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Proceedings | California. Fruit Growers and Farmers Convention
Proceedings California Fruit Growers and Farmers Convention Author:Unknown Author 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: FEEDING OF PLANTS. By Dr. Cyril G. Hopkins, Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, Urbana, 111. Ladies and Gentlemen: You will understand, of course... more », with the former dean of agriculture, scientists have devoted twenty-five years or more to your State, and I cannot be expected to add very much to certain lines of investigation that Dr. Hilgard has carried on out here, particularly along the line of alkali soils. Neither can I undertake to discuss water control, which Dr. King, I have no doubt, ably discussed before your Los Angeles convention, and with such men as Lipman and Coit in their special fields I shall not undertake to dwell much on those particular lines. I shall try to discuss some general principles relating to the feeding of plants, to the subject of plant food, which is, perhaps, the least understood and the most neglected of all the factors relating to the production of crops. I realize that conditions in California are not identical with conditions in all parts of the United States. On the other hand, I observe that the law of gravity holds here the same as it does in Illinois, and I haven't very much doubt that most of the laws of plant growth obtain in California and throughout the Pacific coast generally the same as in other parts of the world. I am not sure that there is so much difference in your great range of soils, all the way from sand to adobe or the heaviest gumbo -- I don't know that they differ so much in physical characteristics from our soil in the humid sections, which also range from sandy soils to gumboes, or what you would call adobe soils. I don't know as there is even so much difference as we might imagine between applying 20 to 40 inches of water -- I am'not speaking of the miner's inch but the way we measure water fall -- I am ...« less