180 Suggested Changes of Farming System. 



success in growing clover, and have had excellent results in the case 

 of land that was only limed once, when it was taken out of the hill 

 about forty-two years ago, and has never been manured or limed 

 since. It is important to dwell carefully on the great value of clover 

 and its only too common failure, which is by far the weakest point 

 in our farming, while it ought to be, and can be, made the strongest 

 point of all, from a manurial and physical point of view. 



The principle of the rotation of crops is the alternation of crops 

 which take nitrogen from the air with those which can only derive it 

 from the soil — speaking generally, the alternation of the leguminossa 

 (of which beans, vetches, and clover are commonly used here) and 

 cereals. If this can be carried out annually, land may be cropped for 

 thousands of years with the addition of hardly any manure. In 

 Mysore six drills of a cereal crop are sown with a seventh of beans 

 (Dolichos spicatus). After harvest the spaces between the drills of 

 beans are ploughed up, and the crop (somewhat like a French bean) 

 soon almost covers the ground, and is harvested in due course. The 

 straw .of the crops is eaten by cattle, and their manure is used as fuel, 

 the ashes only being returned to the land, the decaying roots of 

 the beans, and the atmospheric nitrogen collected by them, being the 

 sole manures besides the scanty supply of a.'ihes ; and yet, with the 

 aid of these resources, every year you will see a crop of corn and a 

 crop of beans more or less good, according to the season. In our 

 agriculture clover is, generally speaking, the nitrogen-collecting crop 

 but it only occurs once in four or five years, and, should the crop 

 fail, the land must wait four or five years for another. Now the 

 failure, or partial failure, of the clover crop means much more than 

 the loss of most valuable food, for it means as well the loss of 

 vegetable matter, and the atmospheric nitrogen which would other- 

 wise have been collected through the agency of the nodules on the 

 clover roots. The loss from the latter alone may often be estimated 

 at about 10s an acre. By the farming system adopted at Clifton-on- 

 Bowmont, and the rejection of ryegrass, these losses can with 

 certainty be averted. 



The next weak point in the present system lies in the fact that from 

 the use of the shallow-rooting ryegrass, and the absence of deep- 

 rooting plants which can not only aerate, but deeply till .and manure 

 the soil, the farmer not only fails to take advantage of the natural 

 resources at his disposal, but fails to take advantage of the stores 

 of plant food which lie at depths below the reach of the plants he 

 now uses. In consequence of the downward filtration of manure, it 

 has been found that the unused subsoil ii often richer than the upper 

 soil, which alone is used by the farmer. 



The third weak point in the present farming system is that when 

 a serious drought occurs the farmer is completely at the mercy of the 

 season. In the case of last year's drought, when there was such a 

 general failure of grass, and especially of clover, the Bank field on 

 my farm had a most luxuriant appearance all the season through, 

 and the results clearly prove that, with the aid of the new farming 



