The Ohio Democrat

Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station.

Encouraging Good Crops—Commercial Fertilizers on Potatoes—Important Tests.

The Ohio Experiment Station has begun a series of experiments in which the three crops, wheat, clover and potatoes, are grown in rotation with and without fertilizers of different kinds. The experiment is to be carried on both at the Central Station in Wayne county, and the North-Western Sub-Station in Fulton county, and was begun in Wayne county in 1894 by planting potatoes on land that had been two years in corn, following grass, and on newly cleared, yellow sand of the oak opening region in Fulton county.

The plan of fertilizing is similar to that which has been pursued in the experiments in continuous cropping at Columbus, except that the fertilizers are used in both smaller and larger quantities than at Columbus.

The soil on which the test is being made at the Central Station is a light clay. It was thoroughly drained in the fall of 1893, with three-inch tile drains, laid 36 feet apart. The planting was done in good season in 1894, and the fertilizers applied broadcast. The potatoes started off well, but their growth was seriously retarded by the excessive drought of the summer.

The general results of the experiment were that while partial fertilizers, containing only one or two of the three essential elements of fertility, produced some increase of crop, that increase was irregular and uncertain; but when a complete fertilizer was applied there was an increase of crop in every case, and the increase rose regularly with the quantity of fertilizer applied. The largest yield, and in Wayne county the largest net profit after paying the cost of the fertilizer, coming from an application of 480 pounds dissolved bone black, 320 pounds nitrate of soda and 300 pounds muriate of potash, a total of 1,100 pounds per acre, costing about $20. This application increased the total yield to 65 bushels per acre over the total yield of the unfertilized plots adjoining.

On the yellow sand in Fulton county where the unfertilized yield was much smaller than in Wayne, the increase from fertilizer was much smaller than on the better land in Wayne, and where incomplete fertilizers were used it was still more irregular, in several cases falling to pay the cost of the fertilizer; but the complete fertilizers paid their cost in every case, with potatoes at 60 cents per bushel, the largest total increase here being 47 bushels, from the same mixture that produced the largest increase in Wayne.

This mixture carried approximately 50 pounds of nitrogen per acre, equivalent to 60 pounds of ammonia, 75 pounds of phosphoric acid and 150 pounds of potash.

It appears that in this test nitrogen was less essential than either phosphoric acid or potash, and it is probable that if the land had been clover sod the amount of nitrogen might have been very considerably reduced. Phosphoric acid appears to produce equally good results, whether applied in the form of dissolved bone black, Carolina rock, basic slag, bone meal or wheat bran.

Potash was apparently almost or quite as necessary as phosphoric acid.