The century-old "law of the minimum" proposed by von Liebig was tested using five independent sets of crop response data on wheat, corn, cotton, silage, and sugar beets. The rival models were polynomial functions reported in the literature as the most suitable models for interpreting those data. Overall, the von Liebig model performed very well. While the nonnested hypothesis test was inconclusive with regard to silage and sugar beets, the von Liebig model rejected the polynomial specifications for wheat, corn and cotton.