520 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.—M. 
calculation consideration must be given to the accidented character of much of our 
farming land and its heavy soils. Most of the progress in implement design is taking 
place in America, where the task on the machine is lighter. Readjustment here 
waits on the adaptation of the new types of implement to British conditions ; it is 
also held up by the necessity to recast our small-field system, a capital outlay for 
which farming at present prices cannot pay. Even if the minimum farm unit as 
dependent on the machine is determined, there still remains the problem of how many 
such units promises the maximum of efficiency. Rationalisation promises economies 
in buying and selling, more effective utilisation of labour by concentration on the 
task of the season, and the power to train and select for efficient management. Small- 
scale farming means that the land is controlled by an unselected slice of the popula- 
tion—good, bad and indifferent, with corresponding results. The drawback of 
rationalised farming lies in the difficulty of detailed supervision in a business which 
depends so much on personal attention, especially with live stock. This leads many 
people to deny the possibility of rationalised farming, and to hold by peasant farming 
as the only way of dealing with the land. Social and political considerations here 
enter, as in the consideration of the Russian experiment compared with the break-up 
of the great estates in other European countries. 
Mr. C. 8. Onwin.—Specialisation in Farming. 
The suggestion underlying this paper is that much of the mixed farming practised 
in this country, more particularly in the districts predominantly arable, suffers under 
the handicap of a tradition which links up the maintenance of soil fertility with 
the practice of animal husbandry. Nearly every farmer regards the dung-cart as 
the foundation of sound arable farming practice, and few ever question the economy 
of rotations designed for an interlocking system of crop and livestock farming. The 
reason is plain enough, for these interdependent systems are as old as agriculture itself. 
Until quite modern times, the only fertiliser the farmer knew was animal manure, and 
although the primitive rotation was adapted from time to time, as new crops were 
introduced, the underlying idea was a cycle of crops, some for human consumption, 
some for animal consumption, the latter being returned to the land as manure to 
promote the growth of the former. 
So firmly rooted was this idea that the introduction of artificial manures by the 
chemists of a hundred years ago, and subsequently, suggested no challenge to it. 
The mixed farming system was farming, and any deviation from it was not. To 
hardly anyone did the thought occur that chemical manures, available in greater and 
greater abundance and variety, might render the farmer virtually independent of 
the old natural fertilisers. Hardly anyone set himself to design new crop rotations in 
which there would be more saleable crops, by the elimination of those grown as stock 
feeds ; to simplify cultivations by the release of the land from the sheepfold; to 
displace the dung-cart, with its trail of weed seeds ; in fact, to reorganise the whole 
economy of crop and livestock husbandry, to reduce the costs of production. 
Quite early in the history of artificial fertilisers, Sir John Lawes had demonstrated 
that they were sufficient in themselves to maintain the fertility of the soil. John 
Prout, of Sawbridgeworth, translated his work into successful commercial practice 
on the cold Hertfordshire clays; George Baylis, of Wyfield, did the same thing on 
the chalk and greensand soils of Berkshire. The rest of the farming community 
regarded the new manures merely as something to supplement the old ones, and 
persisted, often to their destruction, in the old mixed farming tradition. 
To-day, the heavy cost of root and fodder crops has begun to shake the faith in 
the ‘ golden hoof’; the old idea that what was lost on bullock-feeding was made in 
the corn crop, is giving place. But the basic principle remains, in general, as firmly 
rooted in the soil as ever, and in the mixed farming districts there is little indication 
of attempts to consider the extraction of the products of the soil by systems of farming 
designed to treat each product as a speciality, without any necessary dependence 
upon the other branches of the farmer’s business. 
It is the men who have become specialists, though probably unconsciously, who 
are most successful to-day. At home, the store stock breeders of the hills ; the dairy- 
men and the graziers of the valleys: the market gardeners, the fruit-growers, the 
poultry-keepers and the glasshouse men. On the Continent, the bacon and butter 
producers of Denmark. In the new countries, the meat producers; the specialists 
