M.— AGRICULTURE 257 



4-6 year leys for grazing only. The three-year ley is rather like the dual- 

 purpose animal. Although it is a brave southerner who would criticise 

 Scottish practice, I am inclined to criticise excessive dependence on 

 dual-purpose (hay-grazing) three-year leys. I would rather have a 

 sequence of 1-2 year deep-rooting-hay leys following after four-year- 

 white-clover-replete-shallow-rooting-grazing leys. This procedure would 

 give more hay, more grazing and more fertility. With apologies to 

 Aberdeenshire, that is my considered opinion. In any event my criticism 

 of the very best practitioners of ley-farming is that they do not use leys 

 of different kinds for different purposes, and do not rotate all the different 

 sorts of leys after each other all round the farm to anything like a sufficient 

 extent, for it is thus, and only thus, that all-the-year-round grazing is 

 to be obtained. This is too large a subject to discuss in detail here, but 

 it is one demanding much thought and much agronomical research. 



In passing I might say that in my view no problems so much as those 

 of grassland demand prolonged and large-scale agronomical investigation. 

 I would wish to distinguish between, on the one hand, agronomical re- 

 search, and on the other, scientific research as normally understood and 

 conducted. The major aim of agronomical research, which is essentially 

 field research, is to study all the factors which are operative at once and 

 together, and in their natural interplay, for ' nature is a theatre for the 

 inter-relations of activities.' Such a procedure, it may be said, is im- 

 possible, or at least unscientific. It is certainly not impossible, and if it 

 is unscientific it will yet remain agronomical, and many of the problems 

 of agriculture are more likely to be solved, shall I say, by agronomical 

 investigation than by scientific research, while nearly all the results of 

 scientific research have to pass through the sieve of an immense amount 

 of agronomical investigation before they can be made useful, and in some 

 cases perhaps before they can be other than positively dangerous to the 

 practitioner. The technique of agronomical research entails a great 

 deal more than blindly following all the elaborate rules and regulations 

 laid down by the statisticians ; indeed, such rules and regulations are of 

 no fundamental significance in the proper planning of an elaborate series 

 of field experiments. They are sometimes, but by no means always, 

 useful in the actual placing of plots on the ground, and they are some- 

 times essential, but are by no means always necessary, in the examination 

 of quantitative data. One effect of the modern glorification of statistical 

 methods has undoubtedly been a tendency to obscure the wood for the 

 trees, to concentrate on the part, often an isolated part (yield, for example), 

 instead of the whole ; and, worse still, to fill the agronomist with a medley 

 of complexes and inhibitions which have reacted adversely on the develop- 

 ment of a technique adequate to solve a large number of the problems 

 that can only be solved by highly complicated field experiments. Many 

 agronomists are almost too frightened to set up the sort of experiments 

 their experiences teach should be set up, because they are timorous lest 

 the data could be made amenable to statistical analyses. Agriculture 

 would have been the gainer if the agronomist had never been taught to 

 be timorous, and if he had plodded away undeterred and undismayed at 

 the details of his own technique, when by now perhaps he would have 



