Suggested Changes of Parming System. 183 



system not for maintaining and improving, but for continuously 

 lessening, the fertility of the soil. But though the soil has been thus 

 exhausted from a practical point of view, it has not been so from a 

 chemical point of view. It has only been exhausted of its vegetable 

 matter. Speaking generally of most soils, a sufficiency of mineral 

 constituents are still there to last for the crops of a great many years, 

 but these remain inert in consequence of the exhaustion of the humus ; 

 and perhaps the most valuable and encouraging point connected with 

 my experiments at Clifton-on-Bowmont lies in the fact that it has 

 been clearly proved that old worn-out lands that have been cropped 

 for sixty or seventy years, and never manured, will produce as good, 

 and even better, crops than they ever did if only you replace the 

 vegetable matter which these soils contained when first enclosed from 

 the hill. Misfortunes are proverbially said never to come single, and 

 I may here notice that just as prices fell the Scotch farmer found 

 himself tilling soils more exhausted than they ever had been, owing, 

 as I have shown, to a system of agriculture which certainly tends to 

 a yearly-increasing decline of fertility, unless, of course, in those cases 

 where a full supply of humus is kept up. 



It may be useful to sum up some of the results you will certainly 

 obtain from the new proposed system of farming. While your seeds- 

 man's bill per annum need not be increased, and may even be lessened, 

 your gains from atmospheric nitrogen will be large and certain. The 

 land will be more easily, and therefore more cheaply, ploughed and 

 worked, while your tillage (by the agency of roots) will be deepened 

 and improved ; your weeding bills will be abolished, the success of 

 your clover and grass will be certain, your artificial manure bills may 

 be largely reduced ; the supply of humus — in other words, the fertility 

 of the land — instead of decreasing as it has hitherto done, will steadily 

 increase (in some instances we have trebled the value of the land) ; the 

 expense of handling and rehandling farmyard manure will be saved. 

 All crops will be healthier and better. The health of the stock will 

 be much improved, and, as grass is the cheapest food for stock, more 

 luxuriant pastures will entail less cost in feeding. Lastly, by rejecting 

 ryegrass, you will be discarding a comparatively innutritions grass, 

 and one that suffers much from drought, and leaves little vegetable 

 matter, in favour of the grasses used in the Bank field mixture. 

 Such, then, are the certain results you will obtain from the proposed 

 farming system. As regards finger-and-toe, I cannot speak so 

 confidently. I will only go so far as to say that I have reason to 

 think that, with the aid of healthy conditions of soil, and especially 

 an abundant supply of humus, and interposing, as We do at Clifton- 

 on-Bowmont, a longer period between the last turnip crop of one 

 rotation and the first of another, the risk from diseased turnips 

 will certainly be largely diminished. Though we had some 

 turnip disease in part of a field eight or nine years ago, we 

 have had none since, even though last year there were many 

 complaints of it in the neighbourhood ; and in that year wo had 

 a good crop of turnips on land which had only been limed once, 



