AGRICULTURE 4 i 7 



dairies, farmers have often lost any idea of rotations; they consult their convenience 

 and the promise of the market entirely, though cleaning the land and arrangement of 

 labour necessitate some alternation of green and straw crops. With the need for heavy 

 manuring the necessity for a sequence of crops largely disappears; near Penzance for 

 example farmers have for forty years grown year by year a crop of early potatoes fol- 

 lowed by one of broccoli, and on the Ayrshire coast early potatoes are similarly repeated 

 on the same land and followed up by some sort of catch crop to be eaten off by sheep. 

 The intensive growers of market garden and other produce in the neighbourhood of 

 the large towns are beginning to find their operations curtailed by the rapidly increasing 

 difficulty of getting town manure. For example near London one great mar- 

 Decrease to ket gardening district is the strip of light Lower Greensand that is found in 

 manure. Bedfordshire by Sandy and Biggleswade; another lies upon the thin Bag- 

 shot Sands and the alluvials derived from them in Surrey; another upon 

 the equally poor sands of the Eocene in North Kent; all soils naturally of the poorest 

 quality but easy to work early and grateful when liberally supplied with dung. The po- 

 tato growers on the gravels of Hertfordshire, which Arthur Young described as " the jaws 

 of a wolf," and the hop growers of Kent, are equally dependent upon London manure, 

 as the Lancashire and Cheshire potato growers look to the Lancashire towns and the 

 Ayrshire men to Glasgow. But the advent of the motor-car, particularly its displace- 

 ment of horses in omnibuses, trams, and the vans of the big carrying companies, has al- 

 ready enormously reduced the amount of manure produced; London manure for example, 

 which six or seven years ago could be bought at is. a ton on rail or on barge, has now 

 risen to over 43. 6d., and become of much inferior quality. At the same time the town 

 market for straw and hay has declined, so that considerable changes in the farming meth- 

 ods near the large towns are inevitable. It is difficult to see how the market gardeners 

 can easily replace the dung they are losing; on the light soils an abundant supply of 

 humus is as essential as the fertilising elements that are also supplied by farmyard 

 manure. Failing the latter the only alternative method of obtaining humus is to turn 

 in green crops, but the market gardener cannot as a rule afford to leave his land idle 

 even for the time in which to grow a catch crop like mustard or tares. 1 



It cannot be said that any new staple crops have been introduced into the United 

 Kingdom. Some considerable experiments, have, however, been made in the direction 

 of reintroducing tobacco, experiments mainly conducted in Ireland and 

 British owing their substantial progress chiefly to Sir Nugent Everard of Randles- 



growtag. town. Tobacco was at one time grown freely in England, Scotland and 

 Ireland, but the cultivation was put down, partly in the interests of the 

 Virginia settlement and partly because of political objections to the excise that had to 

 be applied as an equivalent to the customs duty. Permission having been obtained 

 from the Treasury, who granted a bounty of 50 an acre and an excise rebate of 2d. per 

 Ib. of manufactured tobacco, experiments began in 1904, and 124 acres were in 1912 

 under crop in Ireland. Corresponding experiments did not begin in England until 1911, 

 39 acres being so cropped in 1912. It has been demonstrated that certain grades of 

 smoking tobacco, particularly a Virginian variety known as Blue Prior, will grow with 

 great vigour in the British Isles, crops as large as 1600 Ibs. per acre of merchantable 

 tobacco having been obtained, but it has not yet been demonstrated that the culture 

 will succeed on a commercial scale without any bounty. Further experiments extend- 

 ing to 1 50 acres in Ireland and about the same area in England have been sanctioned. 



Considerable interest has been aroused in the question of whether the sugar beet 

 crop can be given a footing in British agriculture, largely through the efforts of Mr. 

 Sigmund Stein, who for many years has organised the growth of trial plots of sugar 

 beet in various parts of the kingdom, and by the analysis of the roots had demonstrated 

 that crops can be grown as large as or larger than those obtained on the Continent, and 



/*In view of the decline in the supply of manure, the chief engineer to the London 

 County Council suggested in December 1912 that attention should be directed to the utilisa- 

 tion of the London sewage, which at present is simply carried out to sea and destroyed 



