2 



Bare Fallows. 



[APRIL, 



wheat, was spreading from the Eastern Counties all over Great 

 Britain. 



The more advanced farmers perceived the importance of 

 keeping the land under crop ; by growing turnips it was possible 

 to obtain all the advantages, in the shape of the cultivation and 

 the stirring of the soil, which result from a bare fallow ; at the 

 same time, food was provided for the stock and a much better 

 kind of dung was made than when the straw was merely 

 trampled down to get it into a state fit to go back upon the 

 land. The writings of Arthur Young, who was Secretary to the 

 then Board of Agriculture, in the early years of the nineteenth 

 century, were unceasingly directed against bare fallows ; and his 

 influence, combined with the numerous enclosures and the high 

 prices prevailing during the Napoleonic wars, did much for the 

 spread of turnip culture. The strong lands and the clays were 

 still the difficulty ; on them it was often a costly and even an 

 impossible operation to secure a good plant of turnips, but it 

 became more and more a mark of careless farming to rest con- 

 tent with a bare fallow. Mecchi showed that the strongest 

 Essex clays could be made to grow turnips, and with the spread 

 of mangel cultivation it became possible to put even the most 

 stubborn soils in the South and East of England under roots. 

 The bare fallow still survived as an occasional operation once in 

 seven or eight years, and many clay-land farmers maintained 

 that it was a profitable operation, the benefit of which was felt 

 for several years. Latterly, with the fall in corn prices and 

 diminished rents, the acreage under bare fallow has again 

 showed a tendency to increase. For instance, in Essex the 

 bare fallow in 1866 amounted to 1 1'4 per cent, of the land under 

 corn ; in 1904 it was 16 per cent. ; in Suffolk the bare fallow 

 has actually increased, despite the diminution in the area of 

 arable land, rising from 25,000 acres in 1866 to 30,400 acres in 

 1904. 



A bare fallow is generally taken after a stubble crop, and the 

 prime object is to get as many weed seeds as possible to ger- 

 minate. A first ploughing in autumn will be followed by a cross- 

 ploughing in the spring and two other ploughings in the sum- 

 mer. Sometimes the first ploughing is left until the spring 

 corn has been sown, and is followed by two or even four plough- 



