Agriculture in England. 



13 



a naked fallow, compacted into a brown and adhesive, though still 

 lightish, loam. But though the Norfolk or alternate, or four-course 

 system of husbandry (so called because its simple rotation con- 

 sists of turnips followed by barley, and clover by wheat) has con- 

 ferred such great though silent benefits on the country, it may be 

 doubted whether that system have not accomplished all that it is 

 capable of^ and must not pass into another. Already it has begun 

 to fail in one of its green crops, probably in the other. The red 

 clover, it is admitted, can be no longer repeated once in four years, 

 and the substitution of white clover, or of rye -grass, in the alternate 

 fourth year, or the prolongation of the course to five years, by 

 sowing rye-grass with the clover, and thus leaving the ground in 

 grass for two years successively, are but imperfect remedies. The 

 evil, however, is likely to increase ; for in Flanders, whence the 

 red clover was originally brought over, and where the land has 

 been longer tired with its repetition, it has been destroyed in whole 

 districts by a grey parasitical plant called orohanche, and the only 

 cure has been the entire suspension of its cultivation in those dis- 

 tricts for many years. It is well known, also, that in Norfolk, 

 where the turnip has been longest cultivated, that root has become 

 subject to a disease which distorts it with unhealthy excrescences ; 

 and it may be worth inquiry whether, apart from dry seasons and 

 the depredations of insects, the late general failure of the turnip 

 be not in some degree owing to its too frequent repetition. 



Such being the ill results of a too scanty rotation, which con- 

 sists in the endless repetition of four crops, the remedy must of 

 course be sought in a greater diversity ; and here we cannot but 

 look to that neighbouring country whence our green crops were 

 first derived. In Flanders we find rotations, of great richness and 

 endless diversity, carried over a term not of four years, but of ten, 

 eleven, and even fourteen.* Into all of these potatoes enter, con- 

 sumed on the farm, being in fact the chief food of the cattle 

 during the latter part of winter and the beginning of spring. Car- 

 rots, too, are sown on the same ground with barley or pease, and 

 after either grain is harvested, come also to maturity in the autumn 

 of the same year. The barley-harvest, however, is much earlier 

 than in thi^ country. But though our sunnners do not certainly 

 encourage such double culture, pease might be early enough ripe 

 even with us to admit of its trial ; but, at all events, the Flemish 

 carrot, a white variety, may be worth cultivating as the crop 

 of the year, since it is said to yield 22 tons by the acre, where 

 the common orange or Dutch carrot gives but 11. " Parsnips, it 

 appears, are grown also where the soil is too heavy for carrots, 



* See the account of Flemish Husbandry, in three Numbers lately pub- 

 lished in the * Library of Useful Knowledge.' 



