FERTILISING RECLAIMED LAND 141 



the land accumulated fertility and became a paying 

 proposition, like the little farms one sees everywhere 

 bitten out of the waste on the flanks of the New 

 Forest, on the Bagshot Heath, and the Surrey wastes. 

 The German land reclaimers on the other hand have 

 recognised that the natural infertility of the heaths 

 and moors is in the main due to their deficiency in 

 mineral salts — ^lime, phosphoric acid, and potash — 

 and after the mechanical operations of drainage and 

 clearing had been effected they set themselves to 

 remedy this deficiency by an initial expenditure on 

 fertilisers that would appear to a farmer enormous 

 for such land, but without which even a moderate 

 crop cannot be grown. In this way the land at once 

 becomes capable of yielding a living return for the 

 labour of cultivation, the initial outlay on basic slag 

 and kainit proves to be much less costly than the 

 recurring losses involved in growing crops with no 

 special manuring until some sort of fertility is built 

 up. Indeed, in many cases one sees that the existing 

 farms reclaimed from the heaths in Great Britain are 

 still suffering in part from their original deficiencies ; 

 their productivity is at a low level because even after 

 half a century or more of cultivation the soil is still 

 short of lime, phosphoric acid, potash, sometimes of 

 one constituent, sometimes of all three. 



It is necessary to emphasise this general statement 

 — ^that land reclamation as practised in Great Britain 

 has never taken into account the chemical constitution 

 of the soil and its possible rectification by cheap mineral 

 fertilisers, largely because the process was already 

 falling into disuse by the time these fertilisers became 



