ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 121 



crumbling down of the clod already mentioned constitutes an 

 excellent top-dressing to the wheat, keeping it from being 

 thrown out. This shows how the clay land farmer works 

 in harmony with the forces of nature and brings them to 

 his aid. 



Quite a contrary picture might be drawn of the farmer 

 who insists in proceeding with his tillages wet or dry, who 

 ploughs his clay land in wet weather, and finds afterwards 

 that it is baked into a sort of sunburnt pottery. In vain 

 lie struggles to produce a tilth. It is done, if at all, with 

 immense labour and difficulty, and when so produced it is 

 liable to be undone and destroyed by a sudden heavy fall of 

 rain, which produces a mortar-like condition of the soil. 



Another principle which must be steadily kept in view in 

 the management of clay land is the policy of lightening it 

 up a policy of rendering the soil less stiff and less solid of 

 disintegration. It is the very opposite to the policy pursued 

 in treating light land, which is summed up in the word 

 consolidation. Light land requires consolidation, heavy 

 land requires the reverse. This policy of lightening up clay 

 land is accomplished in various ways. One is the application 

 of farmyard dung in the green or fresh state ; the second 

 is the application of various substances bulky in character, 

 which are meant to mitigate and alter the soil for example, 

 cinders, ashes, town manure, lime, haulm of various kinds 

 anything which will tend to lighten up and separate the 

 particles of the soil. 



With reference to root cultivation on clay land, these soils 

 are not well adapted for this purpose. Two difficulties beset 

 the clay land farmer with reference to root cultivation. It 

 is not by any means easy in the case of stiff clay soils to 

 secure that fine and moist condition suitable for the germin- 

 ation of the turnip seed. This difficulty may be overcome 

 by careful tilth, and if it can, there is not the least doubt 





