TILLAGE AND ROTATION OF CROPS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 85, 5 June 1908, Page 5

TILLAGE AND ROTATION OF CROPS.

Professor W. H. Day, of the Ontario Agricultural College, Canada, has recently issued an important bulletin dealing with the tillage and rotation of crops. He savs that the latest investigations arouse the suspicion that the appai'ent " exhaustion " of soils is due not so much to the depletion of the supply of the stock of plant food, as to the lack of proper sanitary conditions. Animals enforced to exist in an atmosphere rendered foul by their own exhalations soon cease to thrive. The plant above the ground, he maintains, likewise gives off waste products, which if not removed become a menace to its natural to expect that from the rootsof the plant there are excreta, which, if allowed to accumulate, must threaten its very existence. As proper ventilation is necessary to insure the health of the animal, as diffusion, draughts and wind must bring fresh air to the leaves, so must tillage or other treatment purge the soil of the injurious substances cast off b} r the roots. In this purifying process it is believed that air, and, therefore, cultivation, and drainage where, necessary, play an important part. Certain fertilising ingredients are effective under certain conditions, but more potent still is organic matter in the form of humus. There is another method, however, of eliminating the toxic or poisonous effects of the excreta. Whatever they may be, says the professor, it appears that those cast off by one variety of plant are not, as a rule, injurious to another variety. Hence it is that by proper rotation, Professor Day goes on to argue,, we may go on cropping fields from year to year without any apparent exhaustion, and, indeed, by wise rotation, even increasing the yield.