XXIII. NATURE'S SOIL-CONSERVING 
OPERATIONS 
“Behold this compost! behold it well! 
Perhaps every mite has once formed part of a sick person—yet behold! 
The grass of spring covers the prairies. 
The summer growth 1s innocent and disdainful above all those strata of 
sour dead. . 
Now Iam terrified at “the Earth! itis that calm and patient, 
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions, 
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of 
diseased corpses, 
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, 
It renews with such unwitting looks tts prodigal annual sumptuous crops, 
It ee ae divine materials to men, and accepts suchleavings from them 
at the last.” 
—Walt Whitman (The Compost). 
Nature’s system of cropping is on a permanent basis. 
Her soils do not “run out.” She puts back into them regu- 
larly all that she takes out of them, and alittle more. All the 
mineral substances go back to the soil whence they came, and 
with them, in the humus, goes carbon that was derived from 
the atmosphere. There is loss of some valuable soil material 
through leaching and floods, but the gain is greater than the 
loss, and the longer her crops are grown, the more fertile the 
soil- becomes. 
Nature holds the soil together by occupying it fully. She 
grows mainly permanent crops. They are always mixed 
crops; and the mixture is so varied that there is always 
something to grow in every situation. The soil is held with 
roots, and the dead herbage is held by the tough stems of the 
living; it is rapidly disintegrated and the mineral residue is 
fed to the roots again. Thus the food supplies of her vast 
population are used over and over, and between times of use, 
are scrupulously hoarded. 
Nature practices tillage, and on a vast scale, but it is not 
our sort of rapid and wasteful tillage. It is slow soil-mixing, 
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