xviii. Preface to the Third Edition. 



system, and sown down every year with ordinary grass mixtures, 

 that would continue to grow paying crops unless a very great 

 amount of cake-fed manui'e, or other artificials, were applied to 

 the turnip break every year. Even valuable old pastures quickly 

 degenerate when a breeding stock, or young animals, are kept 

 without extra cake feeding. Looking at these facts, it is all the 

 more, remarkable how much your system and scientific seeding 

 has acconiphshed on poor high land such as CHfton-on-Bowmont. 

 Your wonderful success in growing potatoes also raises the 

 question of how much might be made from that valuable crop 

 through cheap production by natural means, and practically no 

 other expenses than the labour of planting and lifting, in 

 contrast to the regular potato districts, with their high rents and 

 enormous expenditure of artificial and farmyard manure." 



High farming on the old lines is no remedy for 

 low prices. For our sole resource in the face of 

 foreign competition we must look to an economy 

 of production which will carry with it, with the 

 smallest possible expenditure on commercial fer- 

 tilizers, an increasing fertility of soil. These 

 objects have throughout been kept steadily in 

 view, and have been successfully carried out at 

 Clifton-on-Bowmont. 



It is remarkable, or perhaps it is not remark- 

 able, that the Board of Agriculture should have 

 not only failed to distribute leaflets on this 

 important subject, but should even have declined 

 to send (as I suggested it should) to the various 

 County Councils notices of the work at Clifton-on- 

 Bowmont, on the ground that for it to do so 

 would be to identify itself with a system — the 

 principles of my system being as old as agricul- 



