184 Suggested Changes of Inarming System. 



about forty-two years ago, and it had never been manured since, 

 excepting with the artificials put down with the turnips ; but the 

 land was well supplied with humus, and had lain in grass for a 

 number of years. Should, then, my surmises be correct, we should 

 be able, with the aid of the new farming system, to save the great 

 expense that is often incurred in liming as a, temporary preventive 

 or cure for finger-and-toe. 



I now propose to remark on the various values to be derived from 

 humus, or decaying vegetable matter, in the soil, in order to show 

 the great advantage of the proposed system of farming in providing, 

 through the agency of a solid and deeply -rooting turf, the largest 

 quantity of this valuable agent Humus is that substance which 

 gives value to forest soils, or newly broken-up pasture lands. It is 

 at once a manurial agent, and a maintainer of the physical condition 

 of the soil ; but perhaps most valuable of all for its effect in 

 conserving that moisture which is often of more importance to the 

 plant than the presence of any quantity of chemical manurial 

 constituents. It is, indeed, the very life and soul of the soil, and 

 that is why the farmer, the planter, or the gardener attaches so 

 much importance to farmyard manure, forest topsoil, turf, or any 

 substance which will supply this indispensable ingredient of fertile 

 soils. These humus-supplying agents all have this immediate ad- 

 vautage^the fact that the results from them are certain, while the 

 results from all purchased manures are uncertain. For the latter 

 may be washed away, or enter into insoluble compounds in the soils, 

 and in the event of a drought the anticipated results might not be 

 gained. The experience in the United States seems to be that it 

 never can certainly .be predicted whether profit or loss will result 

 from the purchase and the application of nitrogen, potash, or 

 phosphoric acid in any form. One thing is certain, says Roberts, 

 in his " The Fertility of the Land" (Macmillan & Co.," price 5s), and 

 that is that the application of farmyard manure, in almost any form, 

 will result in improved fertility and increased profits. But this arises 

 not from its, strictly speaking, chemical constituents, which could, of 

 course, be supplied by chemical manures, but from the fertility 

 which the decaying vegetable matter of the straw imparts to the 

 soil, the most important feature of which is probably owing to the 

 power of humus for conserving moisture, seeing that plants more often 

 fail from lack of moisture, at a critical period of their growth, than 

 from dearth of chemical constituents of plant food ; and it is of equal 

 importance to note that as all the moisture in the soil may be needed, 

 and often is needed, in the growing season, it is most advisable to 

 store, through humus, all that can be kept in the land. In three 

 years' experiments with farmyard manure (Roberts, p. 148), it was 

 found that the first surface foot contained 18| tons more water per 

 acre than adjacent and similar but unmanured land, the second 

 9 -28 tons, and the third 6 '38, or a total difference in the first 3 feet 

 of soil of 34 '41 tons per acre. If, then, the Bank field was quite 

 unaffected by last year's drought, it was mainly because the land 



