The Secret of The Soil.

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 161, 3 June 1909, Page 4

The Secret of The Soil.

When the farmer in Aesop's fable told his sons that he was leaving them treasure buried in his fields,which they would find if they dug for it, he gave them nearly the sum of the knowledge which the modern agriculturist possesses of the soil he ploughs. With all the added learning of a thousand experiments in manuring, in irrigating, and in applying the science of bacteriology to the cultivation of crops, the conclusion is still the same. Tilth is the essential, the imperative need. Farm crs have learned a great deal about the values of different manures for different crop?, and a great deal to, as to the necessities and possibilities of rotation of one crop after another,though the Roman farmer had discovered that principle two thousand years ago. Virgil's first Georgic is full of advice as to alternating crop and crop lupins before oats, for example which is really the practical teaching of our modern requirements, for extracting nitrogen from the air. Varro, before Virgil, even came nearer modern practice, for he advised the sowing of certain crops not with the immediate hope of harvest, but, in the knowledge that such crops ploughed in would increase the fertility of the soil. That is the practical experience of high farming of today. Crops are sown to catch and detain chemical elements necessary for crops that are to succeed them,and then are ploughed in. But the great thing is the mixing and breaking up and ventilating of the soil, ploughing it to enable the frost to do its proper work, pulverising it so that the water which is to hold the food for the plant's roots can cling round every tiny particle of soil. Then the roots can push free and far, and find food and drink wherever they push. That is the substance of human knowledge of the oldest of man's industries. The soil holds all that a plant needs if it can be broken up sufficiently small for the plant to get at its food. To increase tilth and to decrease manure is the main tendency of modern scientific farming.