Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOUR SOILS Loss of Lime. Nature made the value of land as a producer of food utterly dependent upon the activity of lime, and at the same time gave it some power to shirk its work. In a normal soil is a percentage of lime that came from the disintegration of rock of the region or was transported by action of water on a huge scale. Possibly rarely would it be in insufficient amount to keep a soil in a condition friendly to plant life, and to feed the plant, if it stayed where nature placed it and kept in form available for the needs it was intended to meet. There is land that always was notably deficient in this material, and there is land that was known in the early history of the world's agriculture to be "sour," but the troubles of our present day in the case of the farming country in the humid region of the United States is less due to any natural absolute shortage than to combination that destroys value and to escape by action of water. Prevalence of Acidity. The results of experiment station and farm tests are conclusive that the soils of the greater part of all the humid region of the United States show lime deficiency. Formerly, acidity was associated in our minds with wet, low- lying land, but within the last twenty years we have learned that it prevails in light seashore sands along the Atlantic shore, in clays, loams and shales stretching to the Appalachian system of mountains, on top of mountain ranges and across foothills to our central states, and through them in stretches to the semi-arid lands of the west. While not all this land has fallen into the lime- deficient class, and the great part of some states remains alkaline, the tendency toward acidity is continuous. Crop production in great portions of the Mississippi valley is restricted by lack of lime in ...