CULTIVATION OF WASTE LAND 377 



THE CULTIVATION OF WASTE LAND 1 



Br A. D. HALL, M.A., F.R.S. 



THE president of a Section of the British Association has two very 

 distinct precedents before him for his address; he can either set 

 about a general review of the whole subject to which his section is de- 

 voted or he can give an account of one of his own investigations which 

 he judges to be of wider interest and application than usual. The spe- 

 cial circumstances of this meeting in Australia have suggested to me 

 another course. I have tried to find a topic which under one or other of 

 its aspects may be equally interesting both to my colleagues from Eng- 

 land and to my audience who are farming here in this great continent. 

 My subject will be the winning of new land for agriculture, the bringing 

 into cultivation of land that has hitherto been left to run to waste be- 

 cause it was regarded as unprofitable to farm. To some extent, of course, 

 this may be regarded as the normal process by which new countries are 

 settled ; the bush is cleared and the plough follows, or under other con- 

 ditions the rough native herbage gives way to pasture under the organ- 

 ized grazing of sheep or cattle. I wish, however, to deal exclusively with 

 what are commonly termed the bad lands, inasmuch as in many parts of 

 the world though recently settled, agriculture is being forced to attack 

 these bad lands because the supply of natural farming land is running 

 short. In a new country farming begins on the naturally fertile soils 

 that only require a minimum of cultivation to yield profitable crops, 

 and the newcomers wander further afield in order to find land which 

 will in the light of their former experience be good. Before long the 

 supply is exhausted, the second-class land is then taken up until the 

 stage is reached of experimentation upon soils that require some special 

 treatment or novel form of agriculture before they can be utilized at all. 

 Perhaps North America affords the clearest illustration : its great agri- 

 cultural development came with the opening up of the prairies of the 

 Middle West, where the soil rich in the accumulated fertility of past 

 cycles of vegetation was both easy to work and grateful for exploitation. 

 But with the growth of population and the continued demand for land 

 no soils of that class have been available for the last generation or so, 

 and latterly we find the problem has been how to make use of the arid 

 lands, either by irrigation or by dry-farming where the rainfall 

 can still be made adequate for partial cropping, or, further, how to con- 

 vert the soils that are absolutely poisoned by alkali salts into something 



i Address of the president to the Agricultural Section of the British Associa- 

 tion for the Advancement of Science, Australia, 1914. 



vol. lxxxiv. — 26. 



