CHAPTER IV. 



MANURES FOR TEA hV ASSAM. 



Once it has been established that material exhaustion of land 

 takes place by growing a crop, there remain only two alternatives 

 before the cultivator that of manuring the land already in cultiva- 

 tion, and that of abandoning the old plots and putting out fresh land. 

 The latter has been the plan usually adopted in new countries, and it 

 has generally been difficult to make the old agriculturists see that 

 manuring would ever be needed. This has been precisely repeated in 

 the case of tea. And in some few cases the position is probably cor- 

 rect. There are some deep rich alluvial sands which may probably be 

 cultivated under tea for very many years without any fertilisation 

 being needed but these are very few in number, and I doubt whether 

 there are more than one or two pieces of tea land in Assam about 

 which it could be said. But a system of abandonment and exten- 

 sion cannot go on indefinitely on account of the exhaustion of suitable 

 land, a point which has been reached already in certain cases, nor 

 can such a system proceed for long because of its expense and because 

 it means the removal of the best yielding land on a garden further 

 and further from the factory. The only alternative is manuring in 

 one form or another, and this will have to be the policy of the future. 



OBJECTIONS TO MAN/JRIN 7 O. 



Two objections are at once raised. " Manuring can never pay 

 it costs too much " is the first of these and to this it can be 

 replied summarily that " manuring must pay, or the land must be- 

 come a wilderness, and the population it supports abandon it or 

 starve." Agriculture all over the world emphasises the fact that 

 except in very favoured places no agriculture can be carried on on 

 the same spot year after year without the application of manure. 



The second objection taken is that once manures are used it 

 becomes a necessity to use them continually. To a certain extent 

 this is true and necessarily so. Land which has once commenced to 

 deteriorate will continue to do so unless by repeated applications 

 it is kept up to the mark. And the reason which compels manuring 

 in the first instance compels its continuance at intervals for ever 

 afterwards. This however can be reduced to a minimum of fre- 

 quency and of cost by judicious selection of manures, leaving those 

 as far as possible on one side whose action s purely temporary such 



