468 



THE FARMER'S MAGAZliNE. 



ready for the aiauurc : wlicu the manure was put iu 

 lie reversed the drills, and so it lay, and nearlyone- 

 lialf of his turnip land was now in that condition, 

 drilled, manured, and exposed to all the changes of 

 the atmosphere during the winter. It came to be 

 found in a mellow condition iu the spring, and the 

 turnips were sown upon this ; whereas, if the land 

 required to be worked up iu a damp state, he could 

 not make turnips of it at all : and for the few years 

 he had practised this he had never failed in finding 

 that the turnips sown upon that portion of the land 

 came quickest into leaf, and overcame in the shortest 

 period that great difficulty of rearing a good crop of 

 turnips — that of coming quickly to the hoe. He 

 ascribed it to this reason : the land upon the top of 

 the drill was exceedingly mellow and fine ; the 

 manure had been undergoing not the fermentation 

 which it got when thrown into great heaps, where it 

 dispersed its ammonia into the aii-, and wasted much 

 of its best virtues, but it underwent the slow and 

 quiet process of fermentation throughout the winter, 

 covered up with soil ; and they found in the spring 

 all the soil contiguous to the manure in a soft and 

 brown condition, having inhaled much of the ■virtue 

 which the manure had given off." 

 It would be perceived that Mr. Grey not only 

 cleaned his land, but actually manured it in the 

 autumn, thus preparing it in every way. After the 

 land had been cleaned, he (Mr. Darby) thought it 

 was advisable, from his own little experience, to 

 allow it to remain two or three weeks, iu order that 

 the seeds of annuals, such as charlock, should spring 

 up and vegetate ; and then they ought to give the 

 land a very deep ploughing. He was aware that 

 many objected to this deep ploughing, and merely 

 applied the cleaning system after ; but he did not 

 think the work was complete on the generality of 

 soils without deep ploughing. As soon as the land 

 was rid of all surface-roots and weeds, and after 

 there had been time for the annuals to spring up, 

 he gave the land a deep ploughing, and then allowed 

 it to remain for the atmosphere to act upon it. 

 Perhaps upon some light soils it was not so desira- 

 ble to follow the deep ploughing, but even here it 

 did no harm. In fact, the report of experiments in 

 deep ploughing, which obtained a gold medal pre- 

 mium, and appears in the Farmer's Magazine, gave 

 reasons to show that deep ploughing even on light 

 land M'as beneficial ; and the writer stated that in an 

 experiment which had been made, the tui-nip crop 

 showed an excess of 4 tons 13 cwt. 3 qrs. and 21 lbs. 

 where the land had been trench-ploughed, over where 

 it had been shallowed-ploughed. He summed up 

 the whole question with these practical deduc- 

 tions : — 



First : That deep ploughing increases the produce 

 of both green and grain crops ; and this the reporter 

 states not only from what these experiments point 

 to, but from having grown green crops, after trench- 

 ploughing, on 180 acres, and grain crops on 135 

 acres of land, with uniform success. 



Second : That trench-ploughing tendings to firm 

 or consolidate light land. This is stated from the 

 fact, that on walking across the stubble-field the 

 writer felt the shallow-ploughed land more loose 

 than the trench-ploughed land ; and this is also sup- 

 ported by the fact already stated, viz., that the crop 



on the shallow-) ilougtied laiidiiad a greater lean- over 

 than the other, while the quantity of grain was less ; 

 showing that, however forced, it is impossible on 

 weak light land to grow very large crops without 

 deep cultivation, as the mechanical texture of the 

 surface cannot support beyond a certain quantity. 

 Mr. Darby continued to observe that in the aggre- 

 gate of soils they might say there was nothing like 

 deep cultivation in autumn, if the weather was dry 

 and tjie surface well cleaned. Now they were in a 

 position to consider the advantages of the new sys- 

 tem. All the disadvantages of the old system were 

 done away with by the autumn- cleaning of the stub- 

 bles ; the soil was exposed to the action of the frosts 

 during winter, the couch and other weeds were re- 

 moved, and all that came into the soil was reserved 

 there as a store for future crops, and the danger of 

 late cropping was avoided. When the land was 

 thus ploughed up, it merely required the scarifying 

 across it iu the month of March to kill the annuals 

 and other weeds that had grown upon the surface, 

 and it would be fit for the crop to be put in. Then 

 the injury done to the land by "poaching" and 

 pulling it about when it was in an unfit state was 

 entirely obviated. Another important point was 

 the fact that the expense was materially lightened 

 when the system was followed up from year to year ; 

 the stubbles got so clean that they scarcely wanted 

 any scarifying after harvest at all. Instead of this, 

 many farmers in Norfolk were in the habit of send- 

 ing out their men, and they could actually fork oxxt 

 the couch grass for Is. per acre. This showed how 

 clean the stubbles were likely to become when the 

 system was carried out for any length of time. One 

 of the primary advantages of following the autumnal 

 cultivation was, that the land M^as left iu a most 

 favourable state during the winter for the mechanical 

 action of the atmosphere, and when they wanted to 

 go to it in spring they found it in a beautiful " tilth," 

 Nature having done for them what they could not 

 have done half so well themselves. Also, when the 

 land had been cultivated in this way, it took from 

 the atmosphere a great quantity of manure. It was 

 quite a new discovery that the soil did actually take 

 manure from the air ; and it was asserted that the 

 quantity of carbonate of ammonia which fell from 

 the atmosphere and entered into the soil was equal 

 to 2 cwt. of guano, when the land was in a fit state 

 to receive it ; but when it was not, it did not enter 

 into the soil, or was fed on by the weeds. Some 

 chemists maintained that it did not come from the 

 carbonate of ammonia in the atmosphere, but from 

 the air itself, which had an inexhaustible quantity of 

 nitrogen in its composition, being as much as four- 

 fifths of the whole ; and they said that when the 

 crude matters in the soil were turned up, and the 

 air allowed to enter into the interstices, the latter 

 was actually decomposed, the oxygen flying off and 

 the nitrogen being preserved ; so that if this be the 

 case, there was no limit to the quantity of ammonia 

 that might be drawn from the atmosphere in the 

 shape of nitrogen, if the proper conditions were car- 

 ried out. Professor Balfour, in his "Manual of 

 Botany," says — 



" Mielder maintains that the ammonia is not car- 

 ried down from the atmosphere, but is produced in 

 the soil by the combination between the nitrogen of 



