208 QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. [1 Surr., 1897. 
A Coming Crop. 
THE COW-PEA (VIGNA CATIANG). 
By HENRY A. TARDENT, 
Manager of the Westbrook Experiment Farm, 
One of the phenomena which most strikes the careful observer of the agricul- 
tural and economical conditions of Australia is the rapid deterioration and 
impoverishment of our agricultural lands. From east to west, from south to 
north, the signs of it are everywhere eyident. In certain countries, renowned 
for their agriculture, judicious manuring and an intelligent rotation of crops 
enable the agriculturist to grow, every season, large and remunerative crops on 
soils which have been for hundreds, nay thousands, of years under cultivation. 
In other less advanced countries a periodical fallowing of the land provides 
the rest required by Nature. But here—as a rule—nothing of the kind is 
practised. As soon as the land is broken up, the settler grows on it the same 
crop year after year—in some places two or three times a year without manur- 
ing, without rotation of crops, without any fallowing. 
As Nature never permits her wise laws to be sinned against with impunity, — 
the results of that ‘* Ratib-cultur,” or “robbing cultivation,’ as the Germans 
call it with a proper and expressive word, are not slow to be felt. 
The fertile plains of the south, where the pioneers of the early days used 
to grow from 25 to 35 bushels of wheat to the acre, are now reduced to an 
average of 10 and in some places eyen to 5 bushels to the acre. In the north of 
the continent, the sugar-growers begin to remark similar decreases in the returns 
of sugar-cane on soils which, in their virgin state, were considered to be amongst 
the most fertile in the world. The same may be said of the maize, banana, and 
pineapple lands, on which, not only the crops are on the decline but where 
they are also, every year, more and more subjected to various insect and fungoid 
iseases. - 
Such a neglect of the elementary principles of sound agriculture is the 
real cause of the many abandoned farms to be seen here and there in the very 
best agricultural districts of the continent. Nature rebels against the man 
who has become her tyrant and exploiter, instead of being simply her master 
and benefactor. The farm shakes off as a noxious parasite, the man who has 
been living on its vitals, instead of contenting himself with the legitimate 
yearly income ofa well-cultivated land. 
Where is then the remedy for such a regretable state of affairs ? 
The question is a yast and complicated one, and requires careful study, It 
embraces the whole subject of manure and rotation of crops, which it is not 
intended to treat in this short article, the writer wishing only to attract 
attention to the most menaced point and the one easiest to be remedied. 
As is well known, of all the elements necessary to plant life, nitrogen is 
perhaps the most important. In any case it is the costliest and the most 
difficult to keepin the soil. This seems rather strange, when we remember that 
four-fifths of our atmosphere is composed of nitrogen, so that the plants are, 
so to say, constantly bathed in it. Unfortunately, plants do not absorb and 
fix nitrogen through their leaves as they do carbon. They eat it in the soil by 
the extremities of their rootlets when it has become what chemists call nitrates— 
that is, when it has combined with some other elements forming the humus or 
decayed vegetable matter of the soil. 
