Word: soils
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Prophets of agricultural doom are fond of saying that U.S. farms are rapidly losing their fertility and will some day turn into sterile wastelands. This is not happening in one long-cultivated U.S. region. C.L.W. Swanson. chief soil scientist of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, says that the farmland of New England, which was not naturally fertile when the Pilgrims landed, has been made fertile by proper farming methods, and is growing more productive all the time...
...virgin soil under a long-established forest is not always good. Often it is "podzolic"; i.e., it has a top layer (called the "A-horizon") that is rich in humus. Below it is a "B-horizon" from which nearly all plant food has been leached by water percolating from the surface...
...horizon (topsoil) that they found was only two to three inches thick (Iowa topsoil formed under permanent grass is often 18 inches thick). Below this was sterile subsoil, and when the plow mixed the two together, the blend was low in nearly everything that a good soil should have. It was not the lavish virgin soil of popular fancy...
...Such soil could not support extractive agriculture, which takes nutrients out of the soil and does not replace them. Many New England lands that were treated in this way soon went back to forest. But since the development of scientific farming, most New England land that remained in farms has been cultivated intensively and intelligently. Chemical fertilizers, manure and cover crops have improved the poor virgin soil. Each year New England's farmers put more plant food into their lands than they take out. The result: a thriving agriculture that grows high-value crops on "manmade" soil. Maine...
Last week, thanks to the enterprise of two bustling Ohio businessmen, the monastery was finally put together on U.S. soil. In North Miami Beach, Fla., workmen fitted the last of the 35,000 stones in place, and the two businessmen, E. Raymond Moss and William S. Edgemon of Cincinnati, got ready to open the monastery to sightseers. Moss and Edgemon had bought the stones at a bargain after Hearst's death in 1951, and packed them off to Florida. In the summer of 1952, a small army of architects, masons and other workmen started the laborious job of unpacking...