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 Edward H. Faulkner

SOIL RESTORATION
*
WITH A FOREWORD BY

S. Graham Brade-Birks
M.Sc. (Manc.), D.Sc. (Land.), Wye College
(University of London), Kent.

London
MICHAEL JOSEPH
 First published by
MICHAEL JOSEPH LTD.
26 Bloomsbury Street
London, W.C.1
1953
 *

To all who must eat to live

this book offers tentative hope

*
 CONTENTS
*
Foreword
page 9
CHAPTER ONE
A Seven-year Progress Report
page 13
CHAPTER TWO
Farming by Fear
page 23
CHAPTER THREE
What Went Before
page 36
CHAPTER FOUR
Armoured Cells
page 47
CHAPTER FIVE
What, No Artificials!
page 59
CHAPTER SIX
'Missing' Minerals
page 69
CHAPTER SEVEN
Too Scotch to Plough
page 82
CHAPTER EIGHT
Why Not Irrigate?
page 94
CHAPTER NINE
No Fire under the Boiler
page 103
CHAPTER TEN
Sustenance from Soil
page 115
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Adventures in Cropping
page 135
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pauper Soils
page 168
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Something for Nothing
page 178
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Meanwhile, What to Do?
page 187
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
No General Utopia
page 196
 Foreword
*

T
his is a book about rehabilitation. It discusses the restoration
of those tired and impoverished soils that I have been ruined
or nearly ruined by the stupidity of Man. The work of
reconditioning those parts of the world's soil-mantle that have been
misused by agricultural operations is of the utmost importance to
mankind. Those who are engaged in the production of food for men
and animals cannot afford to let the destruction of soils go on any
longer. None of us can look on with equanimity while those who
cultivate the soil ruin its potentialities. A great weight of
responsibility lies upon the present generation and especially upon
its thinkers and its politicians to see that the problems of soil-use are
understood, discussed and solved for the benefit of the human race.
Because soil-erosion is spectacular and dust-bowl formation
cannot be overlooked, these things have been forced upon the
international conscience and the whole civilized world is uneasy
about them; but the subject with which this book is concerned is
more subtle and less obvious and much more effort is therefore
needed to emphasize its fundamental importance.
The respect which Edward Faulkner has previously won for
himself by the earnestness of his appeals to common sense will
enable his message to be more readily accepted in the present
instance. He has by his earlier books already made men who till the
soil think again about the plough—the mould-board plough, of
course,—and in the present volume he begs those who have the
facilities for further investigation to examine the results he has
obtained by experiment on a comparatively small scale. Mr.
Faulkner's work shows what can be done at least in his case, and his
appeal is now directed to the scientists who work on agricultural
problems. It is a reasonable request.
As a scientist myself I must admit that I think Mr. Faulkner is
a bit hard on scientists and I also think that a few of his ideas are
based upon misapprehensions though they do not invalidate the
main argument of his book. Even in their virgin state all soils were
not alike and a soil survey of virgin soils would have exhibited
many differences which I believe Mr. Faulkner imagines did not
exist. But we shall forgive Mr. Faulkner's strictures in our
admiration for his tenacity and singleness of purpose.
It is no use agricultural scientists pooh-poohing what the
author has to say. He has obtained certain striking results on his
own land and in the present work gives his personal explanation of
the outcome of his very practical experiments. Further research may
possibly show that in certain respects Edward Faulkner's results do
not mean what he thinks they mean but they are certainly worth
trying out on other farms and in other places. Of course, the grower
who depends upon his crops for his living will be guided in any
experiments he conducts by the provisions Mr. Faulkner himself
suggests for avoiding losses during the process of soil rehabilitation,
Edward Faulkner recognizes that he is dealing with a very
complex subject which is related to a wide range of causes and
effects. Thus, those who come to examine his opinions and results
from a scientific point of view must be prepared to consider
questions which, though they begin with the soil, travel far from it
into such distant realms as those of physiology, psychology and
public health. Physiology and psychology perhaps meet when we
discuss that widespread feeling that in England to-day new potatoes
and tomatoes do not taste so good as they did fifty years ago! We
blame the modern method of the farmer and market gardener. It
may, of course, be a question of variety or of methods of marketing.
I do not know; and who does? But let it not be forgotten that it may
all be wrapped up with factors that come into the picture when we
talk about Soil Restoration.
Those of us who live in Kent will have especial reason for
appreciating some of Mr. Faulkner's arguments and we shall
naturally compare these American results of his with the
phenomenal success that attends Romney Marsh graziers. On the
best pastures in the Marsh, which fatten twelve sheep, or so, to the
acre, grass has been eaten off every year for centuries, without
manure of any kind ever being brought on to the land by the farmer.
The only extraneous source of nourishment for these pastures that
does not come from the air and the soil is an occasional feed of cake
for the flock, but this is admittedly a very unimportant source of
plant food with no significance in affecting the self sufficiency of
the soil itself in providing all the mineral substances really required
for plant growth. With no manure for centuries, it is quite clear that
Mr. Faulkner's argument here receives handsome support.
In many cases a good many years elapse without any cake
being fed to the sheep. As every Marsh flockmaster will tell you the
pasture is quite capable of fattening sheep year after year without
any help of this kind at all.
Mr. Faulkner is to be congratulated upon writing a very
readable book and for introducing us to Zeb Turner. I was also
amused to read his essay on heraldry and, being interested in the
subject, was curious to find what coats of arms had been borne in
England by those who had the honoured name of Falconer in its
various spellings. Truth is stranger than fiction for this is one that I
found:

Paly of six argent and azure on a bend gules

three trefoils slipped or.

No mediaeval herald could have invented a more appropriate

coat of arms for the author of this book. The shield with six vertical
strips of alternate light and dark (white and blue) may represent a
ploughed field, but -across it is a red diagonal band, the sign of the
rebel Faulkner (who has changed all that) and on the band three
golden leaves of trefoil, the triumph of his art and experiment.
There is no doubt that Edward Faulkner is opening up wide
fields of enquiry and if he succeeds in drawing the attention of the
right people to the matters that are so near to his heart his
experiments and his writings will not have been in vain.
S. GRAHAM BRADE-BIRKS
Godmersham,
Canterbury,
Kent.
 CHAPTER ONE

A Seven-year Progress Report

*

T HE greatest, most pressing need in commercial horticulture

and farming to-day is a technique of soil management that is
at once sound and economical. It is commonly said that
Americans are not primarily gardeners, but miners of the soil. Our
goals have been large crops, high income, and the manifold
conveniences of mechanical power. The mass-production ideal has
been as common to agriculture as to manufacturing, and as vicious
as materialism to our culture and our morals. I must leave
Englishmen to judge how far this is also applicable to their
agriculture and horticulture.
Just as man is an end in himself, so is the soil an end in itself.
The business of this book is to establish as fully as possible the
concept that the development of soil is as necessary as the growing
of crops, and that the failure of the one must ultimately spell the
doom of the other. Fortunately the outlook for the horticulturist is
almost wholly bright. When I began the experiments upon which
this book is based some seven years ago, I had no such assurance.
And yet I had a lifetime of soil investigations behind me, part of
which you will find embodied in two little books, Ploughman's
Folly and Ploughing in Prejudices, which some critics have been so
generous as to describe as 'earnest harbingers of the new
agriculture.'
The experiments which I undertook began in the spring of
1945. They were not intended to be an extension of the facts
contained in these earlier books, but a new chapter in man's—more
properly, my—relations with the soil. It all began when I made the
decision to buy a farm—a piece of land which I knew to be good.
But by the time my wife and I had made everything ready for the
purchase, we found that a man who is now my neighbour had
beaten us to the draw. He had the land. And he did not want to sell.
He is my friend now, but not necessarily an admirer. In fact,
everything I have attempted these last half-dozen years has been
under the scrutiny of Zeb Turner and often contested by his ideas of
what will, or will not, work. Zeb and I hail from the same state,
Kentucky. We were born there, but to-day, here in Ohio, we are
working somewhat richer soil than the hillsides of our youth. Even
so, Zeb has the good piece of land I wanted, whereas I had to take
something less than perfect. His advice, inquiries and observation
during my seven lean years make him, by rights, co-author of this
book. He will appear often, and just as he is, for that is the way he
prefers it.
Upon a small area of the most likely land which I had
acquired, we started late in June, 1945, to make a market garden.
We had no tractor, so I hired a neighbour to disc down the growth
of weeds and self-sown wheat that stood waist-high all over this
quarter-acre plot. This was the first step (and a not unlikely one for
the author of Ploughman's Folly to take) in a programme that was
ultimately to redefine my entire approach to the soil. In short, it was
to prove that one can grow soil while he is growing his crops. There
was to take place here a process in which poor soil was developed
to a condition of productive tilth equalled only by the result of the
centuries-long organic processes of nature.
When we began, the surface of the land was so tight that my
helper's farm-weight harrow could not cut into it to any extent. Most
of the surface had not been touched at all by the discing, and what
the man who worked the tools accomplished was to handle the
growth so roughly that it never recovered from the ordeal. The
surface then lay covered by a few inches of mangled weeds and
near-ripe wheat. The subsequent planting and cultivation had to be
carried out by the crudest of hand methods.
This little corner where we tried to get our holding established
was really not much worse than most of the other farm land in this
part of the country. All such land requires fertilizers and lime even
for the growing of ordinary farm crops, and it is likely that this spot
would have grown pretty good crops if we had used these aids.
Without such treatment it was utterly hopeless to grow marketable
horticultural crops—just as any land nearby would have been. Since
I proposed to learn by actual test what land, properly handled, can
do when not helped along by these customary 'aids,' I worked it that
season without adding anything to it. This practice has been
continued every year since. At no time have I used artificials, lime,
compost, or other soil amendments, anywhere on the farm. Having
no animals, I have had no stable manure to use. Therefore, whatever
change has come to this soil must be credited to the fact that the
remnants of each crop have been faithfully mixed into the soil
before the next crop was planted.
It is barely possible that some benefit resulted from lime that
had been applied before the wheat was seeded in the autumn of
1943. Zeb told me that this area had been limed that autumn; and in
digging sweet potatoes I brought up a little ground limestone from
what probably had been a dead furrow when the lime was put on. At
any rate, no limestone has been noticed except along a line just
about the centre of this strip.
Zeb really guffawed when he saw what a mess the discharrow
had made of that original growth. Even the next year I could not cut
into that surface to any extent; so the stalks of the 1945 sweet-corn
crop were mostly left for me to work through again. By the spring
of 1947, the tight surface had relaxed somewhat so that the disc cut
in better. Since that time there has been no trouble on this score.
There is always some visible rubbish that cannot be hidden, but by
midsummer it has always disappeared so completely that visitors
are surprised to find me working a soil that looks as if it had been
ploughed. And nowadays there are times when it is possible to
scoop up handfuls of this soil that was so harsh when we began with
it. The change is amazing to people who saw how tough it was in
the beginning.
A visiting soil expert, seeing head lettuce growing on this
changed soil, and noting how mellow the soil now is, complimented
me on my 'selection of precisely the right kind of soil in which to
grow head lettuce.' He had not seen the soil as it had been in the
summer of 1945, when it would not even grow a decent tomato. In
his mind I scored high on 'land use.' To him, 'soil development' was
just a phrase with no definite meaning. To me, the difference
between choosing the crop to suit the land you have and making
over the soil so that it will grow whatever crop you wish to grow is
just the difference between compromising, on the one hand, and
fighting through to success, on the other. One is surrender, the other
victory.
You can do the same, I believe, with your garden. If your land
has been used for garden for a long time, the chances are that you
will not have to go through the stage of surface rubbish that made
my experience so difficult in the beginning. Mixing in the debris
will be comparatively easy. But if you have a piece of badly packed
soil—especially if it has never been used for horticultural crops—
you may have to work carefully with spade or fork to avoid leaving
most of the stuff on the surface or only half-buried—which is
worse. For gardens covered by coarse rubbish, compost-making
seems the best way out. This practice, in which the rubbish is
partially decomposed before being used, develops a product that can
be applied easily. It is said to be very stimulating to the growth of
crops that follow. You can learn how to make compost from the
gardening books now generally available. In my own gardening I
have never made compost, because I believe the same
decomposition processes occur when rubbish is mixed into the
surface, and I hope that certain gaseous losses that seem inevitable
in the compost heap will thus be avoided. My relatively large
market-garden space makes the use of farm implements possible, of
course, and the mixing-in much easier.
Unless your proposed garden is now growing turf, it should be
worked without ploughing, except as a last resort. Deep turves are
ploughed without harm, provided the ploughing is shallow enough
to avoid disturbing the subsoil, which is notably lighter in colour
than the root-filled zone above. If kept as a market-garden, or what
we in America call a garden, the land need never again be ploughed.
(The term 'ploughing' as used here means the use of the mouldboard
plough.) Your garden can be prepared without harm by any disc- or
cultivator-type tool that can do the job. There are compelling
reasons for refusing to have the land ploughed. Later these are
discussed at some length.
As I think of it, the production history of the original quarter-
acre plot where this work started in 1945 has probably been rolled
back to what it was a century ago. Conditions within the soil have
undergone a change, which is a continuing process. This change is
more important than most people think. It brings back, I believe,
crop yields of the character produced a century ago. We do know
that fifty years ago, or thereabouts, the land was farmed by a Mr.
Patterson, an uncle of Grove Patterson, the editor of the Toledo
Blade, who used to visit his uncle on this very farm. Mr. Grove
Patterson says his recollections of the place are very indefinite. I
know of no one else who would have clearer memories of this land.
Hence, what it was and how it looked and produced in the days
before the Civil War is a closed book to the present generation. I
believe the work now being done will gradually bring this land back
again to a condition resembling its original status about 1815, when
settlement began in this region. Bumblebees again nest in the turf to
be uncovered by tractor-drawn tools. There are many other creatures
residing in the soil after a long absence. The conditions for their
survival and health—and the health of the soil—have been re-
established.
 You may not get a nest of bumblebees in your garden. But if
you handle your soil properly, you will soon become aware of many
other kinds of living things that were not there before. Earthworms
are the most discussed of these things, but even they may be of less
value than a host of other organisms, most of which are so tiny that
they can be seen only by use of a microscope. Authorities tell us
that the total weight of such tiny living things in a soil may be
measured in tons, incredible though that may seem. The important
point is that, the more of such life there is in a soil, the richer that
soil is. This means that land ought to be so managed that it will
always be well supplied with these tiny organisms. And the one
thing a farmer or horticulturist can do to make life easier for soil
organisms is to supply them with food every time he has the
opportunity. Luckily, their choice of food is simply anything that
will decay. Decay is nothing more than the 'feasting' of bacteria and
other soil organisms upon organic matter.
It is sometimes said that there is no single remedy for the ills
of the soil and the crops it produces. This statement sounds
reasonable, and it may be true. But before we accept it as principle,
we may be well advised to observe the results of developing again
in the soil the liveliness it had when it was first farmed. (An
experiment of this character has never been carried out, as far as I
am aware, under official auspices.) This liveliness can be brought
about again by the simple process of putting into the soil the food—
organic matter of any kind—essential to large populations of all
manner of soil inhabitants. Properly fed, these repatriated organisms
will correct adverse soil conditions, thus making normal crops
possible again.
After only seven years of this kind of treatment, my soil
performs like new land. Already insect and disease troubles are
virtually at an end. Some crops have had no such troubles for
several years. I have come to expect insect infestation and plant
diseases to be so mild that no remedies are needed. In fact—and as
convincing proof that I no longer fear trouble—I have not owned
any spraying or dusting machine for the past fifteen years. I have
lost potato crops twice to Colorado beetle; but the conditions that
caused these losses might have been avoided. In one case, the seed
potatoes had already grown sprouts from twelve to eighteen inches
long. They should have been discarded. In the other, the potatoes
were growing in garden pea rows and could not be cultivated until
the peas had been picked. After the peas were out of the way, the
potatoes were cultivated (which cut off multitudes of roots that were
right in the surface). Grubs, which had completely overlooked these
plants, promptly moved in and destroyed them. As always in my
experience, the destructive activity of insects came only when plants
were in an abnormally weak condition.
Formerly I believed that solely by virtue of the best possible
soil conditions one could banish both insects and diseases. I have
learned better. Most diseases do seem to disappear completely as
the soil improves, but insects are not so easily disposed of. The
explanation seems to lie in the complex of growing conditions,
including—in addition to soil conditions—the influence of too
much or too little heat, light, and/or moisture. Soil conditions are
merely that portion of the growing conditions that can be most
easily modified by the gardener. Tactically, then, the gardener's
strategy must be to make the soil conditions as wholesome as
possible, leaving to Nature the problems of light, heat, and moisture.
In our part of America, one can irrigate, of course, but there are
some important objections to irrigation apart from the obvious fact
that rainfall is abundant in the eastern part of the United States.
These objections will be discussed later.
What has happened on my farm can be brought about by
others elsewhere. I am not specially favoured by Nature in this
matter. It should be noted that no chemicals have been used, so that
all soil changes have been biological and physical in character—a
refreshing thought when the cost accounts are being totted up.
These changes, too, have been spontaneous. I could not have caused
or prevented them, admitting that I did the mechanical work of
mixing in plenty of organic matter. Anybody with good muscles or
a willing horse or a tractor can do the same thing.
Watching these happenings has made Zeb Turner think. He
had never used commercial fertilizers before coming to Ohio. He
had heard of them but had been a doubting Thomas concerning their
benefits. His good sense had told him it would not be necessary to
fertilize land if it were handled as it should be, for the land he
farmed had been in use for many years before he was born. That
land still grew as big crops as ever. When he heard how necessary
artificials are if profitable crops are to be grown, he could not
believe the doctrine, but he could not say just why he did not
believe it. He could only be sure that his Kentucky farm was not
like that. After he saw that my work here was really restoring my
soil to high production again, he said to me one day: 'I guess the
fertilizer fellows think the good Lord didn't know what He was
about when He made this earth. Ground that had to have all that
fertilizer and lime wouldn't be any good to a Kentuckian where I
come from. No power on this earth could put tons and tons of lime
on those steep hills. In most places, even if a carload was left at the
nearest railroad station, there would be no road to haul it except to
the farms nearby. Farmers where I used to live will have to get
along somehow without lime or fertilizer, except what they can
carry in on sleds or their backs.'
That, I thought, was a little sermon that should be heard by a
wider audience.
Zeb did not mention, as he could have done quite justifiably,
that the Kentucky mountain farmer in many cases would not have
the necessary cash for such expenses, unless he worked away from
home to get it. There are many rich farmers in Kentucky, some of
the wealthiest in the country, in fact; but they are not in the part
from which Zeb came. In his country, every farmer expects to
produce what his family needs, and little more. There is no point in
growing more than the family can use, for everybody else is doing
the same thing. That means that the extra potatoes or bacon would
be just so much surplus, not needed by his family or the families of
his neighbours. Yet there is always some extra of most crops and
animals, just because nobody can work out close enough to what
uncertain weather will permit the farmer to produce.
One other important point that will be stressed in this book is
the meaning of all this for the family that must buy all its food.
Artificial manures, lime, chemicals used for seed treatments and
disease and for insect control—all are considered necessary items of
expense in growing food crops. The greengrocer's customer must
pay a price high enough to include these costs, or the gardener—the
market gardener as he is called in England—will soon be out of
business. Hence, or at least partly for this reason, in the United
States we have our universally disliked guaranteed or 'support'
prices.
When soil-development work becomes general, it will be
possible for the commercial grower of food crops, as well as the
home gardener, to omit these expensive items. However, the first
sign that farmers are about to give up using these established 'aids to
crop production' will bring stout opposition. Powerful interests have
built up enormous businesses supplying these aids to farmers, and
they will not see their investments made worthless without a
struggle. (Indeed, farmers themselves have organized their own
factories for supplying artificials and insect-control devices,
convinced that they are essential; so, farm co-operatives will be just
as much in the fight to maintain the status quo as will be the non-
farm groups that live by 'serving' the farmer.) It will be a stiff,
conscientious fight; and writers of books like this will be
condemned as cranks and crackpots.
Yet I believe this is a stage we must pass through. When most
foreign producers of food depend solely upon natural forces to grow
their crops, we cannot hope to produce surpluses indefinitely at
fantastically high costs by comparison, if we expect to market our
excess production to our world neighbours. For years our outsized,
inflated national economy has prevented normal world trade. The
American farmer's bank account (the counterpart of which foreign
farmers do not possess) has enabled him to enjoy an enviable
standard of living by comparison with that of peasants; but at the
same time, his dependence on that bank account—instead of the
resource he would have if he managed his land correctly—is a
factor in the higher prices at which his crops must be sold. The
advantage he formerly had over foreign peasant farmers because of
his machines has now been more than balanced by the extra cash
costs he puts into his crops.
This seven-year report cannot, of course, be considered to be
of a final and decisive character. The future will doubtless bring
about changes in thinking and method. But some positive trends
now seem so evident that they should be taken seriously by
agricultural authorities as well as by others. As far as we in the
United States are concerned, it is necessary in order that we may
remodel our own farming so that it will fit better into world
conditions. We shall find the going better for our home people, too,
as a result. Farmers in other parts of the world will have to examine
the problem afresh from their own point of view.
 CHAPTER TWO

Farming by Fear
*

F REE speech, to Zeb Turner, is all that the phrase implies. He

says what he thinks and expects others to do the same. He is
lucky to have been born in a country where men's opinions
are tolerated. His biting sarcasm wouldn't sound good to 'Uncle Joe'
if Zeb lived in Russia; and Zeb, quite unnaturally, would fail to
come home some night and would never be heard of again. With his
gift for rubbing people the wrong way when he thinks they are
wrong, he would—if he were more widely known—invite the wrath
of the unrighteous upon his head, here at home.
Lately Zeb has been saying that farmers in this country are
ruled by fear. It is easy to understand why he should think so, if one
knows the free and easy sort of existence that Zeb and his poverty-
stricken neighbours enjoyed in his home community. Poverty and
freedom from worry do not go together at all in my part of the
country, and for those of us who are used to life in a busy industrial
area, it seems impossible that anybody could be poor and carefree at
the same time. But they achieve just that in parts of Zeb's native
state. I know, because I, too, grew up there. Let us picture things as
they are there from these details:
There is little level land, none in some places. No machinery
can be used; so the farming there is far different from ours in Ohio.
Nobody has plans for growing a surplus for market, because almost
everybody in the country grows what he and his family will need,
making the local demand for surplus farm and garden produce very
limited. In such hilly country, families that harvest enough for their
own needs are lucky; often, if they have more than enough of some
crop, they may divide freely with neighbours who are short.
This simple peasant life and the labour connected with it are
foreign to the ways of the Corn Belt and other commercial farming
areas, where, but for the saving grace of guaranteed prices, to-day's
market could make or break an entire population. Here there is
stress almost all the time; there, while no one ever enjoys such
everyday comforts as are commonplace here, no one is ever
bothered by the fear that to-morrow's prices may wipe him out
financially.
The Kentucky mountain farmer knows about government aid
to farmers only as he reads of it in his newspaper. He pities those
'poor' farmers up North who must always be helped by the
government—all unconscious that his own farming is too small to
rate even 'bantam' size in comparison with family-sized farms of
commercial areas. How should he know that while he, by
completely self-dependent work, has managed to keep his family
supplied, his counterpart in the level, highly mechanized farming
country has been helping feed the world? The 'big-time' farmer may
borrow freely from his bank, and may actually not even provide for
his family from his own farm—both highly reprehensible practices
from the mountain man's point of view; but, given a fair chance, the
commercial farmer will finish up financially successful, and his
sense of achievement will prove an additional reward for the effort.
 Thus it is small wonder that Zeb was impressed by the
amazing contrasts he found when he came north. He had not even
bothered in Kentucky to have his soil tested, though the advisory
officer of his county would have been pleased to make such tests for
any farmer. I wondered why. 'Well,' said he, 'I would have been no
better off to know how much lime or fertilizer my land needed. I
had no money to buy the stuff; and if it had been donated, there was
no way to get it to my land three miles off the pavement. Knowing
my land needed something I couldn't supply would have made me
worry. Without having tests made, I went ahead and planted and
missed all the worry. Usually the crops turned out well.'
I had to agree that this unconventional reasoning had merit.
And I could better understand why the rush and bustle of farming in
Ohio had seemed to him a sort of dog-fear way of living.
I was not surprised, then, when some days later Zeb suggested
that the easiest way to create panic among commercial farmers to-
day would be to tell them that no more lime, fertilizers, and other
chemicals would be available for farm use. He thought the
announcement would just about annihilate everybody connected
with modern farming, including publishers of farm papers and the
suppliers of the multitude of 'aids' to farming. Just how he contrived
such a private pandemonium I never learned. It is in line, however,
with his notion that farmers are ruled by fear, and it proves that he
still clings to that idea.
Throughout the older settled parts of the country, the fear of
plant diseases, insects, and crop failures has dogged the farmer for
so long that no one now remembers the days when farming involved
nothing except getting the land ready, planting the crop, cultivating,
and harvesting. That was work enough, with the crude tools of those
days; but it was as nothing compared with the complicated
programme of to-day when numerous sprayings or dustings must be
sandwiched in somehow during the growing of the crop. Yet, the
prospect of having none of the accustomed chemicals, and of being
forced to revert to the simple practices of primitive days, produces
in the whole agricultural community a case of jitters far worse than
that resulting from the threat of atomic warfare. Atomic war we
think we know as well as does anybody who is likely to attack us;
but farming without the customary 'essentials' is something that only
peasants overseas are supposed to know how to accomplish.
At the mention of peasants, Zeb's eyes begin to twinkle. His
only chance to know about peasant farming came during World War
I, when he was billeted among country folk in France. 'Those boys
have forgotten more than our American farmers have ever learned
about how to manage soil,' Zeb says. He thinks we would be better
off in this country if we imported some Frenchmen to tell us how to
farm. Of course, with his natural bent for talk, he could go on for
hours about how much we might learn if we tried watching a
peasant farmer at his work.
There is much to be said for peasant farmers, too; but wiser
men than Zeb, or I, have tried to sell their virtues to American
farmers. Professor King, of the University of Wisconsin, for
instance, wore himself out more than a generation ago trying to
popularize the ways of Oriental peasants. Professor King's book,
Farmers of Forty Centuries, was a bold attempt to show just how
these people of the coastal provinces from Japan to southern China
managed to produce so much better crops than we were able to
grow. To him it seemed that American farmers, even then using
more machinery than any other farmers of the world, ought to be
able to do an even better job using Oriental methods than the coolies
themselves were doing. In those days, American farmers were able
to compete in world markets, largely because of their machinery;
for even then American yields per acre were lower than in many
foreign countries, and our machines made it possible still to grow
grain at a lower cost per bushel than it could be grown abroad.
However, few farmers have read Farmers of Forty Centuries.
The ideas it contained did not attract the American public. Perhaps
one big reason why our farmers did not like the idea of copying
Chinese methods was the nauseous odours that are part of that kind
of farming. The use of night soil (human excrement gathered in the
cities at night for use on neighbouring farms) is an ancient practice
in many countries, and is responsible for the bigger yields per acre
from land so treated. One reason that so few farmers ever saw
Professor King's book may be the fact that reviewers naturally
hoped farmers would not adopt such practices, and, therefore, did
not praise it. The reviewers knew that nobody in this country would
willingly eat such food. Aside from the disgusting aspects of the
matter, the danger that disease germs might be carried by food so
produced was being taught for the first time. The cards were stacked
against Farmers of Forty Centuries becoming an influence in
American farming.
The completeness with which this book was eclipsed in its
own day is indicated by the fact that in 1938, when the United
States Department of Agriculture published a list of more than five
hundred important books and bulletins about soil and its
management (as an appendix to the year-book, Soils and Men),
Professor King's book was omitted. This omission is significant,
since many writings dating back into the nineteenth century, and at
least one Latin translation, are included. This list is supposed to be
both selective and significant, but without this book it cannot be so
considered. Now, after being officially neglected for nearly forty
years, Farmers of Forty Centuries, reprinted in England some years
ago, has been republished in the United States by the Rodale Press,
Emmaus, Pennsylvania.
Our agricultural authorities think of peasant farming as an
example of what American farmers ought not to do. And, if the
peasants' high yields could be attained only by resort to their
stinking practices, few would wish to copy them at such a price.
Much writing of recent years in the so-called organic field is to the
effect that night soil can be deodorized by composting, and that the
process also destroys all disease germs. As to the validity of such
claims, I have no proof. But the fact that such claims are made in
what are thought by many to be authoritative circles opens the way
for the reappearance of Professor King's book under favourable
circumstances. This is good fortune which seldom revives forgotten
books.
Much of the writing of to-day in the merging fields of organic
and inorganic treatment of land gives the impression of aimless
wandering in a wilderness of ideas. During the last decade, many
questions arose for which no answers exist, if only because there
has not been time to find authoritative answers. There is the matter
of processing sewage sludge into safe fertilizer. Some writers hail
the reclamation of sewage as a great way to salvage the continuous
losses from our cities of plant food that could contribute
substantially to improved yields from our land. A few have
suggested the composting of everything organic that can be
obtained from one's own land, and bringing in as much more as
possible from elsewhere.
In short, among adherents of the organic school there is a
more or less frantic race to bring together as much organic
substance as possible. At the same time another group has become
greatly bothered by suggestions made in recent books to the effect
that in America we are on a slippery slope, as far as soil fertility is
concerned, and that unless immediate steps are taken towards
recovery we shall plunge into a state of over-population that will
lead to the annihilation of mankind through one grand famine. And
our paid agricultural advisers, chiefly thought of as belonging to the
inorganic school of thought, contemplate the confusion with a
distinct feeling of ennui.
An overwhelming majority of farmers who produce a
marketable surplus are definitely with the scientists—many who
know of the conflicting ideas belligerently so. The majority
probably have not heard of the odd ideas of the organic school and
are, therefore, undisturbed in their faith. All have learned to depend
upon recommendations of one or more- government specialists, or
their local advisers; they have followed these suggestions to
financial success; they would be foolish to become embroiled in
quarrels in the soil-management field, especially since they know
little or nothing of the issues involved. They continue, therefore, to
lean on the ever-changing advice (because the soil situation is
constantly changing) of their scientific friends.
The advice such farmers get is always directed towards the
treating of symptoms. Laboratory science, or an experiment-station
bulletin, or farmer experience or observation, provides the clues to
treatment of each' symptom as it appears. The apparent weakness of
this scheme is that, year by year, the symptoms become more
numerous and more serious. The year-to-year change is so slight as
scarcely to be noticeable; but a generation-to-generation study of
the farms in America that have been abandoned would show that in
many cases they were being successfully farmed—by reference to
similar scientific recommendations—until the last vestiges of
organic matter had been exhausted and the soil could no longer
resist the power of the water running over its surface.
While it is true that neither farmer nor adviser is conscious of
the ultimate effects of this symptom-treating practice, they do
recognize from year to year the growing complexity of the problems
presented to them. What works one season often proves not to work
the next, so that something else must be tried the following year. It
is a continual war, with no truce in sight. And this feature of
northern farming, supposedly so superior to the simpler ways of his
Kentucky hills, is what causes Zeb to think that conventional
farmers, as he has come to know them in northern Ohio, are fear-
driven from the beginning of the season until its close. Part of this
tension is a result of their having a heavy financial investment on
which overhead costs must be met (which is something Zeb's
Kentucky neighbours do not have); but the most serious worries
develop as crops and animals are threatened by troubles of many
kinds, from weather to the grasshopper scourge.
It seems probable that his frequent visits to my farm have had
some effect on Zeb's musings. Here he has seen crops growing on
land that has not had its symptoms treated. He knows that in 1945
our small potatoes had the internal brown specks that reveal a lack
of phosphorus in the growing plant. He knows that in the next year
or two this condition continued to be noticeable; and that for the
past two seasons it has been absent. And this has come about
without the addition of phosphatic fertilizers or anything else except
the remains of each crop, which were mixed into the soil when the
land was being prepared for another crop. Zeb knows, too, that
potatoes have been bothered a little by beetles; that I have done
nothing to discourage these beetles; and that in every season but one
the beetles have done no great damage—eventually disappearing as
their season ended. One year the potatoes were killed off by beetles.
As already mentioned, the 'seed' potatoes used that year had
developed exceptionally long sprouts before they could be planted. I
believed the extra trouble caused by grubs that year meant that the
potatoes had been seriously weakened by this sprouting before
planting.
Seeing me work among crops where insects that commonly
destroy whole fields are at their nefarious business, Zeb marvels
that I pay no attention to these pests. I tell him that, to me, the
presence of insects indicates that something is amiss in the growing
conditions. It may be too hot, too dry, too cool, too moist, or there
may be too much bright light—or too little. Any one of these
conditions seems to affect the insect situation, I tell him. I used to
think that the degree to which the soil had been developed was the
one controlling factor, but the experience of the past seven seasons
indicates that the matter is not so simple as that. Even so, it still
seems that the condition of the soil is the most important single
factor, for, though I do have some insects of a number of different
kinds, I have not done anything by way of chemical control for
many years, and have lost crops only once or twice in all those
years. Usually, the damage is not even noticeable. Squash bugs, for
instance, appeared just about a week before killing frosts were
expected. Obviously, they could do little damage then. Runner
beans usually have from one to a dozen Mexican bean beetles to a
hundred feet of row; and these do not appear until the beans have
been picked once or twice. Even then, the damage they do during
the remainder of the season is never serious. Knowing these facts,
Zeb likes to think of me as a mechanized peasant farmer, treating
the land so well that I need not be driven by fear. To me it is a
compliment I hope to continue to deserve.
He has decided that I am not driven by fear, especially after he
watched all this past spring the progress of head lettuce interplanted
among tomato plants in what he and I had named my 'Chinese'
garden. The sweet Spanish onions and the tomatoes, planted in
alternate rows, were old-timers, both having been grown
successfully before; but the head lettuce was a new venture we were
both on edge about. As things turned out, the weather was cool and
moist long enough into the early summer to enable the lettuce to
head up, and enough was sold to local shops to make it a paying
crop. The heads never did reach the size preferred by the market,
but in many cases the entire plant was so free from blemishes or
disease that half a dozen to ten or more basal leaves could be
included when the plant was cut for market. This made an odd-
looking display of head lettuce when put on the greengrocers' racks,
and at first some of them were dubious about it. The housewives
soon settled that difficulty for them. They liked to get both head
lettuce and leaf lettuce in a single purchase. 'You were just plain
lucky,' Zeb told me. 'First you had miraculous weather—so cool and
moist that it didn't suit the tomatoes very well. And your sweet corn
showed the bad effects of the same too cool, too moist weather. But
the head lettuce—at least part of it—came through booming. And
on land that nobody would expect to grow head lettuce. You can't
expect that kind of luck regularly.' I know how right he is. I know,
too, that he omitted to mention another factor without which even
the favourable weather would not have helped enough to make the
lettuce successful. That is the six years of intermixed crop leavings
that had begun to make this soil black again. The weather was not
uniformly cool and moist, either. One day the mercury sailed into
the low nineties, with never a cloud in sight. That day those head
lettuce plants went as limp as wet linen rags and lay flat on the hot
ground. A shower later on picked them up again, and next morning
they were as spruce as perfection. Having seen this demonstration
of the restorative effect of liberal quantities of organic matter in the
soil, I feel sure that the improved condition of this soil saved the day
for me. Otherwise, I believe that that single torrid day would have
cooked those plants and finished them off.
As with most plantings of lettuce, this one did not 'cut' 100 per
cent. In fact, the actual harvested lettuce was less than 50 per cent.
Yet local prices made this profitable; and, though I am fully aware
that the weather next season may not even permit the crop to squeak
through to a success as limited as this season's, I hope to try again,
with even more plants than this year. 'You're just a plain gambler,'
Zeb tells me, but I remind him that experience has shown that this
little spot where improvement has been going on for seven seasons
gets a little better each year. Thus I hope to benefit from this gradual
soil development, so that in time the excellence of the soil will
largely neutralize the vagaries of the weather. His response is, 'Well,
maybe you'll succeed, but you're just tempting fate.' I agree to that,
of course.
We both remember what pitiful tomatoes this same spot grew
in 1945. Most of them were barely edible, and none marketable.
During the most recent season some of the largest have resembled
baseballs, and packed pecks have weighed more than sixteen
pounds. Other gardeners get similar results by the use of artificials
and irrigation, whereas my land has reached its present point of
productivity without outside aids of any kind at any time in the
seven years I have been working it. When I hear radio interviews in
which specialists proclaim the absolute necessity of treating the
seed, using artificial manure and/ or liming the land, spraying or
dusting the crop against numerous pests, and all the rest of it, I fall
into a rhythm well known in America, that of Porgy and Bess, and
hum, 'It ain't necessarily so; it ain't necessarily so,' and mean it
literally.
It definitely is necessary for the farmer whose land is in a
condition similar to that of mine in 1945 to follow faithfully his
adviser's instructions for growing crops. The fear of failure which
keeps him faithful to these practices accounts for his eventual
success. So, while farmers are dogged by fear, as Zeb charges, they
dare not be otherwise if they are to succeed in cropping land that
has long since lost its own verve for high production. If, on the
other hand, they were patiently to work their way to soil conditions
such as have now developed in this tiny plot of mine, they could
relax their fear tensions and look forward with confidence to a
completely balanced future so far as the productivity of their land is
concerned.
That last statement will be picked up and gleefully refuted by
my friends in the colleges and experiment stations. They can easily
show that soils in different places—sometimes as near to one
another as different parts of the same field—are quite diverse.
Variations in appearance, workability, productivity, chemical
content, and even organic-matter content are often great among soils
of a given community. Knowing these facts, it is easy to infer (note
the word) that one soil might yield to soil-redevelopment practices
while others would not. The truth is, I believe, that variations in
character of soils at the beginning of redevelopment do make some
kinds of soils easier to change than others. That any soil which ever
grew good grass or trees will refuse to redevelop if given a chance, I
doubt seriously. Progress should be evident in any such soil if it is
given enough time.
Experimental data will be produced in quantity which,
allegedly, prove such redevelopment of soil to be impossible. Many
experiments have shown that even when all residues have been
returned to the soil in regular rotations, the changes in organic
matter content over the years are never of great consequence. In
general, the tendency seems to be for the soil to hold permanently
only a very low percentage of organic matter—too little to lend
colour to it; and this is true even where everything possible is
ploughed back into the soil (note the word 'ploughed').
Without realizing that such evidence could never be admitted
as valid (because obtained under conditions as different as possible
from those imposed by a soil-redevelopment scheme), scientists
present their data with full confidence, since it is the result of work
done by themselves and their colleagues under 'controlled
conditions.' Moreover, it is official, whereas my work is not. (The
fact that I have often invited experiment station staff members, who
lodged objection to the 'unofficial' character of my work, to set up
check plots or otherwise arrange comparative tests that would be
official, will not be mentioned, of course.) Then, after they have
patiently presented 'proof that what has occurred on my soil could
occur only on soils that happened to be like this one, they seem
surprised—if not actually hurt—that I brush aside their evidence as
inadmissible. To them, an ordinary check plot in an experiment-
station test represents the same kind of conditions as my 'untreated'
area. The fact that their check plots yield little, while my untreated
land yields heavily, seems to them to prove that my soil is basically
different from that being used for experimentation. Obviously this
cannot be true, since my land has had its annual instalment of crop
residues mixed in regularly—not ploughed in, note. Their check
plot may have had just as much organic matter ploughed in, but the
two conditions are by no means the same. So the argument rests.
Nobody is convinced. And the years pass, with farmers continuing
to treat the ever-recurring symptoms in order to squeeze another
crop out of their all but dead land. Fear! It is there all right.
 CHAPTER THREE

What Went Before

*

H ISTORY is tricky. The items it includes depend on who tells

the story. Lucky, perhaps, is a generation that does not
know the full story of its ancestors. And what generation
does, in fact, know even a small part of its family history? In
America, some representatives of the present think that they know
theirs, but who could possibly have records of the more than a
thousand ancestors (assuming no intermarriages) he has
accumulated since the Mayflower made its voyage?
My personal inclination has been to let the sleeping dogs of
my family history lie. Quite recently, though, an alleged searcher of
family records offered me, at an attractive price, the coat of arms of
the Faulkner family. The doubt that authentic coats of arms exist for
families which, throughout mediaeval times, were servants of the
landed class tempted me strongly to spar a bit with the gentleman.
However, better judgment prevented my starting a fruitless
controversy, and his message found its proper filing space in the
waste-paper basket. A Faulkner escutcheon may, in fact, exist, but
such a search as a mild curiosity has prompted me to make has not
proved that point. I know of no use this token could have for me; so,
if it is worth what the gentleman suggested, he is welcome to keep
it.
In our family, no one has any idea when the males of the line
ceased to accompany royalty or great landed proprietors in England
on bow-and-arrow hunting expeditions. Their main job was to train
and handle the falcons that were required to bring in wildfowl
whose flight the arrow often did not stop. It seems probable that the
introduction of the blunderbus had a part in breaking up the ancient
traditions of hawk training. The birds would naturally be gun shy.
But this is as far as I have been able to reason about this. Ignorance
of the facts has not seemed so terribly important.
I have been much more interested in the story of the
beginnings of the little village where I grew up. A pioneer party
including my ancestors followed the Daniel Boone trail through
Cumberland Gap from North Carolina in 1803, leaving land in
Anson County, North Carolina, which was later acquired by the
county and resold. Some thirty-five miles west of the Gap they
found something unusual for mountainous country: a bottomland
area of a thousand acres or so which was kept rich by annual
overflows of the Clear Fork River, a tributary of the Cumberland.
The area was overgrown by a sort of dwarf bamboo that had worked
its way upstream from its normal habitat along the Gulf Coast. This
had to be grubbed out before the land could be used, and sites for
homes for the families had to be laid out on higher ground nearby.
With Jacob's staff and compass, twelve one-acre lots—three lots by
four lots, with intervening 'streets' some twenty feet wide—were
laid out while the rest of the party bent their backs over mattocks
and grubbing hoes. A cabin, barn, and smoke-house—all built of
logs—on each lot completed the start for the village.
 My boyhood home was one of these home sites, still owned
by my youngest sister. Our farm was a twenty-nine-acre strip of the
original 'canebrake' land, bought at low cost by my father eighty
years after it was cleared. It was the highest part of the flooded land,
receiving the thinnest layer of silt from the backwater, and,
therefore, skinned of its fertility most quickly by poor farming
methods. By my time, two railroads had invaded this mountain
country to haul away the coal and timber, so Father bought a few of
the abandoned sites or parts of them on which to grow market
vegetables. In this occupation he had no rivals for several years,
since most other men elected to work in the mines or the forest. The
children of our family helped Father develop his gardening business
on land that had previously been 'worn out' to the extent that it no
longer would grow more than twenty-five bushels of corn per acre.
My interest in soil redevelopment rather than the popular land-use
principle of soil conservation is, therefore, a second-generation
heritage. Where the choice is to grow corn on the land as it is, or to
put the land into condition to grow cauliflower, my instincts are to
fit it for the higher-value-per-acre crop. Father took this bottom land
that jibbed at producing corn profitably and before many years was
growing all the staple vegetables on it. In my recent work I have
bested his results by methods that enable the land to do all this
without the aid of artificials, animal manures, and similar
amendments, whereas he resorted to the use of these things.
While he was busily engaged feeding the increasing
population brought in by the mining and lumbering activities, these
industries were gutting the resources of our countryside, so that, by
the time I was ready to set out for myself, our county was importing
annually a million to a million and a half dollars' worth of foods and
animal foodstuffs—paid for by declining earnings from mines and
woods. This ugly situation prompted me to attend the College of
Agriculture at the University of Kentucky in order to qualify for
advisory work as a county agricultural agent. Thereafter the
influence of friends, unknown to me at the time, brought me back to
my home county as its first county agent. I worked four years* on
our home problems before venturing into the same work in Ohio.
But that is getting ahead of the story of our community's
development.
The community's story seems well worth consideration, for as
early as 1874 the thoughtfulness of local people had evolved the
idea of making this village an educational centre for the entire
mountain area. Just why this ambition existed, I do not know, but
the fact is that a 'high-school' building was erected from the giant
poplars and fancy hardwoods of the surrounding hillsides, and a
teaching staff was brought in from as far away as Ohio to instruct
those who came to learn. Pupils came from fifty to seventy-five
miles away to attend this, the only school of secondary rank in the
entire mountain district. Some of the teachers boarded with my
parents, and when I was still in the lower grades I began taking an
interest in texts of Latin, Greek, and 'natural philosophy' (physics, to
the pupils of to-day) that had been left behind by these teachers.
The hope of building up a high-ranking educational institution
here was dashed in 1883 when two railroads came together at the
Kentucky-Tennessee state line three miles west of our village.
Within a year or two our hamlet began to be a ghost town, since
many of our people could find employment in Jellico, the new
railroad and mining centre. Jellico grew rapidly, eventually
becoming the home of Grace Moore and Homer Rodeheaver,
singers both. While Jellico was attracting away from our village
those who sought employment in mining, lumbering, or in
connection with the railway, the county-seat town, Williamsburg,
twelve miles away, offered professional employment to most of
those who had been ambitious to develop the local educational
scheme. Thus, our 'high-school' building had to be content to house
the 150 or so grade-school pupils of the neighbourhood until it was
eventually torn down to make way for a better-designed building—
constructed from the big-scale lumber that had gone into the
original building.
When the original school building had been erected, its
ceilings must have been fifteen to twenty feet high (that is a boy's
recollection, and probably is not nearly correct, but they were too
high to permit heating the building in cold weather). The foundation
was one hundred by sixty feet. A second storey was cut into two
rooms, the back room being reserved as a Masonic lodge hall. The
gaping stair well made the front room—where the smaller children
were taught—impossible to heat, except as the heat escaping from
the squat, bulging stove in the lower room assisted. The many
enormous windows radiated much heat that might otherwise have
warmed us. Hence it became necessary to sacrifice the structure that
had been the community's dream house in order to ward off
pneumonia for the rising generation.
Meanwhile, at Williamsburg, the old urge for education stirred
again, and before long a school of the type that had been hoped for
in our little village was started there. It was at Williamsburg that I
had my first real tussle with Latin and the other mental 'interference'
that is high school and college. From 1902 to 1909 I was there
absorbing all I could from some of the best teachers I have known.
Dr. E. E. Wood, even then in Who's Who in America, did his best to
straighten out the English language for us, taking only a few
minutes of each class period for that purpose, and devoting the rest
to wholesome lectures on almost any conceivable subject. He was
fascinating.
At least one man in our village was not happy about the
coming of the railways. He was my father's Uncle John. He was in
the 'transportation business,' such as it was in those days of ox teams
and mud trails. He had for many years brought in from Lexington,
Kentucky, some 140 miles away by mountain passes and crooked
stream beds, all the supplies for our village stores. The end of his
business was sudden, but Uncle John eventually found occupation
as postmaster, in which position he continued through every
Democratic administration until the office was finally abolished in
favour of a rural route from Jellico, Tennessee, the town that had
gobbled up our population. (During Republican administrations,
Uncle John became assistant postmaster, and his Republican
daughter-in-law assumed the job as postmistress.)
As a vegetable gardener, Father made it his aim from the first
to supply the highest-quality product and charge accordingly. His
only serious competition was from vegetables that had already been
displayed in the market at Knoxville, seventy-five miles to the south
on the Southern Railway. These 'warmed-over' vegetables were
never fresh, so Father could easily get higher prices for any crops in
which freshness counted. He was in a peculiarly favourable position
as a gardener. He learned many things, both from experiences with
the trade and from incessant reading. I have never known a man
who spent so much of his leisure time reading. And much of his
reading was of farm publications, for he was keen to learn
everything he could about how farming should be done.
Because of this readiness to try new things, he adopted regular
crop rotation for the one part of the land where this could be done.
Well I remember that rotation, and how the oat crop almost always
had to be cut as hay because the preceding crops had accumulated
too much nitrogen. Clover was ploughed down for potatoes, a good
application of manure and some commercial fertilizer being used in
addition. The potato crop was never very good, probably because
our summer weather was usually too hot and moisture was not
always plentiful. My acquaintance with the potato crop was not all
pleasure, either. I had to 'drill' fertilizer in the rows, by hand, from a
pail, before the seed was planted. As soon as beetles appeared, I had
to knock them off the plants into a pan of kerosene. Part of the
cultivation and hoeing was my work. And as soon as there were
tubers big enough to offer in the market, I was taken from school at
the afternoon interval about three days a week to dig potatoes. Often
this was a very hot job, for at the last cultivation of the potato crop
Father had field maize planted between the rows. This maize grew
slowly until the potato plants began to die down. Then it sprang
ahead like mad, and usually matured the best maize we had. This
tall crop was an effective windbreak which I did not need when the
temperature was between eighty and ninety degrees Fahrenheit on
fine autumn afternoons.
This potato-maize crop was followed the next season by maize
alone, which, in turn, was followed by winter oats, into which red
clover was seeded. The first crop of clover was cut for hay and the
second was ploughed in for the next potato crop. For many years
this rotation was followed on two and one-half-acre fields alongside
each other. At least once the maize yield reached ninety bushels per
acre on land Father had bought cheap because it would no longer
yield more than twenty-five bushels per acre.
Father's superior crops were noted by travellers, because, in
those days, our twenty-nine-acre strip was always greener than the
surrounding area. Once I overheard two men on a train passing
through the valley discussing that greener strip. Naturally, I was
pleased. I have never known a man less inclined to boastfulness
than my father, so it was gratifying to me to know that strangers
recognized that something unusual was being done to our land. In
later years, as county agent of our county, I was told by many
farmers that they had long known of my father as the best farmer in
the county. To hear him talk, you would not have suspected he was
different from almost any other farmer. That, too, was
commendable. I cannot say so much for myself, for I enjoy retailing
what the land is doing. However, more than most farmers, I believe,
I recognize that what happens on the land is caused only remotely
by the farmer. All he can do is to set the stage, mechanically,
chemically, physically, biologically, for what is to happen. Nature,
after all, is in complete control. By tricks of weather, the best efforts
of the farmer can come to naught or can produce fabulous results.
Credit should be given where it is due, and certainly to the farmer is
due only a minor share of the credit for good crops.
Gradually the contrast between Father's land and that of his
neighbours disappeared, for, while they had been derisive in the
early years, they came to realize eventually that Father's unusual
methods were getting more from the land than they were able to
get—despite the fact that our land had been poorer when Father
started working it. They began to follow similar methods, with
equally good results. However, they did general farming, and their
better success did not make them competitors of Father's.
Father ploughed his land, and he used artificials, but he also
made use of the disc harrow instead of the plough wherever this was
feasible, and he never depended upon commercial fertilizers alone.
All through the year, when the weather and the rush of farmwork
permitted, one team was kept busy hauling manure from Jellico. In
those days mules were used in the mines, and many people in the
small towns kept one or more horses. Every grocery firm, or other
business that made deliveries, kept horses. So a great tonnage of
manure was produced in Jellico, and much of it could be had for the
carting away. Father always paid up to fifty cents a wagon-load
where pay was expected. Contrast that with the five dollars or more
a load to-day.
Having ploughed and used fertilizers all his life, Father
believed these practices necessary. I was not disappointed,
therefore, in talking with him about my own thinking in this field, to
find him a good but unbelieving listener. He said almost nothing by
way of objection—which was natural for him—but it was obvious
that he thought it impossible that I should find I could grow the
finest vegetables by methods that involved neither the plough nor
fertilizers. I only wish he might have lived another dozen years in
good health so that he could have known what is happening now on
land I have been working the past seven seasons. It would have both
puzzled and delighted him.
In 1917, he did see the crop of sweet potatoes I grew from the
150 plants I had hoped would produce two bushels. The harvest was
twelve bushels and there were almost no small ones. Each hill had
from one to four large roots, all quite uniform in shape, as is usual
with the Nancy Hall variety. These roots formed right at the point
where the vine emerged from the ground, and in developing size
they pushed upward a few inches, thus creating a mound at the hill.
Father visited us in Williamsburg while I was digging the crop. He
had never seen such a yield in his many years of growing sweet
potatoes, and he could not account for this result. That crop,
yielding at what would amount to more than twelve hundred bushels
per acre, was something that I could not account for at the time. The
explanation did not occur to me until July, 1937, when I decided
that ploughing was definitely wrong in principle.
That sweet-potato surprise party came about in the most
ordinary way—except for one or two details which, at the time,
seemed minor. The usual sweet-potato yield for the whole country
in those days amounted to about one hundred bushels per acre. I had
figured that about 150 plants ought to grow a bushel of potatoes
under average conditions, but I hoped by improving the soil
conditions to get twice the average production. We should need
about two bushels of potatoes for the winter, and I thought I had
planned for just about that. The soil was sand with little organic
matter, so I decided to sow it in rye (autumn of 1916) and plough it
in next spring when it was just six to eight inches high. Rye and
vetch were sown, and grew well, but the spring rains came every
few days and ploughing could not be done until the crop was
shoulder high.
From previous experience of farmers who had ploughed down
tall rye, I knew I dared not plough this down for sweet potatoes. I
hired a neighbour who had the tools, with the understanding that
before he ploughed, he would disc the land three times, lapping
half-way. He protested doing it that way and was determined to
plough it first. However, I told him I would not pay to have it done
unless it were first disced. He went over it three times with the disc
harrow, then ploughed it, then went over it again a few times with
the disc harrow. As a result, none of the rye and vetch could be
seen, and the soil looked exactly as if it had been treated in the usual
way, first by ploughing, then by discing. Up to this point, therefore,
there was nothing abnormal, judging from appearances.
The plants were set in rows not on ridges but level with the
surface, as is the usual practice in that part of the country. The first
unusual feature was that these plants never wilted, but started
immediately to grow. In a few days they had vines starting. They
continued growing all summer. These facts were unusual, for
ordinarily sweet-potato plants require from one to four weeks to get
started. Often they lose all their leaves and later, if they survive,
grow new leaves. The behaviour of these plants was very different
from normal, indicating that something in the situation was more
favourable than usual for growing sweet potatoes.
In most years since 1917, I have tried to grow sweet potatoes,
but have not again had that kind of success, or anything approaching
it. However, no soil I have worked since then has been naturally as
well suited to the crop as was that sandy soil. That is an important
factor. More important, it now seems, may be the pattern of
temperature throughout the summer. The weather sweet potatoes
most enjoy comes with those torrid days when the mattress scorches
one at night and sleep is almost impossible. Such days are rare in
Ohio, and their infrequency may be one of the factors making the
sweet-potato crop undependable here. Before he can predict a
commercially successful crop, of course, the grower must know that
his crop will probably be profitable. At present, for most soil
conditions here, he can only hope. I think that, by grading up the
soil, it may be possible to make this crop more dependable, simply
because the better soil will supply so many more nutrients at all
times when the sweet potato is able to make use of them. On that
theory (it is no more than that) I plan each season to grow a small
area of this crop as a test of the soil's progress in this direction.
If the reader has borne with me through this recital of personal
experiences, he will perhaps be able to understand that to some
extent my interest in soil matters was an essential outgrowth of
family experiences. One remote ancestor had presumably worn out
a North Carolina farm during the Revolutionary War years. His
children sought better land and found it in the Clear Fork River
bottoms, where, within sixty years, they had so abused it that my
grandfather had gone into business as a general-store proprietor, and
his brother John, previously mentioned, had carried goods by ox
team from Lexington, Kentucky, as a means of livelihood. My
father was at first a carpenter, but he soon turned to the land, bought
a strip that was considered ruined, and enlivened it again. As with
all families with extended lineage in the country, my roots were in
the land, and Father's experience gave me confidence that I, too,
could reclaim ruined acreage. This book is the story of the
beginnings of restoration on our 125-acre farm, the 'from rags to
riches' experiences of a tattered and torn bit of earth.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Armoured Cells
*

Z EB TURNER passes right by my place on his way to town. He

was excited that late June morning when he found me hoeing
runner beans. 'Have you counted your Mexican bean beetles
yet?' he asked. When I replied that I had not found any to count, he
seemed a little doubtful. 'Why wouldn't you have them? Earl Rexkin
dusted his beans last night, and I found beetles on mine this
morning. Don't they like your beans?' he wondered. I had not
sprayed or dusted any crop for fifteen years or more, I told him. I
had not been surprised to find no beetles on the bean plants. But he
was not satisfied. 'What I want to know,' he continued, still excited,
'is why your beans aren't bothered by beetles when most other
gardeners' crops are being destroyed by them.' That was not easy to
answer in a few words, especially since I really do not know and
must theorize about this phenomenon. 'I'm sure I don't know,' I told
him, 'but it seems likely that the soil in which the plants grow may
be responsible. It may make the sap of the bean plant different
enough in taste to repel instead of attracting the beetles. I once saw
a Mexican bean beetle alight on a bean plant in my back garden, and
promptly fly away again. In a few seconds the same thing happened
again. Seeing that made me wonder if there were some difference in
plant composition that would account for this odd behaviour of the
beetles.'
I told Zeb that it was not just the beans that were insect free.
'My cucumbers are almost free of cucumber beetles, and so far I
haven't seen a cabbage worm or a squash bug. I'll probably see all of
these in greater numbers before the season is over, but up to now
they have not showed up.'
'Well, now,' Zeb said thoughtfully, 'that's something to think
about. With pests running roughshod over your neighbours' crops,
you have few or none. It looks like a conspiracy. Have you signed a
treaty of peace or something?' he continued, his eyes twinkling in
anticipation of an answer in kind.
'So I look like a conspirator, eh!' I grimaced. 'You might call
this a conspiracy,' I told him, but assured him there was nothing in
writing. Then I explained that, after so many years of almost
bugless freedom, I had been forced to conclude that the different
way of handling the soil must be connected in some fashion with the
insect situation. And, though I grow vegetables for market—which
would make any slip-up in such insect behaviour fatal to marketing
prospects—I had not had, I told him, any equipment for dusting or
spraying for many years.
'You haven't got as much sense as old Oliver Cromwell had,'
he volunteered. 'He trusted in God, but kept his powder dry. You
don't even keep a supply of "powder." ' Thus he scourged me in all
friendliness, and, obviously, would not be satisfied until I had talked
the whole subject through, as far as my thinking permitted. I
anchored the hoe with soil, leaving the handle vertical so that it
could be seen. Then I tried quickly to collect my thoughts for the
full discussion I knew he would insist upon. The subject is an
intricate one about which, so far as I know, no one really knows
very much.
'First,' I said, 'let me show you an exception to the general
rule. This season my potatoes have been literally eaten up by
beetles, and it's only fair that you should know that the system
doesn't work under all conditions.' I thought I knew why the
potatoes had been attacked, so I gave him what seemed to me the
logical reasoning for this failure, as well as the basic reasons I had
developed to account for the success that had become normal.
I explained to him, as I have already pointed out in this book,
that a general sapping of the energy of my seed potatoes, through
the growth of sprouts of great length before they were planted, had
made them fit prey for insect attack. My theory is that fresh,
unsprouted seed potatoes would not have succumbed.
Zeb was hard to convince. He wanted to know why I thought
insects could distinguish between potato plants grown from
unsprouted seed and those that had weakened themselves by
excessive sprouting.
'It seems to me,' I said, 'that these potatoes, in developing long
sprouts while they were stored in the cellar, transferred to those
sprouts minerals, vitamins, or other substances, so that the seed was
robbed of defensive materials. When the two successive crops of
sprouts were broken off, vital materials went with them. As a result,
the shrivelled tubers that remained were in no condition to send out
sprouts that could fend for themselves in anything less than perfect
growing conditions. If the weather had remained cool and moist, it
is possible that the insects would have passed over these plants; for
they often fail to attack the potato crop of an entire community in
favourable seasons. But hard conditions came. The rains stopped
and the weather became hot—both heat and dryness being
conditions potatoes do not like. Thus these plants, lacking the
minerals and vitamins that the seed had spent in growing the earlier,
abortive sprouts, just couldn't take it. The insects sensed they were
in trouble and moved in.'
'You may be right about that,' said Zeb, 'but I still don't see
why insects should like to feed on the weak, rather than on the
strong, plants. Have you any explanation for that?' This question
demanded a ready answer—and I had not one then and have not one
now. However, I had to make do with such ideas as I had, for he
simply would not let go until he was satisfied, whatever the point
under discussion might be.
'I'm sure I don't know just why that should be,' I admitted. 'I
can only theorize, and you know how far theory can be from truth.'
Knowing Zeb, though, I was sure he would accept, tentatively at
least, whatever seemed plausible. I knew, too, that if he saw a flaw
in an argument, he would shoot it right back at me.
'So far as I know,' I said, 'there has been no research that
proves the point, but more and more news fragments reach the
public that suggest a connection between plenty of minerals in the
tissues of a plant or animal and immunity of that plant or animal to
insect or disease attack. Apparently insects prefer tissues that are
not well nourished. If this is true, then we might assume that too
little mineral in plant or animal would amount to an invitation to
come in and dine.' Such reasoning, I explained, could not be treated
as proof, but it might be a straw in the wind indicating where the
truth lies.
For a long minute Zeb said nothing, pondering that idea. Then
he came out with this: 'Maybe you think the sap in Rexkin's bean
plants tastes better to Mexican bean beetles than the sap in your own
beans.' The implied question was a poser. Nobody can find out just
how bean sap tastes to hungry Mexican bean beetles, of course.
Test-tubes still are much too crude for such delicate business. It did
seem, however, that this much might be said: 'Perhaps to the beetle,
sap from poorly-nourished plants does taste better than sap from
well-fed plants.'
I expected this idea to strike fire with the doughty old
mountaineer, and so it did. 'Why in tarnation,' he stormed, 'would a
beetle turn down rich sap in favour of sap that carried almost no
minerals? You must think insects are fools, yet the way they outwit
the best farmers in the country, it looks as if they know what they
are about.' He was really wrought up this time and wanted to know
how I could justify such a statement.
'I think there may be good reason, built right into the insect,
why it might need a different kind of food from the things you and I
must have. The insect carries its skeleton outside, and this hard,
protective tissue makes up the bulk of its weight. The inner parts
that must be supplied with proteins for necessary repair and
maintenance are but a minor part of its body. Moreover, the insect
flies. This means that it must have food that supplies energy for
flight. Starches, sugars, and fats supply that, while minerals
definitely do not. It might be, then, that when plants are suddenly
subjected to dry, hot weather, the decreased water supply to the
roots brings into the plant such a small amount of minerals that the
sap soon becomes charged with carbohydrates and starches, which
the green leaves continue to make under the influence of sunshine.
Such a change in plant physiology is not uncommon and may
account for sudden onslaughts of insects. My observations seem to
justify such a conclusion.'
'Oh, I see,' said Zeb, brightly. I knew something smart was on
the way. 'You think insects might develop arthritis if they drank sap
that was rich in minerals; and that they thrive on the sap of the same
kind of plants that lack the necessary water to transport minerals
from the soil. Is that it?' I admitted it might be a fair comparison.
'Then,' was the next shot from my good friend, 'do you by chance
think insects are wiser than people?' This seemed so far off the
subject that I had to ask what he meant. His reply gives food for
thought, at least.
'They tell us, you know, that we humans eat a lot of food that
does not supply enough proteins and minerals to meet our body
needs: also, that by continuous eating of such foods people grow
"bay windows" and add fat in other places where it has no business
to be. This fat, supposedly, must be supplied with blood vessels,
thus adding unnecessarily to the work of the heart and eventually
usually bringing on heart trouble. Now, as you picture the insect's
behaviour, he seems to know better than to put such an impossible
load on his heart. That's why it seems to me that insects may be
smarter than most people.'
'You may be right,' I replied, playing for time to compose an
answer to this charge against the human race. 'I'm certainly no
expert on insect intelligence. I have learned something in a long
lifetime about the way we mistreat our farm crops by forcing them
to subsist on soil solutions that are too deficient in mineral
substance to permit them to feed themselves well. And you know as
well as I do that people who have to buy their food must accept
whatever the market has to offer. The fact that many people eat
more starchy foods than is good for them is something they cannot
change as easily as you might suppose.'
I could see Zeb begin to question what I was saying even
before he spoke a word. 'You mean to say,' he began, 'that people
couldn't drink more milk, eat more meat, fruit, nuts, cheese, and
other foods if they only had the sense to buy them? That argument
won't hold water. This is a free country. People can do whatever
they like, and usually do—short of interfering with their
neighbours.' He was really 'het up,' as he would have put it.
'Well, Zeb,' I observed as tactfully as I could, 'if a hundred
million people demanded nuts and fruits to-day, after having eaten
bread, meat, and potatoes all their lives, how many of them could be
supplied from available stocks? Very few, and you know it. Almost
everybody would have to fall back on his old diet, despite his
determination to reform. Of course, that isn't going to happen.
People don't reform en masse, anyhow. But you know, when you
consider the subject, that our present food-production business
could not provide any great proportion of our people with a proper
diet even if they demanded it. The American farm is growing almost
solely those crops that can most easily be mechanized; and if you
consider the nuts and fruits that can be used as human food, you will
soon discover that our present farm machinery cannot help to grow
most of the fruit and nut crops. So, before farmers could supply
enough fruits and nuts to feed our country properly, they would not
only have to get the crops started, but would either have to develop
hand methods of managing them or find different machinery for the
purpose. Your point about the super-intelligence of insects won't
stand up, it seems to me. What do you think, in view of this
situation?'
Zeb is not a man to argue for argument's sake. He is easily
convinced by facts. His reply was characteristic. 'You've mentioned
a lot of things I hadn't thought about. It sounds as if people are in a
sort of strait jacket that would prevent them from improving their
diet all at once. But are you sure that solving the nut and fruit
shortage would provide the key to diet reform?' He was getting
down to cases in the way it seems to me we all must if we are really
to solve our food problem so as to eliminate diseases known to
result from foods that lack real food values. This question helps to
bring the whole matter into better focus.
'I may be wrong,' I replied, 'but to me it seems likely that our
meat, milk, cheese, butter, eggs, lard, oleomargarine, and even most
of our cultivated fruits all lack nutritive substance—if only because
they are products of soils which have been depleted by generations
of misuse. If this is true, then it would not be easy to reform diets on
a wholesale basis without important changes in our farm practices.
On the credit side, though, one change in farm practices is now
being made that will help a great deal towards a better diet for
everybody. That is the increase in grassland acreage all over the
country. Properly managed, this grassland can grow beef, pork, and
other animal products that will be richer in minerals than those
which result from feeding hay, silage, and grain produced by
cultivation of the land. This increase in grass acreage is the only
promising development I can think of towards fighting the
deficiency-disease problems of the country. But if farmers try, as
they always have, to grow as many animals as possible from their
pasture land, even grassland will not improve our diet, except in so
far as it results in great increases in numbers of animals and,
therefore, in cheaper meats. That would help, but would fall far
short.' Seeing that Zeb was about to cut in with a question, I
stopped.
'I'd like to know,' he almost exploded, 'what's wrong with
pasturing as many cattle as the land will carry. It's the only way to
keep the pastures neat. In fact, cattle often won't graze the land close
enough to keep it neat, and some farmers put sheep with the cattle
so that the grass will be grazed closer.' His point clinched, he gave
me a chance to have a word.
'You ask what's wrong with close grazing pasture land and
rightly describe close grazing as an old and tried farm practice,' I
began. 'Well, close grazing of pasture land is exactly the same as
close clipping of a lawn. It prevents the grass plants from keeping
up the necessary root activity for searching out new sources of plant
food within the soil. Plant roots attack a source of food supply with
one "installation" of roots, and work at this place until it can yield
no more; meanwhile, other roots in other parts of the plant's feeding
area find another cache, such as a bit of decaying organic matter,
and similarly exhaust it. While this is going on, the plant must be
extending its "lines" of main roots into other territory from which
food may be obtained. But such extensions require food material
from the plant itself. In other words, the plant must be able to spend
some of its reserve energy in building these new extensions of its
root system. It can do this only if there are reserves upon which it
can draw. And such reserves can be created only by the green leaf
tissue of the plant. The constant close grazing keeps the area of
green leaves so low that no reserves can be built up. Therefore, the
plant must halt all such extensions in order to keep up the necessary
leaf growth to continue life. Often, the onset of drought makes even
the maintenance of life impossible, and the grass dies. I hope you
see what I mean. Grazing one animal to each acre might actually
kill off the pasture in a few seasons through such a process of
starvation as I have described. But by grazing only about one animal
to each three acres the farmer would be making it possible for his
grass to gain in vigour as the years pass instead of slowly dying for
lack of a chance to maintain vigorous root growth. I think, Zeb,' I
concluded, 'that all of this is tied up closely with the health or lack
of health of both the grass plants and the animals that graze it. My
guess is that if a farmer grazed thirty-five animals on a one-
hundred-acre pasture his animals could stay healthy without
veterinary service, while one hundred animals -on the same pasture
might need such care frequently. It might not work out that way, but
it seems logical that both animals and plants would be healthier
when the grazing was not too heavy. Doesn't this answer your
question?'
Zeb was ready to concede that heavy grazing might be one
cause of illness in animals, but he had no clear mental picture of
why this should be true. For that matter, I can only theorize about it;
but I do have what seem tenable theories, and I was ready for Zeb's
next question. It did not come very promptly. He was busy digesting
ideas that were mostly new to him. When finally he put it, he was
still slow of speech—something unusual for him.
'Well,' he drawled, still confused in his thoughts, 'how do you
manage to squeeze the cow doctors out of this? Do you think grass
can be medicine under some conditions and poison under others?'
As usual, Zeb had managed to frame his question in a fresh, if
not in a particularly elegant, style. I told him that the situation might
be almost as bad as he implied, but that I had not thought of it in
just that way. 'This whose question of plant and animal nutrition,' I
continued, 'is right now under the spotlight of critical research. The
men who are working on such problems would probably refuse to
think of grass as either a medicine or a poison, so your ideas would
go out the window at once so far as they are concerned. Personally,
I think they deserve serious thought, and I'll tell you why. What you
and I think won't have much effect on how other people think,
anyhow.' Zeb grinned at that, but did not say anything. He knew
how true it was.
'What seems true to me, Zeb,' I began, 'is that the very first
thing to do in order to grow healthy plants or animals is to develop a
healthy soil for plants to grow in. Developing the healthy soil is a
whole chapter in itself, so we shall not stop to discuss it now.
Instead, we shall try to imagine how a properly developed soil can
insure healthy plants. First, a healthy soil is one that is so alive with
multitudes of tiny living things that you can see evidences of them
in almost every hoeful of earth. Few soils are like that, you know. In
fact, most soils are so tightly packed together (unless sandy) that
these small creatures have long since been evicted. They could not
stand the pressures built up by the mould-board plough after most of
the organic matter had disappeared. Ploughing did not matter so
much as long as the soil was still black with decaying organic
matter, but when the last smudge of colour had gone—showing that
the organic matter had been exhausted—the soil became so tight
that ants, wasps, earthworms, and other soil inhabitants had to go
elsewhere to live.
'When that happened, the mineral part of the soil—from which
crops had been getting an abundance of minerals—no longer was
saturated with the acids set free by organic decay. Formerly, these
acids had etched away the needed minerals from the surrounding
microscopic rock dust and had passed them on, in solution, to the
soil moisture which also found space among these rock particles.
Plant roots, then, searching for minerals, merely absorbed this
mineral-charged water and sent it on its way to become part of the
plant. Growth of plants was thus automatic, just as it was in the
Garden of Eden, and just as it is in every weed patch to-day. Such
complete nourishment of a plant can only mean healthy growth.
Minerals supplied by the soil when plenty of organic acids are
present to mine them from the soil mass constitute a real armour of
health. Every single cell of a plant so fed becomes normally
resistant to insects and diseases, just because it has this built-in
armour in every cell.
'Lacking in these minerals—as our overworked, light-coloured
soils must force the plants they grow to be—our farm crops cannot
resist insects or diseases. Farmers have had plenty of experience
with crops that cannot defend themselves against attacks of a host of
pests. That is one sad part of the modern farmer's job. And,
unfortunately, tradition has approved combat-by-poison as the
remedy, overlooking the fact that healthy plants which are fully
supplied with every mineral need by soils capable within
themselves of doing so, become immune, so that no pests attack
them and, therefore, no chemicals are needed. Scientists appear to
have forgotten one axiom of the early scientists who worked with
bacteria, that germs can attack only bodies that have low resistance.
'Low resistance comes from soils that cannot supply minerals
because no organic matter is present to decay, thus furnishing the
liberating acids. The soil water absorbed by plants in such a soil is
necessarily "thin soup" for the plants growing there. Plant cells
cannot wall themselves in with defensive tissues unless they have
the minerals necessary to build such protection. That is the trouble
with the pasture that is kept neatly grazed. It cannot do justice to the
plants it grows.
'Every livestock farmer should have known Arnold G.
Ingham, the king of grass growing in the United States. He had a
lifetime of experience in the dairy business—feeding his cows only
enough grain to tempt them into the barn to be milked, and giving
them so much area to graze that they could not possibly keep it neat.
He even stacked hay in the pasture to act as a "barometer." If the
cattle began to eat the hay, he knew the pasture was no longer what
it ought to be. Mostly, the unprotected stacks were untouched.
Experts who visited Mr. Ingham saw grass they never imagined
could exist on regular pastures, mattress soft, the earth beneath
almost impossible to find. These experts revised their standards for
grass after the experience. For twenty-five years Ingham sold pure-
bred Guernseys from his herd without bringing in a single animal to
supply new blood. Grass-grown health made this possible. But, as
you can see, the grass was good—not the usual half-starved,
closely-cropped pasture that takes a rest during hot, dry midsummer
weather because it lacks vitality.
'My work here, of course, is solely with plants—growing
crops for people instead of domestic animals. I'm doing this in soil
that is being redeveloped to its original vitality, and the crops this
soil grows will, I think, prove to be real promoters of health for the
people who consume them. That's my aim. Nothing less will satisfy
me. So far the indications are that my idea is right. Many a customer
has praised the flavour of my vegetables while he was buying more.
Ordinarily a shrewd buyer might criticize the vegetables in the hope
of getting them cheaper, but it is not at all unusual for a customer to
declare that they had the finest flavour he had ever tasted. Flavour
goes with abundant minerals. So, lacking analyses, I believe these
vegetables are well supplied with minerals.'
By this time Zeb seemed satisfied by the discussion. We
parted to do our separate errands, but he will be back again some
day, and then we are likely to have another spirited argument.
 CHAPTER FIVE

What, No Artificials!
*

I GOT my first experience with artificial manures early in life.

Father was the only man in our community in the 'nineties who
bought and used much commercial fertilizer. He bought a
minimum railway truck load (at that time fifteen tons) of 'mixed
goods.' It consisted mostly of the then popular 2-8-2, but he always
included a few tons of higher-grade mixtures. In those days you
bought 'potato grower,' 'cabbage grower,' and the like. If the name
of the crop was not printed on the fertilizer bag, the farmer did not
buy. The fact that 'potato grower' and 'tobacco grower' had the same
ingredients, and probably were bagged from the same pile, had no
significance.
At first we did not use a full truck load in a season, but the
difference between the freight rate for a truck and the less-than-a-
truck rate was enough to pay for all the unused part and more.
Eventually, the neighbours took all we could spare, but in the first
few years the hired man and I had our troubles beating the lumps
out of those hardened masses from which the bags slipped off in
tatters in the spring. We cleared a space under the barn and set up
our reconditioning business there. Many hours of beating with
shovels were required before the stuff could be handled with any
satisfaction.
Since we had no fertilizer spreader, spreading all had to be
done by hand. Father rode the plank harrow and broadcast the
fertilizer, while the hired man or I drove the team. If it was new
fertilizer straight from the railway truck, this was dusty business.
The one thing we liked about our reconditioned, lumpy stuff was
that it did not fill our eyes and noses with dust.
For potatoes, and perhaps other crops, the land was covered
by a broadcast application. Then all of us were sent down the
furrows, in which the potato seed was to be dropped by hand, to
spread a liberal amount there. It was mixed in by running the
marking plough through the furrow again. Time-consuming as this
operation was, the job was finished all too soon to suit me, for next
we had to drop the potatoes. That meant a heavy coal scuttle of seed
on my right arm—with Father coming along every few minutes to
make me change it to the left arm so that I should drop the seed with
my right hand. As soon as he had gone, unconsciously I changed
back, and it would not be long before he would repeat this business.
I was incurably left-handed at some jobs, and it worried Father—
despite the fact that he was also left-handed at many of the same
jobs.
Similarly crude methods were followed in growing all our
vegetables. I have followed a mule team and walking plough many
a mile in my time. Not until I had been away from home several
years did Father buy a machine with a seat for the driver, though he
finally decided it was better for a man of his age to ride while he
ploughed. He continued to use walking cultivators, however, and
did not, so far as I know, buy a riding cultivator. (I later persuaded a
friendly farmer to let me learn how to run a riding cultivator, so that
I should not be too 'green' in front of the agricultural class I had to
teach.) We broadcast oats by hand and covered the seed with a disc
harrow. Probably Father had originally used the big wooden A-
harrow, with square steel teeth, to cover his oats, for I can
remember when he bought the first disc harrow. And, once when he
had to cover lightly a meadow seeding, he cut some small saplings,
hitched them behind his team, and covered the field with this 'brush'
harrow. This was an odd field not in his rotation area. They were
pretty crude methods.
After our first few years of using artificials, the neighbours—
who had had a lot of fun scoffing at Father's 'sand from
Louisville'—began buying a little to try on their crops. Before many
years the minimum railway-truck load was no longer enough for us
and the neighbours. For a long time this truck-load shipment was
important enough to the fertilizer company for its president to make
a special trip to take Father's order. For ten years or longer it is
likely that ours was the only truck-load order coming into our
county. Little was sold by any of the dealers in town. That is certain.
This account of my acquaintance with fertilizer should
convince critics that my present methods of farming without using it
are not due solely to ignorance of its benefits. I know, and have
known for many years, that fertilizers 'pay.' That fact was not even
new information to me when I heard it at college. The truth is that
when I first mentioned going to an agricultural college, Father said
in his quiet, unassuming way, 'You don't need to.' Those four words
meant a lot. He was not bragging, as a stranger might have thought.
He knew that our farm methods were very much the same as those I
would be taught in college. In all his farm work he had followed
carefully every suggestion that made sense to him. Most of the good
advice came to him through the columns of Home and Farm, a
long-defunct farm publication to which Father subscribed as long as
it existed. Our whole family, incidentally, got many laughs out of
Bill Arp's column. This writer, a reporter for Atlanta Constitution,
contributed a witty and pithy column to our farm paper.
When he knew my reasons for going to college, Father said
nothing against it. He did say that he could not help me, but I told
him I would need only fifty dollars to get started and that I would
pay that back. He loaned me the money, and although I had to draw
on my life insurance to repay it on time, I later cleared the insurance
loan after I had obtained a student dairy-farm job at thirty dollars a
month. I needed agricultural college training in preparation for
undertaking advisory work as a county agent, one requirement being
that the applicant must have a degree from an agricultural college.
At that early date there were so few agricultural-college graduates
that this rule was not adhered to closely. Every graduate who would
accept a position as county agent was given a job, but the need was
so great that many men without college training were put to work—
sometimes, it must be said, for reasons not entirely fair to the public
that supposedly was to be served. One such agent of my
acquaintance used to argue loudly that I was foolish to do all the
travelling I did over my county. 'I see all the farmers when they
come to town. We talk, and I tell them what to do. Then I report
travel according to the distances they live from town.' He was
himself a farmer, and as a native knew every farmer in the county,
so he could do some good without leaving town. However, he not
only had not been to college, but had not gone very far in a school
of any kind. At any rate, his ideas on how to be a successful county
agent were not to be taken too seriously.
Father never used fertilizer alone. We always had quantities of
farmyard manure and applied it heavily. Every farmer who reads
this statement will wonder how anybody could have enough
manure. As I related in a previous chapter, we had access to the
stables of businessmen, mine operators, and others in Jellico; and
Father lost no opportunity to transport to our farm any manure he
could get at no greater cost than fifty cents a wagon-load. Much of it
was free. Use of this manure along with rather liberal amounts of
fertilizers gave our crops a good start. If there was enough rain, we
had good crops. It often happened that there was plenty of rain early
in the season, but not enough during the hot days of August and
September. Maize that had looked wonderful all through May and
June would 'fire' from the ground to the ear in a few weeks after the
rain stopped. Even in those days I knew that nitrogen—from the
manure and the fertilizer—had been responsible for the rank growth
when there was enough moisture in the ground. But when I saw the
maize dry up year after year, I blamed the dead leaves in August on
the nitrogen that had, it seemed to me, pushed the growth too much
in the early stages, so that when dry weather came, there was too
much stalk to be supported.
One impressive fact was that our neighbours who used no
fertilizers and little if any manure on their maize crop had little of
this trouble. Their maize, right across the fence, was much smaller
than ours and had green leaves long after ours had fired. I could not
avoid the conclusion, therefore, that too much nitrogen was at the
root of this trouble.
I am aware that tissue tests of fired maize show a lack of
nitrogen. How I wish tissue tests had been available fifty years ago.
I could have checked the neighbour's maize to see whether it also
might have lacked nitrogen, but remained green because it still had
enough water. Privately, I have doubts as to the possibility of
actually making a clear-cut distinction between a shortage of
nitrogen and a lack of water to transport the nitrogen that might be
present in the soil. And, until someone clears up this point, which
might seem to an agronomist like mere mental astigmatism on my
part, I shall be forced to believe that water shortages and nitrogen
shortages are hopelessly confused.
Being thus 'allergic' to nitrogen as a fertilizer, I have not used
any artificial nitrogenous manure whatever for the past decade. The
last time I applied nitrogen to land was in the early spring of 1939,
in order to induce rank growth of such weeds as started on land I
planned to put to garden crops. This was largely wasted for two
reasons: there were few weeds where maize had been the 1938 crop,
and excessive rain following the broadcasting of this nitrogen
probably stole most of it away.
As for phosphorus and potash, I have used neither since 1940
when they were applied in an effort to make the sweet potato crop
of that year pay the costs of the farming operation. I have never seen
nicer vines than grew that season, but there was never enough heat
at one time to develop potatoes of marketable size. The fact that the
potato vines were rank speaks for the abundance of nitrogen
available from the rye that had been disced into the ground when it
was about three feet tall. The failure of the crop, then, could not be
charged against the fact that no nitrogen had been applied.
Since 1940 I have not used any fertilizer of any kind on any
crop. That record is my chief support for my present thesis that land
is being proved self-sufficient in my present farm operations. If
anywhere on the farm I had used anything brought in from outside,
it would not be possible to make a clear-cut case for soil self-
sufficiency. Determination to prove that point is the sole reason I
have refrained completely from using what would have (as I well
know from boyhood experience) enabled me to grow paying crops
from the start on this misused soil. Lime that was on the place when
I bought it was given to a neighbour. A completely organic fertilizer
manufactured in Florida and sent to me by a friend who had gone
into that business there was turned over to a neighbouring vegetable
grower to be tried out by him. Earthworm castings, supplied by an
earthworm farmer for experimental use, were returned to her,
because even they would have clouded the issue of self-sufficiency
of the soil. So I should like it to be understood that the record is
clear, in fact.
Many of my very good friends in all sincerity have predicted
that, while good, even bountiful, crops might be produced for a few
years, the venture was bound to fail in the end, if only because
nutrient shortages would eventually show up. They may be right, of
course. After all, this is only a seven-year report. However, all those
angles had been considered in planning this project; and the way the
best-developed spots of soil seem to be 'feeling their oats,' it looks
as if success on a grand scale awaits only complete redevelopment
of the soil.
Scientific men believe strongly in spectrographic analysis as a
certain method of detecting every element present in a soil, if
enough tests are made. They are equally certain that it would be
folly to expect crops to find an element, iodine, for instance, in a
soil which showed no trace of that element on spectrographic
analysis. Yet crops continue to find iodine where its presence seems
doubtful. A later chapter will discuss some factors in supposed
element shortages.
As a rule, agronomists are disciples of Liebig. This German
chemist discovered no years ago the then astounding fact that plants
which grow out of the earth contain some of the very same chemical
elements that are shown by analysis to be part of the earth! Since
Liebig's announcement, scientists, in the true American tradition,
have loaded their thinking with mathematical applications and have
taken their figures too seriously. I, too, believe in mathematics, but
am sure that Nature keeps no books on the draining away of
minerals by crops and animals. In my little book of facts I find that
millions of acres of land outside the United States have been
furnishing a full quota of nourishment (including phosphorus) to
crops annually for more centuries than most agronomists have lived
years—and are still delivering crop yields we should be proud to
grow.
Nine-tenths of the people on this earth are unable to farm in
the American way. With rare exceptions, they lack supplies of
phosphates such as exist here; they lack transportation facilities,
even if they had the necessary mineral deposits. In fact, most of the
world's peoples have had to get along ever since Adam's time
without adding anything to their soils that could not be picked up
near at hand. Obviously, if such a system were not effective in
growing ample food crops for untold centuries from the same land,
the world outside this continent would have been depopulated long
before Columbus made his famous discovery.
The United States is almost the newest country in the world in
point of civilized development. It had in the beginning of its
settlement soils that were thought to be inexhaustible. Now, after
only from one to three centuries, its soils are literally on the way out
to sea, because of our mismanagement of them; and we (turn away,
please, while I laugh) talk about American plans for feeding the Far
East with straight faces. Such a situation does not seem to justify the
extravagant praise we heap on the alleged 'scientific know-how' of
American agriculture. What we do know how to do, obviously, is to
ruin unimaginably fine soil in the shortest time taken by any country
in the world. We are in the process of drawing the booby prize for
that outstanding feat in the form of inability to move freely in world
markets.
Commerce, not science, has been at the helm in charting the
course of agriculture in America. True, we have more science
available than all the other countries of the world combined; but we
have ignored all scientific points that did not play directly into the
hands of commercial development. There is plenty of proof if you
doubt this. Such proof has been involved in the agriculture of the
rest of the world, or the last three paragraphs could not have been
written.
Commercial diplomacy brought about the exchange of our
phosphates for Germany's potash—this trade beginning shortly after
Liebig's discoveries had seeped into the thinking of eager business
men. This was one of the first cases and possibly the most
significant one, in which commerce took its cue from science in the
field of agriculture. But throughout the intervening period
practically every new discovery has had to have commercial
backing before it became useful to farmers. For instance, throughout
the world nitrogen from the air is trapped in the soil by Azotobacter
and other nitrogen-gathering, free-living organisms. Nothing else
could account for sufficient nitrogen for the high production per
acre of most foreign countries. Yet, when in 1901 Beijerinck
discovered the role played by Azotobacter, nothing came of it,
possibly because no commercial group came forward with plans for
making this information available to farmers (at a price). The
activities of other organisms which live in 'huts,' called nodules, on
the roots of leguminous plants, have become a traditional aid in
obtaining a nitrogen supply, possibly because somebody developed
means of supplying cultures of these organisms to farmers (again at
a price).
These types of living things that trap atmospheric nitrogen
have long been recognized by science. And my assumption that
Azotobacter can be a dependable source of enough nitrogen for full
crop production is not without scientific foundation. Note this
quotation from Soils and Men, the 1938 Yearbook of the United
States Department of Agriculture, page 965: 'Some nitrogen-fixing
bacteria live in symbiotic relationship with plants (usually legumes,
such as clover and alfalfa), collect nitrogen from the air, and fix it in
a form that can be used by higher plants. Non-symbiotic nitrogen-
fixing bacteria fix a still larger amount of atmospheric nitrogen in
the soil.' The 'non-symbiotic' forms are those that live independently
in the soil and include Azotobacter. Thus it should not seem absurd
for me to depend upon these organisms for the nitrogen my crops
need, for the men who wrote the statement just quoted are scientists
of the highest order.
What is happening here should in time benefit every person in
America and many people in other parts of the world. It should be
clear that when farmers no longer need to include the present cost of
fertilizers, lime, inoculating bacteria, chemicals for sprays and
dusts, or of the machinery for applying all these things, or the cost
of the labour their application requires—when these costs no longer
need be charged against the cost of your food, you should benefit
because of cheaper food. It is of public interest, therefore, that you
who read this account should make it known to officials who are
charged with teaching farmers how to farm in your part of the world
that you are not going to rest until the pertinent information is being
given out to all farmers and gardeners. Tell the heads of your own
relevant bodies; for those who live in America it means your
agricultural college dean, your experiment station head, your
newspaper editor, and your chamber of commerce secretary. Get
these people excited about lowering the cost of the food supply
through the adoption of farming practices that will enable the land
to grow the very finest of food without the present tax of costs of
unneeded chemicals. Your help is a 'must' if such a programme is
ever to be adopted. Commercial interests, even trusting farmers
themselves, will fight such a movement, most of them in all
sincerity because they do not know that these costs can be
eliminated without loss to anybody except those who now profit
needlessly at the expense of all.
Your food will not only be cheaper, it will be better. But that
is a story that will have to wait for another chapter.
 CHAPTER SIX

'Missing' Minerals

I T was a showery morning in early July. I was looking if there

were any signs that the heavy rain of the previous night had
done much damage. Having subsoiled the land the previous
autumn, I did not expect to find signs of runoff water, but wanted to
be sure it had all run into the surface instead of running off. Water is
precious to anybody who cultivates a garden, and all the rain ought
to soak into the soil instead of running to the lowest spot and lying
there until it evaporates. This heavy rain, apparently, had all soaked
in. There was comfort in that discovery.
I had no more than finished this errand when I heard the
familiar chugging of Zeb Turner's ancient roadster. He was on his
way to town, since his land, like mine, was too wet to work.
Evidently, something was on his mind, for he headed into my drive
and let the engine die. 'Are you too busy to argue?' was his greeting.
'No,' I threw back at him. 'My land is as wet as yours, so it is a
good time to talk if you're in the mood.'
'I sure am,' he replied. 'One day last week I was in town to a
meeting where they were talking about something I never heard
about before—"trace elements" and "minor elements" that they
thought might be lacking in some of our ground. Do you know
anything about those things?'
'I certainly don't know much about such things,' I told him,
'and the men you heard talking don't profess to know a lot more than
the rest of us, either.'
'Yes,' he agreed, 'that was the funny part about that meeting.
Generally these fellows who come to talk at farmers' meetings talk
like they know their subject, but these men told us right out that
they weren't sure about a lot of the suspicions they have about these
things.'
'Then you won't expect me to say anything very important on
that subject, since the experts aren't too sure of themselves,' I
ventured.
But Zeb had a question. 'What's a spectrograph?' he asked, just
that bluntly. He had me there. I have not seen a spectroscope myself
since I was a student, but I know the principle on which
spectrographic analyses are made.
After explaining my own ignorance of the apparatus used, I
said, 'You see that shower in the northwest, with the sun shining
enough to show a rainbow, don't you?' He saw it, and we watched it
a little to see whether it was headed our way.
'Yes, I see that,' he said, 'but why don't you tell me something
about this spectrograph thing?' Zeb isn't exactly patient. His
ignorance on a subject seems to hurt him when he feels he can learn
something about it.
'I called your attention to the shower because the rainbow you
see helps to explain the principle of the spectrograph,' I said. 'The
reason you see the rainbow is because millions of raindrops are
doing what scientists used to call "splitting the light" into its several
colours. Light, they tell us, is a blend of colours, none of which we
see unless a raindrop, or a triangular block of optical glass, or some
other thing serves literally to spread a ray of light until its colours
show. In this spreading process, the different parts of the light ray
are bent to different angles. Those that are bent least show the
colour we know as red, those that are bent most show as violet—
with a complete spectrum of colour lying between.' Having only the
raindrops to illustrate the idea, I felt this was pretty thin teaching,
but Zeb himself came to my rescue.
'I'll bet the diamond you see flashing on a woman's finger
when she wants you to know she's engaged is splitting light, too,' he
offered. So, with this evidence that he had the basic idea, I didn't try
for a better illustration.
But we had not yet got down to cases about how the splitting
of light into its colours could be used to recognize chemical
elements, and though Zeb had not even been to high school, he
knew as well as I that we were just at the beginning of the
discussion. 'I don't see how this light-splitting business gets mixed
up with these plant-food elements they were talking about,' he
admitted frankly.
'Well, Zeb,' I admitted also, 'though Isaac Newton discovered
long ago that light could be split into a band of colours, I'm ashamed
to have to tell you that I don't know much more than you do about
the details of the colour band when it's used to detect metals. I do
know this: if iron is dissolved in water and a drop of the solution is
held in the flame from a gas burner, a definite line crossing the
colour band—always at the same place—is made by the iron.
Besides the line made by the iron, there is one made by the platinum
loop used to hold the drop of water, as well as another made by any
other metal that happens to be present as an impurity or otherwise.
It is a very complex matter for fellows like us, as you can see, but
the men who make a lifetime study of such things can use the
spectrum as handily as you use a foot rule. They can tell you just
what elements are present in the sun and the stars.'
'You don't say!' said Zeb, in frank astonishment. And he was
no more amazed than I had been on the day our chemistry professor
had us look into a spectroscope while he vaporized several metals in
the flame. To see the identical line take the identical place each time
the same element was present showed how completely obedient
these substances are to laws about which most of us know nothing.
After Zeb had had time to adjust himself to this idea, he put
forward this question: 'Do you know how many tons of soil a
plough moves in ploughing an acre of land seven inches deep?' I
could answer that question all right, but seeing that Zeb believed he
had me cornered, I thought it would be a shame to spoil his little
joke; so I pretended to be struggling to recall the amount and let him
come out with the answer. 'A thousand tons,' he said. 'No wonder it
takes a team so long to plough an acre,' he added.
'Yes,' I agreed, 'whether a farmer has a team or tractor, the job
of ploughing his land requires more power than any other job on the
farm. Or used to,' I amended, after considering some of the power
jobs that have developed since men learned to mount scrapers on
tractors and call them bulldozers. But we were off the subject, as I
reminded Zeb, and we turned to the missing-element discussion
again.
 'A thousand tons of soil is a lot of earth for anybody to find
out what's in it by that spectrograph,' he said. I had to agree with
that.
'It's two million pounds,' I translated, 'and that's still a lot of
earth.'
Zeb wanted to know, 'Just how is the tester going to know he
will be able to find everything the two million pounds of soil
contain, when he takes only a pound or so of it to the laboratory,
then measures out a spoonful or two for his tests?'
'I don't know what tougher question you could ask, Zeb,' I
replied. 'It has puzzled me, too, but we'll have to allow the men in
the laboratories to decide from their own experience when they have
taken a sample that will represent fairly the entire acre's content.
Nothing in this world is perfect, we know. The laboratory technician
would be the last to claim perfection for his work. But he makes
many preliminary tests to ascertain their reliability before he ever
tries to make a real analysis. So, when a spectrographic test, perhaps
repeated several times for extra reliability, shows none of a given
element present, we may be reasonably sure that the upper seven
inches of the soil tested really has little or none of that element. In
any event, the spectrographic test is the most searching one we
have, so far as I know.'
'You've had tests made of your land, of course?' Zeb asked
innocently, not knowing he had me trapped.
'No,' I was forced to reply, 'I have not had any kind of tests
made of the soil here.' That admission was almost too much for my
neighbour. He had been listening to my explanation of these tests in
all confidence that I would have had them made as a matter of
course.
'Why haven't you had tests made?' he demanded. 'You don't
know a thing about what may be lacking in this land of yours. There
may be serious shortages of minerals, according to what those
fellows said, and you wouldn't know anything about them unless
tests were made.'
To cool him off, I replied that I did not believe it was quite
that serious, and, of course, he wanted to know why I could think
so. 'Well,' I said, 'it is not certain that even if tests fail to show the
presence of a given mineral in the soil, plants growing there will fail
to get all they need of that mineral. Just to show you that this can be
true, here is the opinion of one of the country's leading
spectrographists on that subject.' Then I read the following passage
from a letter I had received not long before and still had in my
pocket:

About the accumulation of an element in the plant which was

not shown to be present in the soil (that question) can be answered
in the affirmative. The explanation is that a plant can absorb and
accumulate elements from a soil where the concentration is so low
that a test will not show them to be present.

'That leaves a lot of leeway, as you can see,' I added. 'It means
that at best the test is not absolute, as any expert would readily
admit and as this one does. Moreover, I think there may be another
possibility that has not been considered with enough care by
specialists in soils.'
 Sensing something worth his attention, Zeb was all ears for
this new angle. 'All tests, or practically all,' I explained, 'take into
account only the upper few inches, or feet, of a soil. It seems to me
that to think of the zone of soil into which a plant extends its roots
as that plant's whole source of mineral supply leaves out of
consideration one of the biggest sources from which all plants draw
nourishment.' By this time Zeb's eyes were fairly popping. He
evidently wondered what in the world I could be driving at; so I
gave him a chance to put his question.
'Now, what in blazes can you be thinking of?' he demanded.
'Well, Zeb,' I said, 'calm yourself. It isn't anything unheard of.
Everybody in the world knows about it if he stops to think. Without
this source of nourishment, not a sprig of grass could grow
anywhere in the world unless rain fell continuously. I'm not asking
for the copyright of this information. What I am thinking of is the
water that comes to the roots of plants from the depths of the earth,
many feet—often in dry times, hundreds of feet—below the deepest
extension of the roots of trees, shrubs, grass, or other plants. Such
water comes loaded with minerals of every kind. It could not be
otherwise. To think of this "capillary" water as not bringing plant
nutrient minerals with it would be the same as to suppose that
distilled water could move through the earth mass without
becoming saturated with those minerals.'
'Well,' Zeb said after quite a pause, 'why didn't I think of that?'
'I guess the reason you didn't think of it, Zeb,' I answered, 'is
that it hasn't been your job to figure such puzzles out. A more
important question is why every trained soil expert in the country is
not to-day telling farmers that they have this source of minerals
upon which their crops can draw and are drawing every minute. If
you'll tell me why, instead of calling the attention of farmers to this
mineral source, they are constantly telling them how much of this or
that fertilizer they must buy and spread on their land, I'll give you
A-plus for the day's work!'
'Now that you mention it, that does seem strange, doesn't it?
But the farmers who don't use fertilizer still have this underground
source you mention.' Zeb wasn't fooling himself or letting me fool
him. He was thinking his way through this situation. Continuing, he
thought aloud: 'Their crops aren't so hot. Fertilizer helps their crops
whenever they buy and use it. Are you sure there is so much mineral
in this subsoil juice you're talking about?' Zeb had come up to my
expectations. Now it was time for me to explain further why I think
water drawn up from deep sources could be used to better advantage
if only our authorities put their energies into devising means of
doing so. I am making use of it on my farm, and know of no reason
why every farmer would not benefit greatly by suitable methods of
handling his soil to this end.
'We should remember, Zeb,' I began, 'that this subsoil
situation got into the discussion because of the rare elements that
might be brought to plant roots from great depths, so that plants
might accumulate quantities of these, even when analyses showed
the upper inches of soil contained none of them. Obviously, if rare
elements were brought to the surface by such means, those that are
more plentiful would certainly take a ride at the same time. This is
all speculation as it applies to any given element, of course; but we
know that water cannot sink into the soil and be brought back to the
surface without dissolving something from the rock it touches on its
way down and back. So, while we cannot specify that plants get any
certain element in this way, we know that many elements are
continuously moving thus from deep in the soil to the surface or
near to the surface.'
'To me,' Zeb mused, 'it sounds as if people ought to be told
about this. While you've been playing it down just now,' he
continued, 'it seems to me that subsoil water may have been more
important in growing crops than I ever thought. Do you know
anybody else who has considered this angle?' he concluded.
'I can't recall,' I replied, 'that any scientist in the United States
has mentioned this source of water with any suggestion that it could
help our crops grow. I did read one book, though, that made much
of this point. It is by an Englishman, Norman Carew, a trained
agriculturist who has spent his working life in the Fiji Islands as a
superintendent of a sugar-growing concern. Mr. Carew gave his
book the tongue-in-cheek title Ploughman's Wisdom, asserting that
it proved Ploughman's Folly incorrect. However, Mr. Carew
mentions only disc ploughs, whereas my book had no quarrel with
any kind of plough except the mould-board plough. Of course, he
could not prove it good practice to use the mould-board plough
unless he used that particular plough. So, to that extent, Mr. Carew's
book is deceptive. But he sets up some theories that are entirely new
to the usual thinking of experts in this country; and at least one of
these theories deserves serious consideration by our agronomists, it
seems to me. He insists that in any soil where considerable decay is
going on, the soil water contains every mineral element, including
nitrogen, that crop plants require. I must say that my thinking in this
field had not progressed so far as that, but as I had almost reached
that conclusion, I was in no mood to deny such a claim.'
'I'm surprised,' said Zeb, 'that you'd listen to a man who so
misrepresented your ideas.' He was indignant about what seemed to
him an unfair attack. So I explained my position.
'The public both here and abroad has been so generous to me
in its reception of Ploughman's Folly' I told him, 'that it would be
unbecoming for me to be other than generous towards anyone who
pays my work such a compliment as to mention it many times in his
book. Even when he condemns my ideas, his discussion of them is
good advertising. So many thousands of copies of Ploughman's
Folly have been sold throughout the world that I can only resolve
not to let a public down that has so richly expressed its interest. You
may not know it, but this farm I am working was actually paid for
outright by money from the sales of that little book in this country.'
Zeb was duly impressed. 'I suppose, then,' he volunteered,
'you are working out on your farm the ideas you put into your book.'
'I certainly could not in honesty do otherwise, Zeb,' I said. 'It
would be heartlessly disillusioning to the visitors who turn up here
every few days to find that, after all I have written against the
conventional ways of handling the land, I was using the very
methods I have condemned.'
'That's all right, Ed,' Zeb replied, 'but most people in this
country know that it pays to use commercial fertilizers. How do you
justify your methods to these people when they come to see you?' I
was glad to have a chance to discuss that question, even though we
were far from the subject we had started on. Many others have
wondered the same thing.
'Well,' I began, 'first of all, I try to explain to visitors that they
would be foolish to do exactly what I am doing. I started with soil
that could not be expected to produce much unless some sort of
fertilizer was used on it. Yet, without using anything except the
mixed-in debris, I doggedly stuck it out for four years of poor crops
before any marked change could be seen. In the fifth year the
tomato crop produced about twenty-one tons per acre (still without
anything having been applied at any time since the start five years
earlier). That, of course, was like magic, after the indifferent results
we had experienced the previous four seasons. My sole reason for
sticking it out in this fashion was to demonstrate that badly
managed soils can, if properly handled, recover their former
productiveness independent of outside aid of any kind. Naturally, I
have forfeited the income I might have had if I had used artificial
manures and lime from the start. But such practice would have
made it impossible to prove anything about the ability of the soil to
regenerate itself alone. I hope that my new book describing this
work will sell well enough to make up for the losses. I tell visitors
to follow closely the advice of experts—their advisers; in the United
States the county agent, local teachers of high school agriculture,
and others—as to fertilizers (except that they should use nitrogen
sparingly if at all), but not to use the mould-board plough at any
time unless a deep turf makes this necessary the first year.
Ploughing up such a turf is not necessarily harmful when the plough
does not run deeper than the depth of black soil.'
'By thus taking advantage of the values to be had from
fertilizers and lime,' I concluded, 'people just starting to farm or
make a garden by these methods will avoid the losses I have had to
suffer and should be reasonably successful from the start. Most
people of this kind are concerned about growing food and other
crops and are not trying to prove anything.'
That this satisfied Zeb was evident from his comment: 'That
sounds like sense.' At this point he had to leave in order to get to
town and back in time for the chores.
To return to those nutrient elements that elude the farmer's
best efforts, I believe it may be said in all fairness that some of the
trouble is caused by practices recommended to the farmers by
experts. This is the only conclusion I can reach from statements
made in an article entitled 'Soils, Crops, Minerals, Animals' that is
included in Grass, the 1948 year-book of the United States
Department of Agriculture, pages 81-86. The following quotations
from that article, each under the name of the element involved, may
help to explain my attitude. The italics in these excerpts are mine:

IODINE
The association of goitre and iodine deficiency with the area
bordering on the Great Lakes and extending westward to
the Rocky Mountains has become widely accepted. In that
region considerable variation exists, however. Sandy soils
are usually much poorer in iodine than clay soils. In
general, the iodine in acid soils appears to be more readily
available to plants than the iodine in alkaline soils. Several
investigators have shown that the iodine content of plants
 can be increased by adding iodine to the soil and as a
general rule soils rich in humus are rich in iodine also.
Greater amounts of iodine are absorbed by plants when
accompanied by the application of manure. . . .

COPPER
Low copper content of plants is usually due to copper
deficiency in the soil. There is some evidence that the
copper in pastures during seasons of luxuriant growth is
reduced. The heavy application of copper sulphate to high-
lime soils has failed to increase the copper content of
pasture; plants, therefore, cannot take up copper efficiently
from alkaline soils.'

MANGANESE
At times the manganese content of pasture grasses and hay
crops may fall below optimum standards. There is no
correlation, though, between the manganese in soils and in
the plants grown on them. The element may not be present
in an available form, notably in alkaline soils. . . .

MOLYBDENUM
The molybdenum content of herbage depends on the
molybdenum in the soil and whether the soil is acid or
alkaline. The more alkaline the soil, the greater the amount of
this element that is taken up by plants. Certain plant species
seem to take up more molybdenum than others.
Molybdenum poisoning has recently been reported
among cattle in the United States. . . .
I interpret the above quotations as admission that in at least
some cases the liming of land has done harm by making unavailable
some elements that our crops need. The writers intended, without
putting it into words, to leave that impression, I think. If this is true,
the time should be ripe right now for some practices of reform
which might take the line I am following.
It is my opinion that our land needed lime in 1945 when we
started working it. No lime has been applied, yet my guess is that
tests now would show that lime is no longer needed. All this is
merely guesswork, of course, since no tests have been made. And
no scientific man would consider it possible that land in need of
lime would be able to correct that condition without having an
application of lime. Therefore, it seems desirable to review the
process by which lime might be accumulated in the upper layers of
soil by natural forces.
Nearly all land is underlaid at some deep level by lime-
bearing rock, in many cases by great strata of limestone. Wherever
this is true, the water that courses around and through this rock and
later is moved upward to the soil surface must carry with it some of
this lime in solution. If there is organic matter in the surface of the
soil, this lime-charged water can be absorbed and held. If the
amount of organic matter is great enough, then enough lime to
neutralize the acidity of the soil can be held in this way. In some
such way, then, the acid soil may, under proper management, cease
to be acid even though no lime application is made.
 Such an abundance of organic matter in the soil might make it
possible again for iodine from native sources within the soil to
become available for our crops. Copper and manganese, too, might
become available because of the organic acids released by decay of
the organic matter. And, in such an environment, molybdenum,
which is released only in an alkaline soil, would continue to be
locked up because of the more acid condition brought about by
these organic acids. If so, there should be no more molybdenum
poisoning of our cattle.
These conclusions may not be valid, but the text of Grass
seems to me to justify them. I wonder if we may expect some
belated official recognition of the validity of abundance of organic
matter mixed right into the soil surface instead of sandwiched
between the inert subsoil and the equally inert top layers of soil?
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Too Scotch to Plough

*

T
oo Scotch to plough—that's me, according to neighbour
Rexkin,' was the gleeful greeting Zeb Turner gave me as I
stopped my car in his drive, opposite the field where he was
working over some land to be seeded to wheat. I had come to buy
some of his surplus cabbage plants, planning to transplant them in
time for the rain that was expected in the afternoon—the first in
three weeks. 'Rexkin started ploughing yesterday,' Zeb continued,
'and when he saw me working here, he wanted to know when I
would start ploughing for wheat. "Never," I told him. "You're just
too stingy to buy enough gasoline," he taunted—"too Scotch," he
amended. I just laughed at him. He's always blowing off at the
mouth.'
This breezy start was a bad beginning for a busy day for me. I
had expected to rush right back to the farm to get things going,
leaving the transplanting to be done later in the day when the sun
was not so hot, but this talk of Zeb's, I knew, was but the
introduction to as long a discussion as I would take time for. He
doesn't plough his land, but he has not learned all the reasons I have
for refusing to plough, and he wanted to be prepared to argue the
matter with Rexkin, his critical neighbour. 'You never plough, Ed,'
he concluded. 'Why don't you?'
'Maybe it is because I am too Scotch,' I replied, seeking for
time to collect my thoughts, 'but it isn't because I refuse to buy
enough gas.' Zeb grinned as he waited for further comment. 'To me,'
I resumed, 'mould-board ploughing is just about the shortest cut
possible to land poverty. You've heard the old saying about the
improvident wife: "She can throw out at the back door more than
her husband can bring in at the front." To me that describes
perfectly what the mould-board plough does to the American
farmer.' And I might have added 'to the English farmer too.' 'It
wastes in leachings from the ploughsole more plant nutrients than
its owner can buy in fertilizers—except when he is helped along by
guaranteed prices for his crops or by other dodges.'
'You said "leachings," if I got it, Ed,' Zeb said. 'Just what do
you mean?'
'You remember, Zeb,' I began, 'the ash hopper on the farm
where you grew up?' He nodded reminiscently. 'Well, that hopper
let the rain run through the wood ashes dumped into it. Your mother
caught the leachings, as the water was called which seeped through
the ashes saturated with the potash from those ashes. By using this
water and the fat left when killing pigs, she made all or most of the
soap your family used. When farmers bury at the plough-sole the
rye or corn stalks, or clover turf, or whatever rubbish there is on the
ground, they create a perfect condition for the soluble stuff from
that rubbish to be leached out. What is lacking for good farming is
some way to catch those leachings and save them for use in growing
the next crop. I'm too Scotch, Zeb, to allow that good substance to
be leached away from the hungry roots of the next crop that I try to
grow.'
 'That sounds reasonable enough, Ed,' Zeb said as he angled for
the right words to pose another question. 'What makes you think
those leachings will help in growing the next crop? It takes nitrogen
and phosphorus, as well as potash, they tell me at the county agent's
office. Do leachings have all those things, too?'
'They certainly do. They contain not only the nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potash you mentioned. In addition, they include
every other mineral element that was used as food material by the
plants that were ploughed in.'
'You look serious enough to be telling the truth, Ed,' Zeb
bantered. 'Are you sure this isn't just an idea of yours? It looks as
though those people in the county agent's office would have
mentioned these things if what you say is true; but they didn't say
anything about them. Is there any proof that real plant food leaches
away from land after it has been ploughed?'
'Indeed, there is, Zeb,' I replied, glad to have that particular
question. 'For many years our experiment stations carried out what
they called lysimeter tests. These tests show how much mineral is
dissolved in the water that flows away from the land and out into
the streams. And I can tell you for sure that the losses each year are
enough to justify anybody's being too Scotch to plough. The figures
show that more plant-food minerals are lost by leaching than are
harvested in crops or grazed off by animals—that is, farmers lose
more minerals by leaching than they use. I should explain what the
lysimeter is, and the best way to do that is to quote Webster's
definition: "A device for measuring the percolation of water through
soils and determining the soluble constituents removed in the
drainage." '
'You can tell Mr. Webster for me,' Zeb grinned, 'that his
definition uses too many highbrow words.' I ignored the comment,
as Zeb obviously intended I should; his next question demanded my
reasons for thinking these same minerals would not be wasted after
discing just as much as after ploughing.
'There are a number of reasons,' I told him. 'First of all, there
is five times as much soil lying above a ten-inch ploughsole as
above a point only two inches below the surface. This means about
five times as much pressure constantly weighing down on whatever
has been ploughed in. Gradually this pressure flattens stems, thus
decreasing their volume so that they can't hold as much water. This
flattening effect is far less in the upper layers, so that each bit of
corn stalk, straw, weed stem, leaf, or other debris can hold just that
much more water. And, don't forget, the catching and holding of
water is one way of preventing the loss of dissolved minerals.
Wherever water is, it is continuously dissolving minerals from
whatever it touches until it has all it can carry. It must then be held
within the root zone of the soil if the roots of weeds, crop plants, or
green-manure crops are to benefit from these dissolved minerals—
thus building up year by year greater mineral stores within the soil.
'Just the opposite happens when soil has been ploughed,' I
continued. 'In ploughed land practically every vestige of organic
matter lies at the depth of the ploughsole. This depth is much too far
for the first roots of most farm crops to reach. During the period
before crop roots can reach the ploughsole, water from rains may
course down through the soil and carry away these minerals as
leachings. In that case, of course, they are lost so far as helping the
crops is concerned. We may then console ourselves that they will be
used downstream for growing water plants to feed the fish, thus
being of some use. Or, if they finally reach the sea, they may serve
the same purpose in feeding shrimp or codfish.'
'But that won't help you and me as farmers,' Zeb remarked.
'How right you are,' I agreed wholeheartedly. 'That is the
saddest feature of our ridiculously serious national soil problem. I'm
not going to farm for the benefit of Newfoundland fishermen if I
know it. My neighbours may do that, and welcome, but I'll stick to
methods that seem to me most economical of the minerals that my
crops need. Yet, honestly, Zeb, I think there are even more
important advantages to be gained by discing than merely the
increased holding of water in the organic debris that lies at higher
levels in the soil—important as that is.
'Think, for instance, of the advantage of having all the
products of decay released exactly where crop roots will be
searching for them—in the upper inches of the soil, instead of eight
or ten inches below the surface. Then the corrosive effects of the
organic acids released by this decay will etch away additional plant
nutrient minerals from the rock dust of which the soil is made up.
These, too, will be exactly where they are being sought—not several
inches too deep to be recovered before being washed out by water
trickling down through the soil.
'And, since in unploughed land there is no organic layer
several inches deep in the soil to stop the rise of water to the root
zone, all water rising naturally from a depth will continue until it is
absorbed by organic fragments in or near the soil surface. Minerals
carried by this water will also be available to crop roots.
'Here, then, are three extra ways in which crops may benefit
from methods which leave all the organic matter mixed into the
surface instead of being ploughed in to a depth of eight or ten
inches. Of course, these are deductions from what we know about
water movements in the soil. No experiment-station proof that they
are correct—or incorrect—exists so far as I know. I do know that
my tomato plants this season act as if they were the beneficiaries of
all these sources of plant food—not just one of them.'
'Those tomato plants of yours are the best I have ever seen,
Ed,' Zeb volunteered. 'They grow as if their roots were finding rich
supplies of food wherever they range. They may well be enjoying
minerals from all the various sources you have just mentioned.
What I'd like to know is why, if discing is that much better than
ploughing, more people haven't found out about its advantages.'
'Some important people have found out, Zeb,' I told him.
'Louis Bromfield told me a few weeks ago that he had not had his
mould-board ploughs out of the sheds all summer. He expects to sell
off several thousand dollars' worth of equipment he has been using
for growing corn and other grains. His farms are rapidly being put
down to grasses and legumes, which can be managed largely with
mowing machines and balers. The rest of the machinery may as well
be sold. At least, that is the impression I got of Mr. Bromfield's
plans. His farming these last ten years has been the most significant
example I know of in the whole country where practical farmers can
see in action on full-scale the best-known methods of handling the
land. Louis has refused to go stale on any one idea. If an idea proves
advantageous, he keeps it working. If it shows weaknesses as part of
his whole scheme, he discards it. Labour costs have affected his
work as they have that of every farmer. Like many others, he has
seen the advantages of having the harvesting done by the cattle—
while a good proportion of the manure is spread at the same time.
These are costless operations and suit the cow's preferences, too. So,
why not?
'Occasionally in any grass system the time may come when
turf will have to be worked over and reseeded. For such tillage
Louis plans to use the Graham-Hoeme plough, which cannot bury
any great portion of the turf. With it, he will kill off the weeds and
wild grasses and get the surface back into condition to germinate his
meadow seeding, all with a minimum of tractor power. His plans
represent a simplified version of the elaborate routines of most mid-
western farms. Four-legged help will do much work that is done by
hard-to-get machine operators on most conventional farms.
'At first, Zeb,' I continued, 'Louis Bromfield used the mould-
board plough; but before many years had passed he began to
substitute surface-working implements wherever this could be done.
This flexibility of his plans while feeling his way from plough to
ploughless methods has made his farm the best place I know of in
the whole of the United States for a farmer to study the angles that
must be considered in making such a change. The size of his
holding at Malabar makes his example a practical one for big-scale
farmers from any part of America. My work, by contrast, is on a
miniature scale and highly theoretical in nature.
'You can see,' I added, 'that my refusal to use chemical "aids"
of any kind would not be practical for people whose land is the
usual badly-worn kind. It made sense for me only because I
expected to make up for the early production losses by reporting the
final results in a book or two. But, while I am not recommending
total abstinence from chemicals to other farmers, it will be too bad
if profit-wise farmers fail to note that this seven-year report shows
that land, if not ploughed, can cure its own many shortcomings.
That important point should not escape the critics who will rant
about my failure to use any of the generally recommended aids.
'Also, Zeb,' I said, 'Mr. Bromfield has proved that any
determined farmer can cut out the use of the mould-board plough,
except where turf must be broken. And that if farmers do this, the
time will come when it will be easy to drop the plough altogether, as
Louis has done. Farmers who wish to carry out such plans would do
well to reread his Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm, and then
follow on with a careful reading of Out of the Earth. The thread of
evolution in Bromfield's thinking and practices will be evident as a
result of such reading.'
Zeb had listened to this comment about Mr. Bromfield's work
with evident interest, because he, too, had wondered just how
practical the work being done at Malabar Farm is. On that point I
have noted the surprise shown by practical farmers who have visited
Malabar with the thought that it was just a rich man's plaything.
Their expressed conclusion usually was that much of the work being
done there might well be adapted to most farms.
We had started by talking about ploughing as a farm practice,
but Zeb had noticed that much time had been spent discussing
minerals. This puzzled him, and he was ready to fire another
question at me. 'You keep talking about minerals as if there were
plenty for our crops, Ed,' he began. 'I wonder why you think so
when the folks in the county agent's office seem to doubt it. How
can you think as you do?'
'I wish all your questions were as easy as that one, Zeb,' I
replied. 'The usual attitude about shortages of this or that mineral
amuses me, really. You know that if we disregard the relatively
insignificant quantity of organic matter that exists only at or near
the surface of the earth, the mass of this planet is wholly mineral. If
you could pass through the centre of the earth and emerge
somewhere near Chungking, after you had passed the zone a few
thousand feet below your starting point—where the deepest deposits
of coal or oil lie—you would find nothing but rock until you
reached geologic forms of organic matter as you neared the surface
of China. Indeed, you would find no water below the maximum
depth to which it has been able to penetrate the earth minerals—a
few miles, perhaps. So all talk of mineral shortages impresses me as
almost deliberate unwillingness to consider the realities of the
situation.'
'I know,' Zeb countered, 'that what you say about the make-up
of the great mass of the earth must be true; but what assurance have
you that in all these minerals there is enough of those which plants
need for their growth? Isn't it possible that the amounts of
phosphates and potash may actually be less than our crops need?'
Zeb is persistent. Until a matter has been cleared up
completely, he cannot rest. So I had to think quickly in order to
explain, if I could, the basis for my disagreement with what he had
been taught.
'All the mineral that could easily be dissolved by water has
probably been long since dissolved,' I began. 'As I think of that
earliest effect of water on the powdered rock that eventually became
our soil, it seems reasonable to me to suspect that the very earliest
chemical compound to be dissolved and washed out into the streams
and eventually to the sea was ordinary table salt—sodium chloride,
the chemists call it. If it had been as slowly soluble as lime, or most
of the other plant-food minerals, it isn't likely that we should need
salt cellars on our dinner tables. A more slowly soluble sodium
chloride would probably have been fabricated into plants just as
lime, phosphate, potash, nitrogen, and the like are. Indeed, I am
expecting that, as the years pass, my potatoes, onions, tomatoes,
lettuce, celery, and many other crops will contain so much salt that
none will need to be added either in cooking or at the table.' Zeb
was listening eagerly and appeared to have no questions brewing at
the moment, so I continued.
'The most insoluble of minerals will dissolve to some extent in
water,' I said. 'The chemists sometimes talk about minerals being
found in water in amounts too small to measure—a trace, say. Even
amounts that can be measured may be only a few parts per million.
You can imagine the meaning of one part per million by dissolving
a single pound of some mineral in ten fifty-ton railway tanks filled
with water. That tedious operation would yield a solution of one
part per million of that mineral. That would be pretty thin
"pickings" for a corn crop which needs liberal quantities of minerals
if it is to grow well. Yet a number of the needed plant-nutrient
minerals might well be as scanty as that in some of our badly
managed soils. The usual soil test records roughly the amount of
these minerals the crop can be expected to use,' I concluded. I could
see that Zeb was ready to speak.
'Are you going to start arguing for fertilizers now, Ed,' he
challenged, 'after talking so much against their use?' The question
was not so complicated as I had feared.
I assured him I had no intention of boosting fertilizer use, and
continued, 'Since the soil tests made to-day deal solely with this
immeasurably small fraction of the amount of mineral actually held
in the soil, it is easy for both tester and farmer to forget that the test
does not register all the phosphorus, or potash, or other plant-
nutrient minerals the soil contains. Much explanation would be
required to resolve this confusion. Yet it must be made clear that
information about total quantities of these minerals in a soil would
have no value whatever to a farmer. The tests in use are practical,
though badly misunderstood; as a result, it is natural that farmers
often hotly oppose ideas that conflict with their successful
experience in following up the results of these tests. To many of
them, I appear to be a dangerous character—advising against the
use of fertilizers and lime when they have learned how essential
they are for good crops during the current season.'
'Well, Ed,' Zeb unbent mentally, 'I guess I'm one of those
ignorant farmers. I don't see just what you propose to do about
growing good crops, if the best I can expect in my soil is such thin
soup as a few parts per million of minerals in the water they find
there. What are you going to do about it?'
'These minerals that are almost completely insoluble in pure
water,' I replied, 'are in many cases easily dissolved by water which
contains a small amount of acid. The acid phosphate or the
superphosphate you apply to your land is nothing more than
phosphate rock that has been finely ground and mixed with enough
acid to enable the soil water to dissolve it. Without the acid the soil
water would scarcely dissolve it at all. In farming my land, I've been
applying this principle, without buying anything. When organic
matter decays, it gives off as one decay product carbon dioxide.
This is a gas, but when it is released in a moist soil, it combines
with the moisture to form carbonic acid—one of the most active
acids for attacking minerals and releasing plant nutrients. What I try
to do is to keep increasing the amount of organic matter in the soil,
so that as much of this and other organic acids as possible will be
released into the soil. These acids will then attack the rock particles
they cling to and from them they will obtain plant-food minerals in
quantities proportional to the amount of such acids given off by
organic decay. You can see, then, that if I have 4 to 5 per cent of
decaying organic matter in my soil—instead of the usual 1 per cent
or less—four or five times as much mineral plant foods will be
released into the soil by the acids from all this decay. The necessary
effect would be registered in improvement in both the yield and the
mineral content of my crops. That is why I am not worried by talk
of mineral shortages, Zeb.' Less puzzlement was registered on Zeb's
face than at any time since the discussion began, but he still had one
question.
'That clears up a lot of points, Ed, I'll have to admit,' he
conceded. 'I wonder, though, why it couldn't all be done just as well
when a man ploughs as when he discs. You've talked about that, but
it still isn't clear to me.'
 'From the way men in professional agriculture have ignored
the concept of breaking land by discing instead of ploughing, I
imagine, Zeb, you have a lot of company in so thinking. In regular
farming practice it isn't usual for farmers to plough down anything
like as much organic matter as I want to have on the ground when I
disc. If a farmer regularly ploughed in rye from three to five feet
tall, he would soon learn that such ploughing simply could not be
tolerated. The complete layer of organic matter that would lie
between the subsoil and the topsoil would be a perfect barrier to
prevent deep water from rising above that organic layer. You may
doubt this. I think that even the scientists may doubt it. But in
accordance with physical law, the organic matter would steal water
from the overlying mass of mineral matter, and the mineral matter
could never reverse that process. In other words, if the soil above
the organic matter were wet, the organic layer would soon absorb
most of the water, and in this process it would be helped by gravity.
If, on the other hand, the subsoil, below the organic layer, were wet,
the organic layer would (unless already saturated) absorb water
from below until it became saturated.'
'The result of these processes,' I continued, 'would be to keep
the organic layer always at or near the saturation point, and any
excess water would always be found just below the organic layer in
the mineral soil. None—absolutely none—could be carried upward
from the organic layer. All water movement above that layer would
have to be towards it, because organic matter—as the scientists
say—has more affinity for water than a mineral mass has. This
inability of water to move upward from an organic layer explains
why the ploughing in of great quantities of organic matter is
necessarily almost a complete waste of its substance. The mixing in
of similar quantities of organic matter by discing or other methods
leaves no separating layer between topsoil and subsoil. And, since
there is no interfering layer to prevent upward movement of water,
the upper inches of a soil into which great quantities of organic
matter have been mixed will be well supplied with moisture for a
maximum period of time between rains. This water will be loaded
with the decay products of the organic matter mixed in and will,
therefore, produce healthy growth in the plants by which it is
absorbed.'
By this time Zeb himself was pretty well saturated with
information concerning the ways in which water is pulled about
beneath the soil by unseen forces. The most interesting thing about
all this, of course, is the fact that whether the water is taken down
through the soil and eventually flushed out into the creeks or is
pulled back up towards the surface where it is absorbed by roots of
plants, the water coursing through the soil is always loaded with
whatever minerals it has had to pick up. Nature is said to abhor a
vacuum; perhaps so, but certainly no more than she dislikes pure
water. Wherever water is, unless it be just emerging from the worm
of a still, it is always carrying something somewhere. It is the great
common carrier.
Knowing this about water, we cannot avoid knowing that
since the man who ploughs makes it impossible for soil water to
serve him by carrying its mineral load upward to a place where crop
roots can get it, he literally robs his soil of plant food in the form of
dissolved decay products, by forcing the water carrying these
products to travel away from instead of towards the root zone of his
soil.
'So,' I said to Zeb, 'if you want to know why I am too Scotch
to plough, you now have the story.' Needless to say, I got little work
done that forenoon.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

Why Not Irrigate?

*

P LANTS are nursed at the breast of Nature. Or, to use another

metaphor, we may think of plants as receiving a constant
transfusion of soil-blood—to prevent ailments rather than to
cure them. To make either of these figures of speech valid, however,
we must assume a healthy condition in the soil. Or we must accept a
lack of health, with consequent liability of plants grown on it to
disease and insect attack. Dangerous as analogies, drawn too far,
can be, I see nothing seriously wrong with these. As I think of such
things, they picture, almost visibly, just what happens between earth
and the kingdom of plants. In the subsurface darkness of the soil
much goes on that is not and cannot ever be visible to the human
eye. We can only imagine the diverse ways in which myriads of
individuals, from bacteria to toads in size and just as varied in their
inter-relationships with the environment, manage to live. All live
with concern solely for their individual needs, but they all donate,
unintentionally, some substances of indispensable value to the soil.
Neither humans nor other animals could exist healthily without
these factors.
Does that sound like a grandiose conception? It definitely is
not. And the critical factor is that 'soil-blood,' water. Without water
in suitable amount the relation between soil and plant becomes
strained. Leaves lose lustre, and they wilt, curl or otherwise show,
almost at once, any lack of enough water. Too much water, though,
may be just as bad for plants. If the water-table is too high, plants
cannot extend their roots into the deeper layers of earth, but must
confine their distribution to those upper inches of soil—the very
zone which is destined to become powdery dry in arid times. Thus it
is certain that in most seasons there will be times when the plant
cannot satisfy its 'thirst'—which is also its hunger, since all its food
from the soil is brought to its roots in water.
The fact that the supply of water in the root zone of the soil
varies between too much and too little provides one of the most
baffling problems the farmer has to face. How nice it would be, he
thinks, if the rains would always arrive on time and leave before
their welcome wore out. But in most places the rains just do not
behave that way. All too often the skies are lavish with water day
after day, even for weeks, at times when work needs to be done in
the fields. Then fair skies prevail until some crops are all but burned
up by lack of enough water to keep their leaves turgid. It follows
that the weather remains the dominant factor in the success or
failure of a farming venture.
The question of artificial irrigation, therefore, becomes
supremely important to people whose very existence may depend
upon rain that fails to arrive until the crops have given up the
struggle. And, strangely enough, many of these people live in areas
where plenty of rain falls within the year for all crop needs. In
recent years thousands of farmers and gardeners in the north-eastern
part of the United States have installed overhead irrigation systems
in order to avoid losing crops from drought after months of hard
work has been put into their development.
The reasons for irrigating are many and potent, apart from the
fact that manufacturers need markets for irrigation equipment!
Water supplies have become increasingly undependable as the soil
has become progressively more compact. Most of the rainfall runs
off many acres where formerly most of it ran in. The result is an
actual lack of water for growing the crops, despite an annual rainfall
of many times the minimum necessary to grow the crops. Waiting
for rain is not the fondest thing a farmer is of, to paraphrase a
popular fictional character of a few years ago. The rain may not
come after all, and it would be tragic to allow a crop to perish after
so much labour and other expense have gone into its production.
Such considerations are strongly on the side of the seller of
irrigation equipment.
Yet there are important reasons for refusing to resort to
artificial watering (if ways can be devised to that end), despite the
urgency of such tense circumstances.
To begin with, even the most economical irrigation system—
one in which the water is provided at low cost by public agencies
and used in surface furrows—is much more costly than the
production of crops by use of natural rainfall wherever this can be
made possible. Therefore, if better management of the soil can help
to make artificial watering unnecessary without costly decreases in
yield, this possibility should be thoroughly explored.
In his recent book, Tree Crops, Dr. J. Russell Smith offers
examples of practices that make tree production possible on land
which otherwise would lie useless under the torrid sun. The most
plausible of these consists simply in making surface furrows or
ditches to lead run-off water into holes dug in the places where trees
are to stand. The effect of such a system would be to increase
greatly the available water at the tree sites while denying water to
the intervening spaces. Dr. Smith's theory is that the vigorous
growth of trees so watered would, if the trees were suitably spaced,
result before many years in protecting by shade the dry areas
between the trees. Such protection would effectively prevent wind
erosion, he thinks, and combat most of the destructive forces which
eat away at unprotected soils. Appropriate species, he believes,
include those which produce human foods or animal feeding-stuffs
not now being produced in abundance. Dr. Smith's ideas deserve
careful thought, although no one can say offhand whether they offer
the best solution of some of our most serious food and farm
problems. They at least offer food for thought in that direction, and
such mental nourishment is all too rare.
Once an irrigation system has been established, the temptation
to use it more than is best for the crops seems likely to cause
trouble. The fact is that drought is not an unmixed evil. Farmers
have long known that when crops are establishing their root system,
moderate drought is better than abundant rain. Roots will be
extended more widely and more intensively into the soil if they
must search for water instead of finding it right at hand. Such
amplified root systems enable plants to use better the abundant
rainfall that may come later on. Contrariwise, plants that develop
their root systems under plentiful water conditions have no
incentive to expand those roots into every nook and cranny within
the root zone, hence they are limited when abundant rainfall comes
later and they cannot profit so well by it. It should be obvious, then,
that possession of an irrigation system might easily result in
underprivileged plants, by discouraging the self-help that is normal
with plants. Is this the same as saying that plants may easily be
corrupted by their enforced association with human beings? I
wonder.
Another advantage may exist for crops that are forced to
subsist on the natural supply of water, even though it may be
somewhat limited. Because this natural supply of water has been in
the soil for weeks or months, it may have acquired a richer load of
plant-nutrient minerals. On the other hand, water supplied by
irrigation (while necessarily supplying some minerals) may be
deficient in the very minerals that are lacking in the surface layers
of the soil. This would seem to be true especially of water collected
in ponds from surface run-off. Where such differences in richness
exist between native and artificial supplies of water, the crops may
easily be nutritionally deficient under irrigation when they might be
completely nutritious with natural supplies of water. In many cases,
of course, the tonnage of crops produced under conditions of
irrigation might easily be many times that produced naturally—but
if that end were accomplished at the expense of real food values,
surely nobody could be proud of the fact. How often that really
happens now in our intensely commercial production of human
foods in this country, one can only guess.
A key mineral in all nutrition is calcium—lime, as it is known
in its common forms. Tests of the surface inches of farm soils show
that in many instances they lack calcium. Yet deep under these same
soils in practically all cases lie almost unlimited sources of lime.
Consider, then, what may actually happen when such soils are
irrigated. The irrigator discovers through a soil test that lime is
needed and provides it in whatever quantity tests indicate is correct.
His crops will be well supplied with calcium and, presumably, will
be all they ought to be, even if the irrigation water comes from an
area that is deficient in available lime and in most of the other
elements his surface soil lacks. The fertilizers he applies may also
be of the nearly chemically pure variety, thus possibly being
without those elements that are lacking both in the soil and in the
irrigation water. Furthermore, and of diabolic importance, it may
happen that none of these missing minerals is of a kind that reveals
its absence by decreased yield or poor appearance of the crop. Crop
yields, then, can be heavy, and the product can closely imitate the
pictures in the seed catalogue (which may themselves be
photographs of deficiently-produced specimens), and still not
provide adequate nutrients. But the consumer, poor fellow, is
helpless. He cannot distinguish the deficient from the nourishing by
appearance; and he can neither afford the cost nor take the time to
await the biologic assays, by means of laboratory animals, that
would be necessary in many cases to determine the differences.
Allergies represent the most awkward and embarrassing of
deficiency conditions. They are also among the most mysterious
ailments that afflict mankind. No one professes to know just what
allergies are in all their aspects, and no one knows just how to cure
all of them. It is known that certain allergy symptoms result from
the use of or contact with foods or other substances. I think it is
possible that allergies may represent effects of food deficiencies,
either in the victim or in his inheritance of faulty endocrine glands
from near or remote ancestors who suffered from deficient foods.
Of course, my theory cannot be proved in the present stage of our
knowledge, but no reasonably well-informed scientist, on the other
hand, would declare it impossible. If it should be true, we should
have a clue to the means of overcoming allergies.
To get back to the subject at hand, let us consider what might
happen if a soil identical with that which produced deficient foods
were managed with due regard for all the known facts, but relying
on natural rainfall. The outcome might be crops just as good from
the standpoint of yield and appearance, and, I firmly believe, crops
that would meet every test for complete nutritive quality.
Few soils now being used in commercial food production in
America can be relied upon to grow profitable crops solely from
their own available plant-food resources. If this were not true, the
whole programme of liming and the use of artificials would be
unnecessary. Because it is true, scientists have evolved tests which
enable farmers to modify their soil so as to maintain a minimum
tonnage production of crops acceptable in appearance to the buying
public. So fully have the energies of scientists been occupied with
economic problems that they have had little time to consider
farming practices from the standpoint of the consumer's health.
We may assume fairly, I think, that before any depleted land
could be expected to produce profitable yields of fully nutritious
crops without lime, fertilizers, or irrigation, it would have to be
taken through a reconstruction process, from the subsoil up, such as
I have employed for my soil here in Ohio. Following rehabilitation,
we might expect, from such a soil, crops of unsurpassed quality and
yields that commercial producers would be pleased to get from their
heavily treated and irrigated land. In saying this, however, I am
making some assumptions that are yet to be proved. I take it for
granted that the food crops now being produced by my quarter-acre
longest under treatment are substantially complete in their nutritive
quality, though no tests have been made to prove or disprove this
assumption. If it could be assumed that the palate knows, as popular
advertising used to assert that 'the nose knows,' the point would be
proved; most of the vegetables I grow are so delicious that my
customers, as I have said previously, invariably testify to their
superior flavour. I suspect the scientists might insist, in the absence
of laboratory tests, that this may be an instance in which the
customer is not always right. My reply is that I would welcome any
efforts of the scientists to prove or disprove that fact.
To return to the discussion of how non-irrigation might be
expected to accomplish in crop nutritive quality what irrigation
could not, a few additional points may be considered.
The behaviour of my crops in 1945, when compared with that
of the same varieties in 1950, suggests that perhaps in 1945 the soil
was acid and that in 1950 it either was not acid or was less acid. In
this connection, a well-known scientist suggested to me that such a
change might be thought of as miraculous since no lime had been
supplied, adding that in these days we do not expect scientific
miracles. I reminded him that lime-bearing rock is a part of the
glacial till which covers the entire northern part of the United States
east of the Rocky Mountains. Furthermore, I pointed out, the
obviously greater content of organic matter now in this soil might
be expected to supply acids that would react on this limestone, with
the result that released calcium compounds might be sufficient in
quantity to neutralize or decrease considerably the acidity of the
soil. He readily acknowledged this possibility. It must be admitted,
however, that in the absence of laboratory tests we do not know
whether or not this is true. I should be more than willing to co-
operate at any time with anyone who cares to investigate what is
happening to the soil here on my farm or to the crops it produces.
Meanwhile, I am making no tests of any sort, because the evidence
seems conclusive, and I am content to believe that Nature, being in
charge, is so much better a farmer than I am that there is no need to
suspect trouble.
I have often been asked how I expected my crops to obtain
elements that might be absent from this soil. That is a fair question,
certainly, and has already been considered to some extent
previously in this book. However, it seems likely that in non-
irrigation farming these troublesome minor elements may be even
less of a problem than if the soil were being artificially watered.
Here is why I think so.
The farmer who irrigates almost always operates his land
without restoring to it its original subsurface community status. This
means that his land has less organic matter in the surface and,
therefore, grows plants whose roots—not being encouraged to
spread by the presence of intriguing bits of moisture-holding
organic matter—are largely dependent on the irrigation water and
do not extend either deeply or widely in the soil. Deep strata of the
soil, as a result, have slight influence on the crops, because the
abundance of irrigation water makes it unlikely that much moisture
from these deep layers will ever reach crop roots.
The farmer who does not irrigate, on the other hand, is
compelled to have his soil in the finest condition organically. Water
from deep in the soil is an important factor in the development of
his crops, especially between rains. And this water comes laden
with every kind of mineral this deeper zone of rock contains. It is
unlikely that his crops would be deficient in any needed element,
since they enjoy both this richer natural soil solution and the
benefits incident to abundance of organic matter in and near the
surface.
I realize how like dream stuff this sounds. If I had not had the
experience of eating what this soil produced in the first year, as well
as in each ensuing year, I, too, could not believe the very claims I
now make. They would seem too fantastic to merit consideration.
But after all that experience, these claims seem only what should be
expected. So far as I am concerned, the neighbours may irrigate to
their hearts' content, but I shall continue to depend upon natural
rainfall for all crops and shall expect richer, spicier flavours as a
result of this policy.
 CHAPTER NINE

No Fire under the Boiler

*

T HE use of the term soil conservation is for many people a

form of self-delusion. The idea of saving, or salvaging,
cannot be divorced from the word conserve. Yet nothing vital
about a productive soil can be preserved, saved, or even held in its
present condition. On the contrary, the soil spends itself in order to
produce crops; it could not possibly produce crops otherwise. Hence
the riddle involved in the term soil conservation.
Soil is not a tangible thing like timber, water, or coal—all of
which are included along with soil in the general class of resources.
In truth, soil really is scarcely a thing in the common sense of that
term. Soil really is a dynamic condition of the earth's surface; and
our real aim when we speak of soil conservation is to retain that
dynamic status if we have it, or to regain it if we have lost it. Most
of our soils, obviously, have lost it.
That dynamic condition results from 'things,' multitudes of
things, exactly as the power of steam results from the activities
under the boiler. We lost that dynamic soil condition by allowing its
causes to vanish, exactly as we lose the power of steam by allowing
the fire to go out. And undynamic is a good word to describe
practically any farm soil you can think of to-day.
Such land certainly is not soil in any proper sense. It is far
more like what existed before the plant kingdom took over. Science
is essential if profitable crops are to grow from such inert material.
We need desperately land as spontaneous as was the soil in the
Garden of Eden. To get it, we must stop thwarting Nature's efforts
and begin to co-operate with her.
I had reached this place in writing this chapter when Zeb
Turner turned up at my home—almost the first time he had ever
come to the house to talk things over. The same rain that had
stopped my outdoor work and given me the time to write had kept
him from working, too. He wanted to know what I was writing, and
I read the above passage to him. That was enough to start him
asking questions, especially since he had come to discuss my
reasons for not having animals on my farm. He knew that livestock
is generally thought of as necessary in any scheme for keeping soil
from losing its productiveness, and had just recently begun to
wonder how I could expect to build up high productiveness in the
land without even a hen to provide the manure usually deemed
necessary. He started talking.
'I've just been thinking about you and your odd way of trying
to build up the soil. I never had more than a cow and chickens
myself, but, of course, I just have a little scrap of land. The manure
from the cowshed and the chicken-house helps me a lot. You don't
even have chickens. And you expect to make a whole farm rich
without help from animals of any kind. It don't make sense with
what they say at the farm meetings. They say you must have
animals to improve the land. Now, how can you explain this odd
kind of soil business without any kind of manure?' Zeb gets excited
before he finishes a long speech, so he was quite excited when he
stopped talking. My task was to help him think clearly and calmly
about these things. 'I imagine you compost your cornstalks and
other crop remains with your manure, Zeb,' I began. He agreed that
he did, because if he did not do that, he would not be able to cover
the rubbish with his small-scale tillage implements and would have
trouble all summer cultivating his crops. I had felt sure this must be
his scheme, knowing that he managed his land with the sketchiest of
factory-made implements. Aside from his garden tractor and its
equipment, he has little that he didn't make himself except hoes and
rakes. He learned to make his own, by necessity, and has continued
to do so.
'You and I do our work a bit differently, Zeb,' I began, 'but
there is no difference in principle. Living on your land, you can
have your cow and chickens, but since I live away from mine, I
can't have animals of any kind. However, those really are details, as
I think I can show you. Your animals digest coarse crop remains
like cornstalks, thus changing it from unmanageable rubbish to a
form that can be put back into the soil without causing you trouble
later. However, your cow must have bedding and your chickens
must have straw or other litter; otherwise conditions in their quarters
would become most unsanitary. The cow bedding and the chicken
litter still remain coarse after use, and this coarseness makes it nice
for you to have a compost heap where the manure may rot further
before being applied to the land. And in this manure heap, such
garden rubbish as tomato vines, all the weeds that develop in such
profusion, and other debris can be rotted down to suitable form for
use on the land. This is the service performed for you by your
compost pile.
'On my farm I get the same results (except for the milk and
eggs) that you get by your system. Both plans are acceptable ways
of managing the land, especially if their operation tends to increase
the black colour in the soil.'
'I'm glad you mentioned the colour of the soil, Ed,' Zeb
interrupted. 'My land was almost as white as paper when I bought it
eight years ago. Now it's much darker in colour. I don't believe it is
as black as yours, but it seems to get a little darker each year. Yours
has coloured up fast in the few years you have been working it. Do
you have an idea why your land gets darker faster than mine?' I
thought I did, and said so.
'You see, Zeb,' I explained, 'since all my rubbish goes into the
soil without previous treatment, my soil must accomplish in one
long-time process the partial destruction that requires two stages on
your farm. Your cow and hens digest their feed, returning part of its
substance as manure, but using whatever is necessary to maintain
their own bodies. You get eggs and milk as dividends on these
operations, but you can't recover the substance burned up (with
actual heat, as proved by the warmth of their bloodstreams) by these
animals. I don't get the dividends you get, but neither do I lose the
substance that is used up as food by the myriads of organisms in the
soil that destroy the rubbish, by decay. These tiny living things die,
and their bodies then yield back to the soil the full value of the
energy they had taken from the rubbish for their maintenance. This
difference is considerable and may account for my soil's becoming
black faster—if, as you believe, it is colouring up faster than yours.'
A warning glint in Zeb's eyes made me stop here.
He had a really meaty question this time, though it was
'loaded' so I was tempted to parry it and try to steer the conversation
into other channels. 'I've been wondering, Ed, what makes my land
and yours so much blacker than the soils of farmers who have lots
of manure. Most of them plough in a pretty good turf about once in
three or four years. And they all buy fertilizers in addition. Now, it
looks as if those fellows would have better soil than we could have.
They work a lot harder at it and spend plenty for that purpose. But,
unless I am mistaken, none of these men has soil as dark as either
yours or mine. How would you explain that situation?'
'The answer to that, as I see it,' I began, 'involves both the
farmers' practices and the advice they heed. Personally, I'm afraid
land is losing colour rather than becoming darker in many places
where the owners follow faithfully the advice they get. In other
words, a large proportion of the half-million acres they tell us
become useless each year may actually be land that has been used
strictly according to instructions. Manure is ploughed in, when it
should in all truth be mixed into the surface. The whole substance is
thus liable to be lost. Annual mixing in of crop remains necessarily
adds more total organic matter than can be expected of good turves
when turned in only once in three or four years. Yet, you know
these inferior practices are what farmers are advised to follow.'
'You talk as if you thought farmers are not getting the advice
they should, Ed,' Zeb put in with a devilish look in his eyes. My
next comment killed that ironic humour dead.
'This is a serious, sad matter to me, Zeb,' I said warmly. 'For
years I, too, was an adviser to farmers. I was terribly conscientious
in the advice I gave, but not a bit more so than most of the scientists
now doing the same thing. I now know, of course, that some advice
I gave was faulty; and if I were now a county agent or a high school
teacher of agriculture, I could be much more helpful. Yet I was then
just as sure as to-day's advisers are now that science had most of the
answers for farmers' problems. You'd be surprised, though, how
close, in principle, to-day's advice is to what we handed out thirty-
five years ago. So, while everybody concerned would like to believe
that the billion dollars spent annually to teach farmers how to farm
is being wisely used. I can't help wondering whether the farmers
who accept the advice without question may be the ones who will
lose their land. If so, things really would be serious.
'Then there's human nature to consider, Zeb,' I continued. 'It
sounds far-fetched to bring it into the discussion, but I think human
nature may really be an important factor. Few farmers can resist a
chance to take extra income from their land by harvesting excess
growth that should be left to improve the land. Also, most experts
would approve such a move for two quite human reasons. First of
all, if the expert disapproved, the farmer might think him
unpractical; and, in the second place, the adviser's annual report to
his government agency looks better when farm income has swelled
because of his advice.
'While businessmen metaphorically "plough back into the
business" a liberal portion of each year's profits, farmers—who own
real ploughs—rarely do the agricultural equivalent of that
commendable practice. Although the farmers own the ploughs,
businessmen do most of the figurative "ploughing." The blame for
this is at least partly due to approval by advisers of practices that
ought to be recognized as bad for the land. Yet in discussions of our
worsening soil situation in America, writers and speakers blame
"greedy" farmers, forgetting that the farmer is following advice he
has reason to think good.
'There are farmers, though, who have an acute sense of justice
towards their land and plan to return to it everything they decently
can. I would guess that, in general, these are the men whose land
still gives a good account of itself year after year. Men such as these
would be good farmers even if there were no agricultural advisers.
They have not formed the habit of letting somebody else do their
thinking for them. If we had enough of such farmers, there would be
no political football known in the United States as the "farm
problem." Instead of surpluses and support prices, we should
probably have abundant production at reasonable cost, so that food
could be sold at prices all could afford to pay. Wouldn't that be
something?'
Having disposed of this most embarrassing part of Zeb's
question, I turned to the matter of soil colour, which also has its
embarrassing angles. 'In strict honesty,' I told Zeb, 'I oughtn't to try
to answer this part of your question, for I haven't seen enough of the
country's soils to justify my forming a judgment from observation.
From common hearsay, however, I know that floods are becoming
more common and that erosion increases year by year. Both of these
conditions are definitely related to the black colour being almost
absent from our soils.
'You know, Zeb,' I continued, 'it simply is impossible for
water to travel from one place to another over the surface of a soil
that could "leak" it through. You wouldn't expect to roof your house
with sponge. Soil should be like a sponge. Instead, it is like a roof.
Water cannot avoid being drawn into any surface on which it falls if
there are openings through which it can enter. Gravity drags it in.
Nothing short of a miracle could enable water to run off a porous
soil until those openings were all filled with water. So, when water
from rains begins to race over the surface of the land—even after
only a quarter of an inch of rain—we know that the dense condition
of the soil has partly nullified the force of gravity. Therefore, since
flood and erosion conditions are becoming worse from decade to
decade, we must conclude that the manner in which our farm land is
being handled tends to puddle its surface instead of making it
porous. Our soil is being made leak-proof largely by ploughing.
'You probably wonder what all this has to do with the colour
of the soil. The answer is easy, but it is not so easy to know why
that information has not been given to American farmers. In truth,
the presence or absence of abundant organic matter is closely
related to numerous soil problems, and when we supply an
abundance of organic matter at frequent intervals to a soil we
automatically correct quite a number of troubles. This suggestion
will be scorned by men who have devoted their lives to treating
symptoms of the soil; but their attitude probably results from the
traditional separation of the various sciences. No scientist feels
comfortable when he is called upon for an opinion within the field
of another scientist. And it happens that colour, warmth, moisture,
texture, and structure in soils all are matters of physics, while the
processes within the soil which change structure and colour are
studied by chemists or biologists, or both, hence are taboo for
discussion by physicists. These segregations of facts among
scientists are probably responsible for a lot of misinformation, or
lack of information, among farmers.
'If I may walk in where scientists fear to tread,' I went on, 'I'd
say that soil becomes black as the result of having more organic
matter, since decay is not completed promptly and the partially
decayed material assumes its "charred" appearance because the
black carbon contained in all organic matter is slowest of all the
elements to change form. Accumulation of this carbon quite
naturally blackens the soil. Incidentally, the carbon is gradually
consumed by nitrogen-gathering, free-living forms of life that pay
for their "keep" by the nitrogen they must take from the air to
balance their diet of almost pure carbon. When these organisms die,
the proteins they have built into themselves become available to
plants growing nearby. How's that, Zeb,' I asked, 'for a layman's
explanation of some of the facts farmers have failed to get from
scientists?'
'It may be all right, Ed,' replied Zeb. 'I wouldn't know. But I'll
say this for you: You can come to some of the dingdest conclusions
I ever heard without moving away from this desk.' That gem of
sarcasm made it necessary for me to defend my position of
presuming to expound upon sciences I was not qualified to discuss,
so I took some pains to justify what to him had seemed too
sweeping conclusions.
'I'm sure, Zeb, that as a matter of theory every part of that
statement has the backing of science,' I told him. 'And with one
exception, every idea involved has been proved both by
experimental work and by farmers' practices. The exception is the
assumption that nitrogen-gathering, free-living organisms can have
a practical effect on field operations. No scientist would approve
that theory, I suspect. Yet in 1949 I achieved a yield of
approximately twenty-one tons of tomatoes an acre in soil to which
no artificial nitrogenous manure had been added for more than five
years. The tomatoes could not have made a start when transplanted
unless there had been nitrogen in the soil, and it would be foolish to
assume that this unusual yield could have resulted unless
atmospheric nitrogen had been liberally drawn upon. Any scientist
questioning my statement would have to explain this tomato yield. I
know of no one who would attempt that, unless he thought I had
deliberately lied about the whole thing. And I'm sure my
neighbours, who have watched this development like hawks, would
refute that suspicion.'
'Of course, Ed,' Zeb conceded. 'I have watched you all
through, and I know you've had some of the finest crops there I have
ever seen. I just thought maybe you were stretching your science a
little bit to cover the case. You've about disproved that now.'
With that Zeb began to stir as if he had to leave, explaining
that his wife expected him home promptly for dinner, and it was
now nearly one o'clock.
I wish Zeb could have stayed just enough longer to help finish
this chapter, for there is some difficult going still ahead. If what
follows proves to be dull, it may be partly because he isn't here to
help me think it out. I'll have to do the best I can without him.
 Agricultural research concerning the soil—which means
nearly all such research—exhibits what might be called a squirrel-
cage character. There is tremendous activity, but mostly in one
place. Solve a problem to-day, and you can expect it back to be
solved again in a few years. I know of no other field of research
where this is equally true. For example, consider what has happened
in the matter of calcium as a requirement for successful cropping.
The cage has revolved many times since Cyril G. Hopkins settled its
status neatly some forty years ago.
At that time the verdict was that, except for legumes, crop
needs for calcium were 'so extremely small' and the amounts of
limestone in the earth were 'so extremely large' that limestone
applications were not needed for any except the leguminous crops.
Look at us now. A farmer would be careless, indeed, to-day if he
dared to plant a crop without first having had his soil tested to
determine its need for lime as well as for fertilizers. I wonder just
how to-day's researchers would explain the situation. I suspect they
would dismiss Hopkins as hopelessly inept in his observations and
not a careful investigator. I believe there may be a better
explanation, however.
To put it in terms of the title of this chapter, I'd say that in
Hopkins's day there was still fire under the boiler, while to-day that
fire has gone out. More concretely, forty years ago most American
soils still retained enough organic matter to absorb and retain near
the surface enough calcium salts amply to supply the growing crops.
To-day, if I do not misjudge the situation, that organic matter—
together with the entire subsurface community which it fed—had
disappeared from practically all farm soils of the humid portion of
the United States. Hence, there is no longer absorbent ability, or
certainly not enough, to retain those calcium salts that rise with the
water that comes up from below. Calcium salts still rise with the
soil water, but each trickle of water downward through the soil
picks them up again and carries them away from the root zone.
If this explanation seems doubtful, consider how often writers
on the subject mention that the subsoil contains more plant nutrients
than the topsoil, at least in certain areas. The subsoil also has more
clay in most places; and clay is a better absorbent than the coarser
soil particles of most surface soils. Perhaps this may explain why
Louis Bromfield in Out of the Earth reports that below the eighteen
inches of upper soil which showed almost no calcium, his deep
subsoil contained 'almost too much lime.' At any rate, it is food for
thought for all farmers, as well as for research men who recommend
more and bigger applications of limestone as a means of preserving
the productivity of the soil.
It may be well to repeat what has been said previously about
limestone applications. Continued applications of lime tend to make
certain trace elements unavailable. This is one of the delicately
balanced situations which seem to justify the feeling that a man
must be infinitely wise in order to farm successfully. I would
heartily agree that if a man proposes to continue with the
substandard soil that now exists everywhere in the United States—
to say nothing of other parts of the world—he will indeed require
the almost constant attention of experts if he is to succeed. On the
other hand, if he is determined to recondition his soil by methods
equivalent to those by which the original soil was created—methods
such as I have been using—he need be no wiser than the supposedly
ignorant peasants of the world, whose crop yields so often put our
farmers to shame. A programme of soil restoration is certainly
easier on the blood pressure than the tedious tacking back and forth
from extreme to extreme as dictated by superficial soil tests.
A further reminder about calcium seems in order here. One
effect of suitable applications of limestone is to granulate soils that
tend to puddle. It is well to remember that this is also one of the
important effects of an abundance of organic matter in the soil. In
fact, although much more time is required to obtain substantial
results, I feel sure that plenty of well-mixed-in organic matter will
eventually do for the soil everything that can be expected of the
most faithful and complete application of both lime and fertilizers.
Otherwise, you may be sure I would not be writing this now.
This discussion of the vagaries of lime relations in the soil,
which require recurring research to keep farming on an even keel, is
but one aspect of that squirrel-cage performance. What about
varieties of the various crops? They all 'run out' in time. Why?
Simply because the soil continues to become less and less able to
deliver enough sustenance to support the old varieties properly. This
accounts fully for the hybrid-corn venture, as well as for all other
plant breeding designed to obtain better-yielding varieties of crops.
'Improvements,' as often as not, are but adaptations to the waning
ability of the soil—as Dr. Albrecht has said so often and so
earnestly. By rekindling the fire under the boiler, we can again use
the old, favourite varieties just as successfully as we or our
ancestors used them years ago. We can again grow flax, if we care
to. For that matter, we can grow anywhere any crop that climatic
conditions will permit, if we will conscientiously restore our soils so
that they can be their old selves again.
That is the rekindling of the fire under the boiler. Once that
has been done, 'land use' will be a dead issue, for sure.
 CHAPTER TEN

Sustenance from Soil

*

T
o write a chapter such as this is an ambitious, not to say
hazardous, undertaking. At least three special fields—soils,
food, and health—are involved, in none of which am I a
specialist. To make it worse, there is not to my knowledge any
person who lays claim to be a specialist in all three. There are
hundreds of specialists in each of these fields, but none who
attempts to correlate the information common to all three into a
logical pattern. Therefore, I am venturing to gather together a few of
the facts commonly known (or the inferences from what is
commonly known) that demonstrate how human health may
actually be a direct product of the soil.
Growing vegetables would be a pointless occupation except
for our hope that they contain things needed to sustain life. Yet it is
frequently pointed out that one carrot may contain as much as sixty
times more of an essential mineral than another carrot from which it
cannot be distinguished without chemical analysis. I cannot speak
for the accuracy of this statement, but I do know that flavour is
thought to be associated with mineral content and that vegetables
differ immensely in flavour. The potatoes produced by our soil each
year since we began working this Ohio farm have provided a study
in progression from insipid tastelessness to high flavour and mealy
quality. And the potatoes are but a single example. Every vegetable
that grows well here has become more richly flavoured with the
passing years.
After seven years I seem to have made some progress as far as
my own health is concerned, as a result of eating the fruits and
vegetables this land has produced. I realize that this might be mere
imagination, but the fact that I have been able, in spite of advancing
age, to do harder work than ever before in my life, especially during
the past year—practically without red meat in my diet—seems to
me quite acceptable evidence of the state of my health. I have not
consulted a doctor for several years. Formerly I needed medical
attention, or thought I did, frequently. Not all the difference can be
credited to this garden and its vegetables, however, for throughout
my adult life I have kept abreast of discoveries concerning diet and
health and have made such changes in my diet as seemed advisable.
In 1945, I experienced serious pains, supposedly arthritic in nature,
which I no longer have. I am twenty-five to thirty pounds lighter in
weight, with no ill effects from the loss. In general, I feel as well as
I did fifteen to twenty years ago. I do not work as fast as I did then,
but I can endure much more sustained hard work than at any other
time I can remember.
Nothing I can put into this chapter can be expressed in terms
of the vitamin and mineral consciousness we have developed in the
past thirty years. In fact, the emphasis upon vitamin and mineral
consumption now current could be abandoned if our foods were
grown as they should be—from completely developed soils. There
seems good reason for so thinking. It should be evident that if our
farm crops had always nourished farm animals completely, nobody
would have started to investigate crop composition beyond the usual
analyses for proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. But there were
obvious shortcomings, even when the composition seemed normal.
Research into the reasons for the failure of apparently normal feeds
to nourish farm animals properly resulted in the discovery of
unsuspected factors which later were named vitamins. Still later, the
nutritional research that began in the interest of farm animals was
applied to human beings.
It seems to me that since our knowledge of vitamins originates
from food deficiencies, we could quite safely forget all we have
learned in the field of vitamins if we would make sure that our food
comes from soil that is fully capable of supplying everything crops
need. Mother Earth 'suckles' plants in precisely the same sense that
a baby, if it is lucky, is suckled at its mother's breast. If the mother
is healthy, there is no need to be concerned about the quality of the
food the child gets. If Mother Earth is also completely healthy, the
plant will get all the elements it needs—and the humans who
consume plants so produced will get all they need. So, once such a
situation has been assured, vitamin supplements can be tossed out
the window, except in cases of illness.
There is continuing speculation about the character of
vitamins. Nobody pretends to know precisely what they are, but
they have an undeniable role in the promotion of general health.
They seem to act like the familiar catalysts of chemistry, enabling
the body to assimilate essential substances which might otherwise
not become available to it. A notable example is calcium, which
needs an accompanying vitamin intake in order to be assimilated by
the human or animal organism. My theory is that a completely
balanced soil provides the foods rich in essential vitamins and
minerals. Acceptance of this theory will not, of course, clarify the
vitamin situation, but it will help to relate completeness of products
of the soil to completeness of the soil's own development.
Recognition of this relationship seems to me essential to the study
of nutrition.
I want to emphasize strongly the point that the single change
needed in our farming system to avoid deficient foods is to
redevelop soil. It is my belief that once our soils have been
restocked with plenty of organic matter in the root zone (not just
under it, as is assured by the use of the mould-board plough), the
crops grown thereafter will show a tendency to uniformity of
analysis. This should be true regardless of the soil type, since the
soil is now made up chiefly of miscellaneous minerals. In other
words, every glaciated soil throughout the entire northern part of the
United States should grow onions, sweet corn, or potatoes, each
having an analysis appropriate to its kind, with notable uniformity
in the analyses of crops grown in various parts of the area.
That a single change in our system should be expected to right
the present wrongs is anathema to our present-day scientific mind.
The scientist believes that no single remedy or cure is possible,
forgetting the simple cures for such formerly mysterious diseases as
pellagra. Until the remedy was found to be a change of diet, pellagra
was one of the most complicated of ailments, offering a complex
array of symptoms. Yet any one of a number of highly mineralized
foods can end the trouble—almost abruptly. Is it not logical, then, to
expect that once we have restored our soils to their former
perfection, they will cease to produce deficient vegetables? That is a
point well worth arguing with any scientist who is disposed to
ignore the possibilities suggested here.
If we are to bring about the revolution in farm practices that is
essential to halt the production of deficient foods and to promote the
growing of fully nourishing foods, we cannot allow the scientist
who is unwilling to discuss such matters to dismiss our questions.
That has been done too often already. Not that scientists are
unwilling to face unpleasant truths. But they are so confident of the
superiority of the educated point of view as against what they
consider a cultish view that they dislike even to discuss the
possibility that there might be merit outside their accepted scheme
of things.
Despite this attitude, there is really no uniform point of view
among scientists. More than one recognized researcher has
suggested that cancer, spinal meningitis, heart failure, and most of
the other diseases that are becoming more deadly than war, may
result from deficient foods. Deficient foods can be produced (I
sincerely believe) only from soils that fail to supply plants with
everything they require. Yet I have pleaded with cancer specialists
and men engaged in research into the causes of polio and other
maladies to devote at least part of their work to feeding test patients
with the products of fully redeveloped soil. And, what is much more
to the point, I have suggested that children be fed in control groups,
one group on the foods usually available in the market and another
the products of revitalized soil. As far as I know, these suggestions
have never received serious consideration. If they have, faith in
Science over Nature was the decisive point, I suspect.
It is easy to believe that if a crop fails to obtain from the soil
any given mineral, the remedy is to apply that mineral to the soil.
That procedure results in a product that has more of the mineral in
question. What more do you want? a scientist might ask in all good
conscience. And right here and now I shall say just what seems to
me to need saying: No man (this is my opinion, note, and may be
wholly wrong) can possibly judge so accurately as to be sure that
the added chemical will not disrupt the plants' intake of other
equally essential elements. A notable example is lime. Too much
lime added to soils has already caused 'shortages' of other needed
elements by making the soil basic, or by reducing acidity below the
point at which these other chemical elements are dissolved for plant
use. Evidence of this fact has been introduced in an earlier chapter,
taken from Grass, the 1948 year-book of the United States
Department of Agriculture. In other words, the most careful
scientist may turn out to be as great a bungler as the proverbial bull
in a china shop. I am willing to trust Nature.
The scientist believes that adjustment of the soil to suit the
crop is his job, not Nature's. He can cite abundant evidence to prove
that Nature often lets farmers down. That is, when the farmer fails
or refuses to use artificials, he suffers by having less tonnage of
crop to harvest. Scientists have been much impressed by scales,
balances, steelyards, and the like, as means of reckoning the effects
of practices of farmers. They tend to ignore the hospital beds filled
by those same farmers. Also, since the scientist is employed for this
very purpose, he does not like Nature to volunteer to adjust the soil
to the crop. He feels perfectly capable of doing what he is paid to
do. And you cannot blame him. What you can do is to call his
attention to such outstanding work as that of Sir Robert McCarrison,
who proved that differences in diet accounted for differences in the
health of the Hunzas and their neighbouring tribes of the Himalayan
region.
He probably will not have heard of McCarrison, but this
scientist's work is properly documented in a publication entitled
Studies in Deficiency Disease. It is an English book, published by
Oxford University Press, but has also been published in the United
States by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research of
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Every physician who wants to follow
through the basic pioneer work done by McCarrison should obtain
this book and study it carefully. Far from being a cultist, Sir Robert
McCarrison was a British army officer stationed among the tribes of
north-western India for seven years. He was impressed by the fact
that, though he was the only medical man available to them, the
eight thousand Hunzas needed his attention only for accidents, eye
irritations caused by the poor ventilation of their houses in winter,
and old-age troubles. The astonishing freedom of the Hunzas from
the ordinary ills that afflict humanity caused Sir Robert to ask to be
allowed to make a thorough investigation. Accordingly, he was
provided with the necessary buildings and equipment. His book is
his report of his work.
Many laymen who would find McCarrison's book dull reading
would do well to examine Dr. Guy Theodore Wrench's more
popular report, The Wheel of Health. This, also, is an English
publication (London: Daniel, 1938), and it is well worth reading.
Still another and even more popularly written English book is
Dr. Lionel James Picton's Nutrition and the Soil, which has been
reprinted in the United States by the Devin-Adair company. While it
covers the entire field of soil-food-health more comprehensively
than either of the older books, it is very easy reading and is an
essential work for everyone who is interested in his own or the
people's health.
Do you wonder why England should break out in a rash of
such books while few have been written in America? There may be
a good reason apart from the fact that it was an Englishman, Dr.
McCarrison, who started the ball rolling. England has far less than
one acre per person of available land, in comparison with from three
to fifteen acres per person in the United States (the number
depending upon whether total land area is counted or only land that
is considered capable of growing food crops). If the entire area of
England is counted, there is still only eighty-five hundredths of an
acre per person available, and much less if the tillable area alone is
included. It is easy to see, therefore, why the British should be
concerned more than Americans about the source of food.
For years Englishmen visiting our country have remarked that
our chief soil problem is having so much too much land. We have
so much soil, in their opinion, that we cannot manage it properly,
even with our machinery. In their view, if we had one-tenth as
much, we should be forced to do a better job with it and would,
therefore, have less of a problem. That is something worth thinking
about. In my judgment, their view is correct. I suspect that this
British attitude irritates a good many Americans who consider the
English as opinionated anyway, and doubt their ability to analyse so
easily the troubles we have in the United States. Much that appears
in my present book tends to support the British view and may, as a
result, be considered of doubtful value by some in America who
read my opinions. My purpose, however, is to give a report of the
behaviour of the land, rather than to offer a recital of theories, even
though the latter may be attractive to me.
There is one reason, and I believe only one, why American
scientific investigations have not arrived at the same conclusions I
have. The objectives of scientific experiments have been different
from my objectives. American scientists have been so harried by the
tough problems of a soil mantle, of which hundreds of thousands of
acres become worthless annually, that they have had no time for
studying long-range possibilities of soil renewal. The main
scientific effort has been to enable men to continue to live from the
crop production of an ever-dwindling supply of available plant
nutrients in their 'tired' soils. By contrast, nobody has been pressing
me to give at once the answer to this or that tense problem. In fact,
nobody has been paying any attention to what I have been doing—
an attitude for which I have been profoundly grateful, because I had
to do all my own work during the preliminary period when my soil
could not provide the income to pay for hired help. I have been free,
therefore, to test thoroughly the theory that a misused soil can right
itself if it is allowed to consume all the wastes of each season's
production.
The upshot of my work, then, has been to allow the soil to
consume much that on many farms would have to be fed to animals.
Other farmers than Zeb have thought I ought to have animals to
hasten the improvement in the soil. While that is a common belief, I
think my soil has become productive at a faster rate without animals
than it would have with them. The more food material I can mix
into the soil each year, I believe, the greater will be the increase in
small life within the soil. It should be obvious that if animals that
consume hay, fodder, and other produce get any nutritive benefits
from those foodstuffs, the quantity of chemical substance that can
be returned to the soil in the manure must be less than the quantity
in the original hay and fodder.
What tends to complicate the question of the employment of
manure as against the use of the raw cornstalks and other debris is
that the manure contains many substances of animal origin that were
not present in the raw stuff before feeding. However, in order for
the crude material to nourish animals, it is necessary for it to lose
more than could be replaced by any and all contributions of
substance from the animals. If this were not true, then mathematics
would be useless as a means of valuing such things. The bald fact is
that the tonnage of manure on a dry-matter basis returned to the land
is only about one-half the tonnage of raw materials fed to the
animals producing it. While the actual mathematics of this matter is
extremely hazy, we may safely conclude that the return of substance
in manure could not possibly be as great as the amount in the hay,
fodder, and other foodstuffs.
While it is obvious that in the use of animal manure the
abundance of available nitrates, potash, and other elements
stimulate immediate growth in the crop, it must not be forgotten that
manure is in a more highly perishable state than raw materials when
mixed into the soil. Because the more perishable material will be
used up more quickly, thereafter the crop may have less to depend
upon than if its source of plant food had been the raw materials
mixed directly into the soil. The quick results that follow the use of
manure are apt to blind us to the more enduring effects of gradually
decaying materials. Their substance will still be available after the
quickly soluble constituents of the manure have been used.
This interpretation of the known facts about organic decay in
the soil must be made to account for the rather rapid rate at which
my soil seems to be coming to life again. Its progress has been
much more rapid in the past few years. In the first two or three years
of my ownership the change was negligible. Indeed, in the first
seasons the surface was so hard that it was impossible to mix debris
into it. Thus the surface was covered by debris through most of the
summer, and the crop had to be cultivated with hand tools. The
mere covering of the surface by such rubbish, however, may have
had some good effect, for in the third year it became possible to cut
into the surface so as to mix this material in. Thereafter, crop
improvements have been noticeable and have seemed to become
increasingly important year by year. Where this development will
stop, I do not know. That it should occur at all is in direct conflict
with the supposedly practical teachings about soil fertility, for crop
production is popularly believed to impoverish the soil, while my
soil seems to be thriving on higher and higher production.
Eventually, I expect this soil to produce the finest of celery,
though now it cannot manage this crop. However, test plantings
year after year show that the soil is gradually becoming celery soil.
The plants it produces are bigger and more nearly normal in size
with each passing year. Ten years from now, at the latest, I shall
expect to be able to market celery from this soil, which, as I have
said, in 1945 would not grow a decent tomato. And that
improvement will have been attained without losing the use of the
land at any time. Annually, from 1945 to the year when celery
finally attains acceptable development, this soil will have produced
crops for home use or market. On the basis of work at experiment
stations throughout our country, such a feat could be proved to be
impossible.
The apparent conflict between the behaviour of my soil and
what is to be generally expected of soil lies in the fact that all
experimental workers aim at producing crops immediately. 'The
farmer must make a living now,' they tell me, adding, 'he can't wait
to experiment.' This is true. But many farmers, probably most, could
set aside a small area for redevelopment. Results equal to or better
than any I have got—especially in the first two or three years—
ought to follow if farmers would continue for a few seasons their
customary lime and fertilizer practices, with the possible
elimination of artificial nitrogen after the first year or two. It is my
opinion that crops would be better in the early years if the usual
liming and fertilizing practices were continued at that time. The
usual rotation practices would have to be omitted, however, because
rotations permit the introduction of fresh organic matter only once
in three or four years and, if land is to be treated fairly, it must have
fresh supplies of organic matter at least once a season.
It is too much to hope that agricultural authorities will begin
right away to suggest any such innovation. To begin with, the
authorities themselves do not know what would happen. They must
learn what their clients can expect before they dare make
recommendations. It is not likely that within the next decade any
such change will be encouraged—unless farmers themselves go
ahead with it. If farmers apply enough pressure for agricultural
research in this direction, much will be done in a surprisingly short
time. So long as I am alone in applying pressure, nothing happens,
of course. Therefore, every farmer who wants to begin gradually to
develop new soil on his farm should at once request advice from his
agricultural college or experiment station, or both. If enough
farmers do this, we should in the next fifteen or twenty years lift the
face of agriculture generally.
When enough farmers have redeveloped good soil on their
farms, the 'farm problem,' an ancient and undesirable political
football, which I have already mentioned, should vanish. By that
time, doubtless we shall have mountainous surpluses of many crops,
but with a great economic difference. Surpluses created by Nature
working alone would cost but a minor fraction of the present
production cost of crops. When, without having to spray or lime or
to use artificials, farmers have grown crops both of higher yield and
of higher quality than would previously have been possible on
substandard soil, the way to lower food costs to consumers will
have been opened in the only legitimate way. Because of decreased
production costs, the grower can sell at lower prices and still make a
profit. Also, because of these lower prices, consumers can buy more
freely and can completely satisfy their appetites—thus wiping out
the surpluses.
That better nutrition would follow such a change, I feel sure.
As I view the situation, the roots of crops would be searching for
nutriment in a natural environment, one in which the soil solution
had not been unbalanced by any extraneous applications to the land.
The leaves of crops would both take in carbon dioxide and give out
oxygen without the interference of chemical films on the leaf
surface. Moreover, the effect of sunlight—the motive power for the
manufacture of starch and other structural materials within the
leaf—would not be weakened by powdery or filmy coverings on the
upper surface of the leaves. In other words, natural forces could
work without interference or interruption by the well-intentioned
but unnecessary actions of the farmer. The plant tissues should then
be completely natural in composition rather than synthetic, as they
probably are to some extent when plant growth has proceeded under
artificial handling.
To many a scientific reader, the above paragraph will seem
like hair-splitting in order to make a point. However, if flavour is
any criterion of food value, the point is made. Differences in flavour
are often astonishing, and the flavour of a vegetable grown in
naturally well-developed soil is far more pleasing than the flavour
of the same vegetable grown in the conventional way on ordinary
soil. A naturally grown tomato does not smell like a drug-store
when it is cut open, while some tomatoes sold these days certainly
do have an odd odour. These differences in quality, therefore, are
too wide to admit the charge of hair-splitting.
While we are stressing the importance of growing food crops
in a completely natural environment may be a good time to examine
a favourite suggestion for improving our soils—the use of sewage.
Many people urge us to save as much as possible of the plant-food
values wasted annually in the sewage from our towns and cities. At
first thought it sounds like a capital suggestion, for we know that
most people elsewhere in the world—notably in the Orient—gather
night soil in the cities and use it, either raw or after composting, in
growing their crops. I have already referred to Professor King's
Farmers of Forty Centuries, which sets forth the advantages to be
gained by conserving human wastes as well as other manures. But
King was at least a generation ahead of the times, for in 1910, when
his book was first published, few people realized that our farm soils
were becoming less productive all the time. Moreover, no one in the
United States wanted to imitate a foreigner, even though his farming
was more successful than our own. This is an important book, and
every thoughtful reader will benefit from a study of its pictures as
well as from the text. However, I should like to suggest that the
'sewage' we need most to save is that which is continuously leaching
away from the ploughsole on almost every farm on arable land.
Sewage-saving is a vital issue. But far more vital is the plant-
nutrient material lost annually in the drainage from our farm land.
Actual figures made public a few years ago in the United States by
the National Resources Board indicate that far more plant-nutrient
material than is used by our crops and livestock is lost each year in
this way. One key principle on which my work here in Ohio is
based is the saving or prevention of such waste from my land.
In an earlier chapter I explained how ploughing necessarily
wastes what is ploughed in, and I want to stress that fact again here.
The idea is so novel to most people that it may not easily be realized
in full perspective.
Organic matter is absorbent. That quality is one general
characteristic of every kind of material that has ever had life. If
wood were not so highly absorbent, lumber would not have to be
'seasoned.' Yet most of the material the farmer ploughs in is much
more absorbent than wood, because it is less dense. The absorption
capacity is so high in most leaves, stems, roots, and other fragments
of plant tissue that a mass of such material can actually dry out the
surrounding soil by stealing away its water. When that mass of
organic matter happens to be a 'sandwich' layer beneath several
inches of soil, it is easy to see that no known power could move the
liquid decay products of that organic matter upward. Both gravity
and the pull of the organic layer work against upward movement of
liquids from the ploughsole. So it would be folly to expect that the
farmer's crops would ever get any benefit from such ploughed-in
material—except crops, such as maize, that can send feeding roots
to ploughsole depth almost by the time the shoot appears above the
ground.
This means that at all times when water is moving downward
through farm land, it is carrying away a load of minerals, some of
which would have been used by crops if the organic material had
been mixed into the root zone instead of being ploughed in. When I
made similar statements several years ago in Ploughman's Folly, the
idea was somewhat theoretical. It is no longer theory to me, for my
redeveloping land is proving its validity. This land gets better while
producing bigger and bigger crops each year. As conventional
theory goes, the bigger the crop grown the more the land is 'robbed'
of fertility, hence the need for artificial manures and lime. Well, the
real robber is not the crop, but the plough which wastes what
otherwise would handsomely feed the crop. (On my farm these
wastes evidently do feed my crops, for there is no other way that
they could be fed.)
My position on the sewage question, then, does not oppose
saving municipal wastes. Rather, I favour doing what is much easier
and more directly and immediately beneficial—so handling our
organic matter that it can contribute its entire substance to the
growing of crops. If this point can be driven home quickly enough
to prevent some city fathers from yielding to the well-meaning
pressures of distraught citizens who can see no other way than
sewage composting for assuring food for their grandchildren, it may
prevent the spending of big sums from the rates and taxes for
structures that are not actually needed.
While we are discussing odd notions that have found their
way into our thinking about foods and nutrition, it may be well to
pay our respects to the idea that white sugar, white flour, and other
highly refined foods are chiefly responsible for nutritional
deficiencies. Let me say first that these niceties of refinement have
really contributed their share to a desperately bad situation. Also, I
should state that I am not at all prejudiced in favour of either white
sugar or white flour—I personally make and bake my own bread
from whole wheat flour, using dark molasses, butter, and no white
flour whatever. In addition, wherever possible, dark brown sugar,
dark molasses, or honey replaces white sugar in my diet. Once a
day—often twice—I cook, as a cereal, hard spring-wheat that has
been cracked just enough to break each grain so that it will cook
quickly. These facts should make me a 'member of the lodge' of
food cranks, but I do not consider myself odd in following such a
regime. I am merely trying to make up for the necessary
deficiencies in practically all of that portion of my food which must
be purchased.
Having proved that I can criticize constructively the campaign
against white sugar, white flour, and other highly refined foods, I
should like to offer only this suggestion. Far more significant than
these super-refinements of a few foods—from the standpoint of
deficiencies—is the inability of our substandard land to put into our
crops the essentials for good animal and human nutrition. Once we
have redeveloped our farm land so that it again grows crops that are
fully nourished, we can with perfect safety continue to use these
highly refined foods if we care to. There are obvious advantages to
the credit of these refinements. Who nowadays wants to bother with
keeping whole wheat flour, or the cracked wheat cereal, fresh? Only
a few cranks like me. The great majority of our American
population will continue to buy their foods via radio and television
advertising. Why not, therefore, take the easier, more practical
course of helping our land to rebuild itself, so that the foods we do
eat in a nearly natural state will really nourish us? Let's stop
straining at gnats and swallowing camels.
I believe that our entire system of dietetics originates directly
from our imperfect soil situation. If that thought seems strange,
consider how we arrived at our manner of thinking about foods.
Consider, too, why it is necessary for us to worry about foods in the
first place. Nutrition should be as natural and normal as breathing.
There should be no dietetic rules, because there should be no pitfalls
to be avoided when we sit down at the festive board. We ought to be
able to reach for any attractive item and eat as much of it as we like.
Similarly, we should be safe in sampling any other foods that appeal
to us, finally leaving the table with complete assurance that no bad
effects would follow such eating. Since that situation, obviously, is
the ideal, it is what should exist—and would exist if our soils were
what they should be.
Instead of eating freely whatever attracts us, to avoid trouble
we must stick to a set of rules that have been formulated to keep us
from suffering too seriously because of the shortcomings of our
food. Dieticians have divided our rations into seven classes, some of
which are known as 'protective.' What do they protect us against?
To speak plainly, if with some embarrassment as a patriotic citizen
of the United States, they protect us against the only foods grown in
sufficient abundance in our country to be cheap enough for general
consumption. Check through the list of foods grown in surplus
quantities, and you will know roughly what the protective class of
foods must shield us from. There may be exceptions to that rule, but
it is a fair general rule.
Being anchored to the spot, our plants cannot rove about and
select the environment that suits them. They cannot even move to
the shade when the sun is too hot. Life might be quite different if
plants could detach themselves at times, just to relax in the shade in
the middle of a long August day! At least, if they could do this, they
would not be forced to manufacture starch hour after hour during
such a period, with barely enough water reaching their leaves to
keep them from wilting. Such conditions prevent sufficient nitrogen
and minerals from coming in to produce the plant's normal
manufacture of protein tissue. Therefore, the plant, being compelled
to endure the sunshine, must produce starch in the absence of the
nitrogen and minerals which the soil, lacking water, could not send
up at the moment. Such conditions probably account for the
gradually decreasing percentage of protein found nowadays in
maize and wheat in comparison with the percentages found a
generation ago.
It is no good blaming farmers who thoughtlessly permitted
their soil to fade from black to the tint of the rock from which it was
made; the important thing now is to do something about it. It may
truthfully be said, I think, that if farmers and their advisers had
remembered the vital importance of dark colour in soil, we should
always have remained ignorant of vitamins, hormones, auxins, and
the like. And that kind of ignorance would have been bliss, without
the ugly implications that usually are attached to ignorance.
Knowledge of how to correct faults in our foods is of value only if
our foods are faulty. That much should be clear. How much better it
would be if our foods needed no correction. 'Protective' foods would
then have no significance, for all our foods, properly grown, would
have that same protective character.
Perhaps you wonder why I think dark soil can be connected
with such highly refined substances. It is an interesting story. For
many years I have found most interesting reading in the field of the
antibiotics, the vitamins, the hormones, and the auxins. I know no
more about these things technically than does any other person who
has read the articles about them appearing in the popular magazines.
Yet during all the time these stories have been appearing, I have
been noticing changes in the soil I was working as it developed
again its normal black colour. The fact that, in every case, the
research wonder came from a soil rich in organic matter forced me
to think it possible that highly organic soils might be able to
transmit some of these vital properties to the crops they grow. It was
obvious that most of our commercially grown vegetables were not
being grown from soil high in organic matter. I could not avoid the
tentative conclusion that possibly my soil, when properly
developed, might be capable of growing vegetables that would build
such bulwarks of health that disease could not attack successfully.
Whether this is a sound conclusion is yet to be proved, of course.
In the United States we are very proud of our ability to
command foods from the ends of the earth. There is nothing
especially blameable about that, of course, unless it makes us look
down our noses at people who cannot do so, merely for lack of
money. Most other countries import foods only if they lack the
quantity they need. We have to import foods in order to provide a
diet of suitable quality. (The word 'import' is used in a very broad
sense, to include fresh fruit and vegetable shipments from the West
Coast, Florida, and Texas to the great markets of the north-eastern
part of our country. Without these we should be thrown back upon
our native resources, and, as we know from experience, there would
be an increase in certain maladies that these foods prevent.) Trading
of food even between nearby communities is rare in most countries,
except when drought cuts short some crops. We, forced to mingle
foods grown in different areas in order to set an approximately
decent diet, manage to take great pride in our 'superior' system.
To make things worse, men who are entrusted with the
improvement of our farm land insist that from two and a half to
three acres of land per person is necessary if we are to survive. I
hope this book will serve as an antidote to such misleading
statements.
To prove these doctrines false, Americans only need to take a
look around them at people in other parts of the world. Only in two
or three other countries would it be possible to have three acres of
land per person, unless part of the population were either moved out
or killed off. The British and the Japanese—to name two with
whose situation Americans have had occasion to be familiar—must
depend on a great deal less than one acre per person. Yet these
people raise a surprisingly large proportion of their own food. Most
of the world is far more densely peopled than the United States, and
the idea that one person needs the large acreage recommended by
some American national agricultural leaders is as preposterous as a
good many other ideas we Americans seem to have acquired.
Nothing is wrong with most soils in our country that cannot be
cured quickly by the surface incorporation of enough organic
matter. By the same token, nothing is wrong with the crops grown
in America that cannot be cured quickly by the chance to grow in
soils so redeveloped. And, happily, there is nothing physically
wrong with our livestock or with ourselves that will not be helped
immensely, perhaps cured altogether, when we can eat food that
originates from soils properly developed.
This is a strong doctrine, acceptable to very few men in any of
the three scientific fields involved. And I must admit frankly that so
far as it deals with the health possibilities I have suggested, it is
wholly theory. The soil-plant relationships discussed do not involve
unproved theory. In fact, prominent in the discussion has been the
report of results obtained from the land itself. It seems a forthright
verdict. By that I mean that the land looks as if it would continue to
produce similar results—all without any additions whatever from
outside. It is, indeed, a heretical soil. Thus arguments in rebuttal of
claims made about the soil and plant relationships are directed not at
me, but at my soil. It can take it. I am glad to be able to shift the
responsibility for thus disrupting the peace of laboratories where I
have been 'proved' incorrect so many times.
But even the medical men cannot prove that what I am
suggesting is impossible. They have made no tests with laboratory
animals first fed for several generations solely on properly grown
foods and then inoculated with disease germs to see whether they
would succumb or prove immune. Until such tests are made, my
theory, of course, cannot be proved either true or untrue, but I think
that the possibility that my ideas are right is strong. Such tests
would to a great extent duplicate the work of Dr. McCarrison, but,
even so, they should be made in my country with foods grown here,
and by all means grown in a completely developed soil. With food
grown in the ordinary way we need not bother to make tests, except
as checks against the right kind of food. We know already the effect
of eating deficient foods, for they comprise almost all that is really
available to the ordinary person.
I daresay that one thing that has prevented such research has
been the easy assumption that the deficient foods in this country are
those grown with too little or incorrect fertilizers. Medically trained
laboratory technicians who know nothing whatever about the basic
facts of food production cannot be expected to assume that the food-
production system itself may be out of gear, because of science
rather than in spite of it. So, when the idea of feeding animals on
properly grown food is mentioned, they think first of crops grown
according to the current recommendations of science. The word
'current' in this case is used advisedly, for few seasons go by
without changes of some consequence being made in these
recommendations in the United States.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

Adventures in Cropping
*

T HE trustful gardener, who year after year has selected his

seeds by the pictures in his seed catalogue and is always
disappointed in the results, is due to have his innings as soon
as he can complete the redevelopment of his soil. The redeveloped
soil will faithfully reproduce the pictures there in his garden. A
multitude of his plants and their fruit may be just as good as the
photograph. Some may be better. Jokesmiths who have thrived for
generations by creating merriment at the expense of such 'simple'
souls will have to look elsewhere for material.
This awesome ability of redeveloped soil to deliver
astonishing results came to my attention most vividly last year,
when the head lettuce—supposedly not adapted to this district at
all—produced dozens of plants that might well have been
photographed for the seedsman's little book. Such a gracious vote of
confidence in the soil could not be overlooked even by a veteran
gardener like myself. While I have grown crops of some kind
almost every year, I had never seen a plant supposedly not suited to
the district put on such a show before. I was as thrilled as any
amateur, and probably made a bore of myself among the neighbours
about it. That is one good illustration of what I mean by 'adventures'
with crops.
But, to be perfectly fair, I ought to admit that such a handsome
result could not have been obtained unless other conditions as well
as those of the soil had been right. A few more hot days, or a
temperature a few degrees higher on the hot days, might have
prevented any such development, because lettuce is supersensitive
to heat about the time that it is heading.
Although I know how vulnerable lettuce is to heat and realize
that this result is not properly a basis for deciding on lettuce as a
regular crop, I have already stated that I plan to risk even more
plants next year. Two facts have encouraged this decision. In the
first place, because the soil has become better each season than it
was the year before, I expect the soil itself to provide an even better
environment. Secondly, this quarter-acre plot has been subsoiled,
and I hope this will tend to neutralize the effects of hot dry weather.
I think lettuce may suffer as much from lack of water on a hot day
as from the heat. The two conditions often go together, and heat
may get the blame that should be charged against a dry soil. I
believe that my soil, which has been chiselled every fifty-four
inches across its entire surface, ought to take in most of the water
that has been running off. If it does so, then there should be enough
water in the soil when the hot days come to ensure that the heat will
contribute to growth instead of wilting the plants. The proof will lie
in the crop.
People who believe crop rotation necessary would probably
oppose using the same land over and over again for any crop, as I
am doing. Tomatoes have grown here each year since 1945, and
next year will be the second year for lettuce. The case for rotation is
based partly on the avoidance of disease carried over in the soil.
This soil has answered that argument for me in the case of one
tomato disease. In 1947 we had to buy tomatoes for canning
because buckeye rot, a treacherous tomato disease with us which is
certainly carried over in the soil, destroyed our crop before it was
quite ripe. That year we had tomatoes in a strip ten feet wide. In
1948 the tomato strip was twenty feet away, but still in the same
plot, and we harvested and canned or extracted the juice of all that
we had planned to use in that way. Just as we finished canning, the
disease struck, and we did not have another decent tomato that year.
In 1949, one-sixth of an acre within this quarter-acre plot was
devoted to tomatoes, including the area where buckeye rot had been
so serious in 1947. About seven thousand pounds of usable
tomatoes were harvested before the disease struck. Thereafter most
of the fruit was damaged by this disease, but by that time frost was
just around the corner and the attack made little difference. Except
for an occasional plant, the 1950 crop was not affected at all.
I relate this history of one crop, as affected by a single disease,
to show why I boldly continue to plant the same land with the same
crop without fearing the consequences. As I interpret these results,
they mean that growing conditions within the soil are becoming
more and more favourable for tomatoes each season. Microscopic
tests of water leaching through this soil each year might show that
the number of organisms causing this disease decreases year by
year. It certainly would be interesting to know whether this is true.
If it is, it would be in harmony with what Dr. Waksman of the New
Jersey College of Agriculture (Rutgers) at New Brunswick
discovered. He found that very fertile soils (those containing much
organic matter) contained substances which under laboratory
conditions killed off many disease-producing bacteria. While I
would like to know the reason for the obvious weakening of the
disease (or the strengthening of the plant to resist the disease), I am
not waiting for research to determine the cause. I am going right
ahead and am planting the space with head lettuce and tomatoes,
two of the three crops it grew last year, in complete confidence that
nothing bad will happen to them.
The lettuce is really a fill-in crop. All rows on the entire farm
are in pairs, twenty-six inches apart. Last year one row of each pair
grew sweet Spanish onions. The other was marked off at sixteen-
inch intervals to be set with plants. Two of every three of these plant
sites were planted with head lettuce at the same time as the onion
seed was drilled. A few weeks later the tomato plants were set in the
other places. The plan will be the same next year, except that onions
will be omitted and the rows occupied by this crop will also be set
with lettuce. Roughly, there will be 640 tomato plants and 3,200
lettuce plants.
So far as I can now foresee, this same area will probably grow
these two crops each season for some years to come. That plan will
be changed only by the discovery that some other crop or
combination of crops offers more return for the effort. In other
chapters I have given the reasons for a soil's being made better by
cropping instead of poorer, as is usually taught. Some readers,
however, who have had sad experience with insects and diseases in
their own gardens will wonder if I am quite sane in mixing crops
that could not be sprayed or dusted at the same time and with the
same preparations. The answer, of course, is that I do not expect to
have any great need for either dusting or spraying. Such insects or
diseases as occur cause so little damage that no treatment could
possibly pay for the time consumed in applying the poison even if
everything else was free. Moreover, all the diseases and insects
show the same sort of retiring disposition as has been shown by
buckeye rot. For these reasons I am not afraid to intermix crops in
any manner that seems most likely to increase the 'take' from the
area involved.
In fact, it seems to me that intercropping has great possibilities
for gardeners. It is not a new idea. The Chinese always have more
than one crop at a time on the land when this is feasible. Some of
their arrangements are described in Farmers of Forty Centuries.
Their chief crop is rice, of course, which we shall not attempt. Yet
they plant wheat in pairs of rows, allowing a hoe-width between the
pairs and space for the worker to walk between the rows. Several
seeds go into each 'hill' in these rows, and Professor King reported
yields as high as 117 bushels per acre. No one farmer had a whole
acre in wheat, or even a large part of an acre. Intercropping in China
is comparable to our seeding wheat in standing maize in some parts
of the United States.
The omission of sweet Spanish onions from my combination
does not reflect on that crop. I have grown these onions for several
seasons—always satisfactorily in comparison with the results I
should expect with any other variety of onion I have used, although
the onions were not large enough to pass in the market as the big
boys for sandwiches. To be in that class an onion must be at least
three inches in diameter. Bushels of mine closely approached this
size, but did not quite reach it. Consequently they brought only the
price of ordinary onions. From experience of their taste I knew that
they deserved better than that. They were as mild as an apple in
many instances, yet full-flavoured with the onion taste.
Since my oversize, mild onions that were still undersize for
their race could not keep the company of their big brothers, I had to
arrange special marketing. They were placed with a friend who runs
a roadside market near the city and were advertised in the local
daily newspaper as 'delicious, sweet Spanish onions,' which they
certainly were. They drew customers who were looking for
something better than the usual market onion. The number of repeat
orders testifies to the fact that they satisfied these discriminating
people. Some people, indeed, reported that while ordinary onions
caused digestive distress, they could eat these with no bad after-
effects. They were buying comfortable eating and were willing to
pay a premium for it. Can you blame them?
It is likely that some small space will be planted with these
onions next year, but unless I succeed in finding someone interested
to look after them, the row space given to them will have to be
extremely small. I shall have very little time for such work during
the coming season, although I hope later to be able to put at least a
quarter-acre under this crop annually, interplanted, perhaps, with
sweet potato. There are special reasons for this combination: (1)
The sweet potato vines will shade the protruding tops of the onion
bulbs, so that they will not turn green; and (2) by harvesting the
onions first, I hope to be able to harvest the sweet potatoes by
mechanical means, the details of which as yet I have not worked
out. I expect to run a point shaped like my subsoiler point under the
sweet potato row and thus lay most of the roots on top of the
ground. In order to do this kind of digging, I need the point attached
in the exact centre of the tractor drawbar. Such attachment would
force me to drive the tractor wheels on the rows adjacent to the one
being dug. Therefore, if I plant alternate rows to a crop that can be
harvested earlier, that particular 'snag' will be avoided. What other
difficulties may be found, I shall know only after trial.
Up to now my soil has not been suitable for sweet potatoes.
For that matter, it has not suited white potatoes very well, either.
There is probably too much silt, which tends to shrink tightly as the
soil loses moisture. This shrinkage of the volume makes it grip
tightly the root and tuber crops and such lush-growing crops as
celery. From the way it seems to be developing, however, I think
that eventually the completeness of organic involvement may
compensate for the silty character. If this happens, there is another
possibility. Perhaps the time will come when either kind of potatoes
can be grown without necessity for digging. Harvesting would be
accomplished by simply pulling up the vines—the roots or tubers
coming up at the same time. This sounds fantastic, I know. Maybe it
is. But that condition does exist, and I know of no reason why it
might not develop here. I do not say that this is going to happen. It
merely seems within the range of possibility. Having been
astonished already by having the best of this soil produce at a rate of
almost $1,000 per acre from a previous condition in which its
products would not have been acceptable in the market, I am
mentally prepared for startling developments—developments not
even imaginable from soils handled in the orthodox fashion.
Runner beans have been 'teacher's pet' among my crops. They
have done well under almost all conditions. I even marketed a few
baskets of beans in 1945. They have done well when other crops did
poorly because they can get their nitrogen supply directly from the
air, even in a soil that is pretty poor. Every season through 1948 I
marketed some runner beans, but have grown none for market since,
largely for lack of dependable pickers. I plan to grow them again
next year because the proposed crop area being so much larger than
usual, I shall have to hire help, anyway. I may have as much as a
quarter of an acre in beans, possibly even more—if they can be
planted quite early. The early bean gets the price. I intend to plant
both green and wax beans because in recent years demand has gone
from preferring the green bean almost unanimously to taking quite
as many wax beans.
Seasonal conditions seem to affect beans less than any other
crop I grow. This, too, is probably due to their ability to take
nitrogen from the air. They do so well that I never make successive
plantings, as is usually recommended. It is standard practice here to
get four or more pickings from the first planting. Then, after a rest
period of a few weeks, these same plants usually produce some
additional beans. In most cases the beans planted in early April are
still bearing to some extent when frost comes. They staged their star
performance for me in 1947. That year I had sold four pickings by
the time the price went flat; then I lost interest in the beans for the
season. After digging a half-acre of potatoes and attending to other
chores that kept me from seeing the bean plants, I suddenly found in
early September that these plants had developed completely new
tops, buds, blossoms, and beans. The late crop was apparently just
as heavy and of as good quality as the early crop. And beans could
hardly be given away at that time, for everybody in town had beans
in his own garden. This is the only time I have ever seen beans act
just this way. However, I believe the same thing could occur every
year. The bean plant starts its leaves from special 'arms'—the start
for new leaf growth can often be seen by examining these parts. It
seems, then, that whether this growth develops depends upon
weather conditions as well as upon soil conditions. Apparently the
pattern of rainfall, heat, or some other factor set these vestigial
growths going and resulted in the new plants and the second crop.
Do you wonder that I feel kindly towards beans? This 1947
crop, just from its four marketed pickings, brought in a gross
income at the rate of $550 per acre. As that was only the second
year of development for that part of the garden and the beans were
not planted as early as I like to plant them, it is possible that they
could do even better now.
Lima beans are an entirely different proposition, at least for
my tight soil. One of the biggest problems so far has been to get the
plants started—I have probably planted earlier than is best for this
crop. And then there have been the chipmunks. If this land were
clean-tilled, I probably would have less trouble with these little
pests, for they nest in stumps, trees, and even in holes in the ground
at the margins of my best-developed area. When the Lima beans are
sprouting, they systematically take the embryo beans one by one
until all, or almost all, have been destroyed. I dislike poisoning
chipmunks, but I have put out poison twice with some success. With
the later plantings of Limas I am not bothered as much, perhaps
because by that time there are enough other things that the
chipmunks like to make it impossible for them to consume an entire
planting of beans. In addition, the Lima-bean plantings have always
been of from one to three pounds of seed. By planting a larger area,
I daresay I should have relatively less damage at any time.
The question of how many Lima beans to plant is not so easy
to decide as it used to be. Nowadays the housewife refuses to buy
Limas in the shell—frozen foods have spoiled her, perhaps. So,
unless the gardener is prepared to shell his beans before taking them
to market, he will plant only what he needs for his own use and for
special friends.
As with my other crops, I have had increasing success with
Limas, despite the chipmunks. The plants that get started develop
well, are almost untouched by Mexican bean beetle, and yield well.
On a few occasions I have picked more than forty beans from a
single plant at one time, all in the proper state of maturity. These
plants were exceptional, of course, and their existence suggests the
advisability, later, of making selections for providing my own seed
supply. But before this plan can be carried out, it will be necessary
to exterminate the chipmunks, for they gradually consume all beans
that are left to mature.
Potatoes are generally considered a necessary part of the diet.
I doubt whether people who use the kind of potatoes usually
available on the market get all the values they are entitled to.
Popularly, the most nutritious part of the potato is thought to be the
skin, but I question the notion that the skin of a properly grown
potato is notably more nutritious than the mass of internal material.
The skin of the potato, like the skin of any animal, serves a
defensive purpose. It protects the meat from attack by organisms of
decay, and so long as the skin is whole and normal in structure, no
disease organism gets through to the tenderer tissues inside.
Ideal weather for potatoes is similar to that in which head
lettuce develops best—days that are moist and cool, as we think of
cool, with the highest temperatures below the nineties. I suspect that
as with lettuce, the critical thing is usually moisture rather than
temperature. Many who have failed with head lettuce consistently
and have just as consistently succeeded with potatoes, will wonder
how this can be true if the two ideally require the same kind of
weather.
The explanation, I think, lies in the totally different character
of these two. Lettuce, so far as its value to us as food is concerned,
is wholly above ground. And to be satisfactory, it must develop a
fairly tight head. Failure to get the right amount of the right
minerals results in no head, and we simply write off the entire plant
as worthless and forget it. Potatoes, on the other hand, grow a
relatively enormous top that devotes its energies to the storage of
such minerals as can be spared in underground bodies we call
tubers. In its growth, first consideration must be given to the top
itself. And so long as that top operates to manufacture starch, all
excess starch not used in the top tissues is presumably transferred to
the underground storage. If growing conditions are near the ideal,
the progress of a potato plant is remarkably rapid in developing both
top and tuber. Let the supply of water coming up from the soil be
radically decreased, and the potato plant is in trouble quickly, as is
evidenced by immediate attack by Colorado beetle. If the season
throughout the plant's active period should remain very
unfavourable to the potato crop, the grubs will dispose of the top
growth very quickly, and such harvestable tubers as have developed
up to that time will be the bulk of the crop. And, for a very good
reason I think, both tubers and plants are apt to be lacking in the
nutritive materials they would have received if the plants had lived
under more ideal growing conditions.
At this point the validity of any programme of spraying or
dusting deserves consideration. The crises, so far as the potato crop
is concerned, is one of too little raw material to continue growth.
The obvious remedy would be rain or a decrease in temperature that
would lower the plant's need for soil minerals to the amount that is
being brought up at the moment in the soil water. Either condition,
incidentally, will immediately cause the Colorado beetle to
disappear, if my observation is correct. What probably happens is
that the larva (the reddish young beetle grubs that eat so
voraciously) are picked off by ladybirds, if only a day or two old, or
are eaten by predatory insects of a number of kinds that live by this
police-duty on both wild and crop plants. Whatever may explain the
disappearance of the grubs, the fact that they do disappear makes
chemical treatment of the plant unnecessary. However, most
growers of potatoes have never allowed enough time to elapse
between discovery of the first beetle and the chemical application to
find out whether the treatment would be worth while. (Their haste is
usually commendable, even so, for they are dealing with soils which
are definitely substandard and could not provide the conditions that
prevail in my soil after its experience of redevelopment.)
 Students of such matters should keep in mind these facts: The
effects of the chemical treatments designed to prevent insect or
disease injury make living conditions for these enemies impossible.
(Read that last sentence again. It is the heart of the argument against
such practices as spraying and dusting.) Better nourishment of the
plant is not part of pest-control plans. In fact, the grower assumes
that his programme of green manures, fertilizers, and so on, has
made the environment right for growing potatoes, and he also
assumes the inevitability of diseases and insects. Both assumptions
are false. The presence either of disease or of insects in destructive
force proves that the growing conditions are not right. And the chief
factor in growing conditions is the soil.
The top growth of the potato plant, therefore, when attacked
either by insects or by diseases, proves the existence of nutritive
deficiencies. We cannot at a glance tell exactly what is lacking,
except that men well trained in that field can determine at least
some of the elements whose absence causes certain visible
symptoms. By tissue tests these same men can find out even more
about what happens to be lacking. However, all this is merely
'locking the door' after the disappearance of the valuable something
that is essential to a decent potato. How much simpler to assure
beforehand that the soil—so far as it is a factor in growing
conditions—shall be right. By preliminary treatment of the soil to
develop it into the right sort of condition to grow all kinds of crops,
we shall automatically have made it into the finest potato soil. Then
all the tiresome procedure incident to chemical programmes will
have been made unnecessary. Potatoes planted in such a soil will
grow as completely nourished plants. Or, if complete freedom from
diseases and insects is not achieved at once, the continuance of
proper management of the soil will in time correct the deficiency.
Now for that question of the vast superiority of potato skins
over the internal tissue: certain features about the potatoes I have
grown on my farm suggest that redeveloped soil puts a lot of
material into potatoes that it did not put into them when we began.
The first and second years' crops were so deficient in phosphorus
that they showed the characteristic brown flecks in the internal
tissue of the tuber. From that sad beginning we have progressed to
the mealiest, best-flavoured potatoes I have ever eaten. No Idaho
baker—an excellent potato, famous in the United States—is any
better than any potato little or big, from my last year's crop. And the
excellent flavour of the mealy internal tissue suggests that it
contains a lot of minerals in addition to the starch that makes up the
bulk of that portion of the tuber. In this case, I doubt that there is as
much contrast in composition between skin and other parts of the
potato as in potatoes produced in the usual way. In other words, if
my potatoes should be cut, bruised, or otherwise injured in the field
while growing, I believe there would be less likelihood that rot or
other trouble would destroy them.
On this last point there is evidence. A number of potatoes that
were injured in the field have grown enough replacement tissue to
heal over the wound, but not enough to hide the fact that there had
been injury. This has happened most often where growing tubers
were bored into by grubs. Occasional injuries have occured in
cultivation. These heal over in grotesque ways sometimes, proving
the internal vitality of the potato—that a whole skin is not entirely
necessary to prevent destruction.
Grubs, incidentally, have caused more trouble than any other
one thing. I hope the subsoiling done recently will improve moisture
conditions within the soil enough to eliminate this pest. Only future
crops can determine whether this will happen.
Other troubles that have not altogether disappeared include
some internal rots that develop in winter storage, the familiar scab,
and an occasional tuber that completely disintegrates internally
during winter storage. All these conditions are of far less
consequence than they used to be. I could decrease their incidence
still further if I would cull the planting stock more closely. Because
my object is to learn whether, as I suspect, most of these troubles
result from growing conditions, I purposely include in the planting
stock all except the most diseased. Occasionally an especially bad
piece fails to germinate or dies soon after coming through the
ground, but most of the potatoes come through. It is my belief that
the resulting crop is less affected by disease than were the planted
tubers, but that belief may be partly wishful thinking. Of one thing I
am sure: there is some development within the potato during winter
storage that accounts for the increasingly diseased condition of the
ones selected in spring for planting.
Usually I plant small, whole potatoes, just because I have
them and to save the trouble of cutting larger stock. I doubt that
there is any special advantage gained by the fact that the potato is
planted whole, though this is sometimes claimed. Yet last year,
when I did cut the potatoes to extend my scanty supply, one small
lot, planted where water covered the land twice before they could
germinate, failed to come through. I believe whole potatoes would
have succeeded. Elsewhere the cut tubers germinated perfectly.
One further condition that might be important is that I seem to
have better seed potatoes each year. The quantity planted is usually
only what I think I shall need during the winter for my own use, and
I do not rely heavily on potatoes. I like them best when they are
new: as soon as sizable tubers have formed, I begin at once to look
for them. By continuing this practice and digging those that die
early, I keep myself supplied with potatoes during the growing
season. After they have been stored for winter, I eat them sparingly.
It is possible that the early-dying plants are the ones whose progeny
would be most diseased at the end of winter storage. If critics say
that I have simply eliminated the diseased tubers, I would not
attempt to refute the charge. Yet the over-all effect seems to be a
gradual disappearance of disease, despite the obvious fact that the
weather conditions we usually have here in Ohio are often much too
hot and dry to suit this crop.
I hope the subsoiling will so improve the internal water supply
of the soil as to make life easier for potatoes as well as for lettuce. If
it does, the effect might be to make potatoes fairly immune to both
diseases and insects. Such immunity, of course, would be a sort of
ultimate effect.
I have discussed this problem crop in detail so that the reader
will not get the idea that everything goes smoothly simply because
the land is being redeveloped. For crops that like the kind of
weather we usually get, perfection or near-perfection is actually the
rule. However, potatoes, cabbage and their kind, and cucumbers and
their near relatives reveal their dislike for our weather by various
ailments that they develop. By planting these crops very sparingly
each season and watching their behaviour, I can judge whether the
land has improved from one year to the next. So every year I try to
grow some of each class of crop, expecting the weather-critical ones
to fail. The nearer these crops approach the degree of development
that would make them marketable, the more the land has improved,
as I consider the evidence. That seems to me a valid rule of thumb
for this procedure, which so far as I know has no precedent
elsewhere in our country.
Some members of the cabbage family seem more likely to
succeed than others, the difference apparently depending on
whether they can develop completely before hot, dry weather starts
or after it is largely over. I have had little trouble with kohl-rabi; and
although our market scarcely handles it, I continue to grow it for
home use. Broccoli, I think, will succeed if planted where it is to
grow, especially the very earliest varieties, planted as early as the
ground can be prepared. And this season I intend to grow more
broccoli than I ever attempted before.
Success with cabbage has seemed to wait on better soil
conditions. Of no crop has this seemed truer. The young plants
usually grow away very well until the first hot, dry days. Then the
plants are visited by the cabbage-worm moth, and before long there
are caterpillars. The degree to which these damage the crop,
apparently depends on just when they appear. If the sparrows have
not already gone to the wheatfields, the damage may scarcely be
noticeable; but while the sparrows are away, the number of
caterpillars may increase so much that the plants are mere frames of
stems with little leaf tissue clinging to them. This worst stage I have
not had this past year or two, whether this was the result of more
complete soil development or of bird help, I do not know. There
have been instances when a plant, after having been stripped to the
stems, responded to more favourable weather conditions and grew a
nice head. Such development, of course, cannot be depended upon
when cabbage is to be marketed. The crop must mature with
reasonable promptness to be accepted in the market.
Believing that my soil may now be better suited to cabbage
and relying on the subsoiling in which the soil is loosened but not
turned, to soften the sharpest effects of the weather, I plan this
season to try to grow a few thousand cabbages for the local market.
This is really a 'shot in the dark,' since heretofore few of my
cabbages have reached market quality. Last year I did sell enough to
pay well for the small investment in plants. I am aware that the
season was cool and moist enough to permit lettuce to head and
potatoes to develop better than usual. It is reasonable to suppose that
the cabbage crop, also, was better than usual because of the weather.
I am prepared, therefore, for a burst of hot weather to make me
regret my investment in cabbage plants. But maybe not.
Every few years I try Brussels sprouts. At first the plants made
no compact heads. The 1948 season was my last attempt with them.
They did better that season, and did develop compact heads.
However, because the rainfall did not come soon enough they got
started so late that these heads were frozen before they could be
picked. I am not planning to try them again next year, but some year
soon I want to test this crop commercially. Ohio conditions are
thought to be unsuited to Brussels sprouts, but I want to see what
effect soil redevelopment will have.
Some gardeners in this district grow cauliflower extensively,
and the local market for it is excellent. However, the necessity for
watching it carefully to prevent the developing 'flower' from being
darkened by light before the outer leaves are tied together makes
this crop tedious by comparison with most others. I have not,
therefore, given it a really good test. My last try with it also was in
1948. My soil has improved a lot since then, so the crop might do
well now. I hope to have a few hundred plants this season to check
its behaviour now as compared with that of the earlier crop. The
readiness with which it sells locally recommends it. Also, except for
the light problem while its head is developing, it is easier to grow
than many other vegetables. I want it as a regular crop as soon as
possible.
The cucumber is one of the least dependable crops in this soil.
I have picked some of the finest cucumbers I have ever seen; yet to
get the plants through the early stages, free enough from weeds for
the crop to be picked satisfactorily, presents some tough problems.
And some years a whole plot of cucumber plants disappears almost
overnight, because, I think, of the vagaries of the weather. As a
result, I am not enthusiastic about growing cucumbers except as an
experiment, partly because it presents all these difficult situations.
There are some indications that if one had turf to be worked
up into a garden, cucumbers would be one of the most dependable
crops. I have been surprised by their behaviour when planted in turf,
and often puzzled by their apparent dislike of what seemed to me
excellent conditions in soil that had not just been prepared from
fresh turf. Yet I hope no one will boldly plant this crop in turf
because of my observations. To get down to cases, in 1927 I started
late—mid-June or later—with garden planted in an old field just
ploughed. (That was ten years before I had decided that ploughing is
wrong.) All crops did fairly well, but the cucumbers were
outstanding. We harvested and used or made into pickles great
quantities of them, all before there was any trouble with beetles.
This was my first experience of growing cucumbers without any
trouble from these pests. In 1947, alongside the runner beans that
did so well that they developed second top and second crop, I had
cucumbers. These plants came through the ground promptly and
seemed perfect in every way. I became busy with other matters for a
week or so, and the next time I looked over the cucumber patch
there were scarcely any plants to be found. They had simply
vanished—taken, of course, by cucumber beetle. That was most
difficult to explain, and is one of the experiences that led me to
begin blaming trouble caused either by insects or by diseases upon
the entire complex of growing conditions (including the soil as the
most important condition) instead of upon the soil alone.
These two instances of cucumber behaviour probably cannot
be explained by any simple formula. In 1927, cucumbers succeeded
perfectly in an old field that had just been ploughed from turf. In
1947, they failed in land that had been well treated and was good
enough to cause beans to give a spectacular performance. It seems
clear that differences in the two soils cannot alone explain such
different behaviour. Knowing that 1927 was a season of
exceptionally high rainfall may help to explain the fine crop that
year—the cucumber, both plant and fruit, being extremely high in
water content. For beans to behave as they did in 1947, there must
have been a fair amount of rain. However, water may have become
critical for the tiny cucumber plants at a time when the beans were
well out of danger from a brief drought. And, in a soil such as mine
was at that time, a crises in water could happen very shortly after
rain. Now, several years later, the soil has more nearly renewed
itself. It is probable that a repetition of the same conditions would
not kill off the cucumbers. Bettering the soil, it seems to me, is the
best insurance the farmer can have that his crops will not be wholly
at the mercy of the weather. And this condition would probably be
more important for success with cucumbers than with most other
crops.
Watermelons and muskmelons are in the same class of crops.
They need enough water, and at the right time, or they perish. Up to
now I have not had satisfactory development of either of these
crops, even when there was enough rainfall. It seems probable that
they like a lighter texture of soil for best growth—more sand. And it
seems logical to expect that they will do better on my land after it
has been developed for another five to ten years. The increasing
amount of organic matter is already making the soil easier to work. I
hope that eventually it will work as easily and noiselessly as a peat
soil. When that time comes, if ever, all the water-loving crops like
cucumbers and the melons should do far better than they do now.
Among the squashes, several have done pretty well, but the
Hubbard, the one I was most anxious to grow, still does not
succeed. Several other varieties have thrived, especially the summer
kinds. In 1950, the Hubbard came nearer than ever before to
producing fruit.
One of the squashes, or as I believe English people would call
them, pumpkins, has been outstanding. It is the variety known in the
United States as Butternut—not Buttercup, which I have not tried.
The Butternut is a new introduction in this district and was difficult
to market because it was new to the public. However, several people
had planted it and had grown a surplus, so that it appeared in the
local stores throughout the autumn. Many who bought it with
misgiving came back for more, and by the end of the season quite a
lot of Butternut squash had passed through the market. I had trouble
throughout half the season because it did not sell freely. Then I
supplied samples to one of the best hotels. The squash was new to
the chef, although he came from New England where it is supposed
to be a favourite. The next time I saw him he arranged to take the
rest of my crop. It had proved to be the best squash he had ever
seen, he said. I plan to plant an acre next season since this gem of a
squash has been introduced to the public.
While my land is being redeveloped, sweet corn (maize) is the
crop of most value. It leaves more residue to be worked into the
soil—one of the most important virtues any crop can have until the
land has recovered some of its old verve. Income from the sale of
sweet corn, while good, is far less than from several other crops that
can be grown with about as little effort. So, while I take special
pride in growing a tasty variety of sweet corn for discriminating
palates, I do not try to have it throughout the season. The marketing
of it late in the season interferes too much with the necessary work
of getting land ready for the wheat crop. This soil can often be
planted as much as a month earlier in spring than most of the
supposedly early horticultural soils in this district. The darker colour
partly accounts for this advantage. I hope the effect of the
subsoiling, which stirs deep soil without turning it, will be to hasten
its drying out to suitable planting condition.
European corn borer has been a formidable pest of sweet corn
in this area for several years. The earliest plantings are the most
affected, so a good many horticulturists purposely allow the first
possible planting dates to pass and wait until May to plant. The
dwindling importance of the corn borer to my sweet corn, because
of the improved soil, encourages me to continue planting this crop
as early as it is possible to get the ground ready. Often I get the first
planting in the ground by the middle of April. Our spring rains may
then keep me from planting again until a month later, but if it is
possible I prefer to make a second planting about two weeks after
the first. These two plantings are usually all I do except for small
plantings for family use. Sweet corn frozen as soon as it can be cut
from the ear and prepared is no less a delight than the fresh corn just
from the field. However, what little experience I have had with
frozen 'corn-on-the-cob' has not made me wish to prepare it again.
This product of the freezer seems to lose all its texture and to
acquire a mushy consistency, even though it retains its flavour fairly
well.
As a means of easing the harvesting of all crops that are to be
planted extensively, I plan to plant the main crop in blocks eight
rows wide, allowing between the blocks two rows of some low-
growing crop over which the tractor can be driven in order to pick
up baskets of the main crop. This plan seems to me quite important.
In the past I have discovered how heavy a big basket of tomatoes or
sweet corn or head lettuce can be. And the farther it must be carried,
the heavier it becomes. My plan of picking up these baskets and
loading them right on to the tractor-drawn trailer or other carrying
arrangement will lessen this burdensome carrying, as well as allow
more time to be devoted to the actual harvesting. Some of the crops
that will be grown in these intervening spaces are cabbage,
cauliflower, beans, peas, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, if any, and one
other crop scarcely mentioned so far—broccoli.
My experience with broccoli has not yet been completely
satisfactory, even though I have grown some broccoli that seemed
faultless. One thing prevented me from trying to market it. Even the
best had an occasional caterpillar. And anyone familiar with
broccoli would believe the worst—or should—if he saw a single
caterpillar on it. Hidden inside the flower heads are apt to be many
more caterpillars than can be seen on the outside. I have had plants
that showed no sign whatever of having been touched by
caterpillars, yet some caterpillars could be found about the heads. I
hope the subsoiling will regularize the moisture supply so that no
caterpillars can be found on the broccoli heads. If it succeeds, I shall
have found a new market crop.
Eggplant is another vegetable I hope to grow in at least one
small space. Up to now I have not tried this crop many times, but I
think my improved soil may now suit it fairly well. Demand for
eggplant is less than for most crops, yet I might hope to sell all that
could be produced by a hundred or more plants. I have discovered
that eggplant grown in this darker soil has a flavour of its own that
is not noticeable in the produce usually available in the markets.
Perhaps if the eggplant was eaten for its own flavour and was not
dependent upon eggs and batter or other devices for flavour, the
demand might increase. It seems worth trying a few hundred plants
to find out.
Kohl-rabi is another crop that deserves a better market. I have
not seen it on sale in this vicinity at all, but shall grow some of it for
home use and for any market demand I can find. It is particularly
sweet as grown in my redeveloped soil and it remains tender
somewhat longer than when the soil producing it is poverty-
stricken.
I should like very much to grow parsley, and have grown
some of excellent quality in this soil. Whether I shall try it depends
upon the availability of labour to keep the weeds out of it. It is so
tiny for some weeks after its very tardy germination that only an
optimist dares plant it. I may use transplants, thus avoiding the early
weeding trouble. For home gardeners, parsley is one crop that
should always be grown. Its content of vitamin A, according to
some authorities, put it high on the list of protective foods. And that
means that, whatever social practice demands, if the meat you order
at a restaurant comes garnished with parsley, you should eat it as
well as the rest of the dish.
Do you like parsnips? To me, a few meals of parsnips in the
winter can be very satisfying. I have grown a few every year just for
home use, but I shall not grow them for market, because they could
not be sold unwashed with us, and as yet I have no arrangements on
the farm for washing any crop.
Then there are green peppers. I have grown a few plants each
year just to see how they developed. Not many years ago the
European corn borer moved in and took possession of some fruits,
but I have not seen a fruit so affected for a couple of years now. To
me that is still further proof that my soil supports its crop more
completely than it used to. So far I have not tried to market peppers,
but I think I shall very shortly.
No crop responds better to improved soil than the turnip. Yet I
believe this crop seldom gets a chance to grow under conditions that
suit it best. One evidence is the fact that even when growing in what
seem perfect conditions, the root is attacked by maggot. To me that
definitely indicates that the growing conditions have not been
suitable. I once saw a turnip grown on my father's farm in Kentucky
that weighed several pounds. It seemed fully as large as a man's
head. And there was no sign of maggot on it or on any turnip I ever
saw in those days. We grew turnips for market every year, storing
the surplus in outdoor piles covered heavily enough to prevent
freezing. They were as good as apples all winter.
The first year I worked my farm I had a significant experience
with turnips. Many apple-tree stumps had to be removed before the
land could be worked easily, but this task was postponed until
winter. Around one stump the weeds were exceptionally rank. I cut
these weeds with a scythe one early August day and literally threw a
few turnip seeds into the debris with little attempt to cover them. As
the weeds wilted, the seeds found lodgment in the soil surface, and
over a period of several weeks many of them germinated. They
grew well, and later I made it a practice each time I came home for
lunch to bring two or three small turnips. These, prepared by boiling
until just tender and seasoned with butter, salt, and pepper, provided
some of the finest eating I can recall having at any time. They were
sweet and juicy, and though I ate them practically every day, I did
not get tired of them. Rather, they always seemed to taste as good as
if I had not eaten turnips for a long time. That satisfying quality of
every food grown from a well-developed soil seems to suggest that
these vegetables are being fully nourished and are therefore capable
of nourishing fully whoever consumes them.
This may be a good place to mention something that seems
common to every crop grown here, especially as the soil becomes
well suited to that crop. The better soil seems to develop a sweeter
product. I believe that these better crops contain more minerals,
more protein, and more vitamins. The fact that they are actually
more completely satisfying fits the supposition that their content of
food compounds is higher. Whether or not this is actually true has
not yet been proved by chemical or biological tests. It was a surprise
to me to find these crops also apparently higher in sugar content.
And I began to wonder if there is a connection between the
formation of protein and the formation of sugar. Dr. Albrecht has
mentioned the apparent, perhaps proved, connection between the
development of higher starch content and the waning fertility of the
soil. The higher starch content goes with lower mineral and protein
content, the starch possibly being formed when the crop failed to
receive in the soil solution enough compounds of nitrogen to permit
the formation of proteins. Is it fantastic to suggest that normally,
then, high protein accompanies high sugar content? I have no means
of judging the truth of the matter except that a supposedly higher
protein content in a food crop goes with sweeter taste than is the
case with the identical crop grown by a poorer soil. I hope further
enlightenment will come from somebody more competent than I am
to analyse the situation.
Any discussion of sweetness suggests the garden pea,
treasured chiefly for this quality, though it is also a high-protein
food. I have not grown peas for market at all, but I have been
growing them for home use. The question of protein and sweetness
would probably not have been suggested by this crop, simply
because it has the ability to get its own nitrogen—facilitating the
formation of proteins—almost directly from the air. The pea crop,
therefore, would always be sweet if the suggestion I have already
made is correct. The connection between sugar in the crops and a
better soil was first suggested by the sweeter potatoes, the sweeter
tomatoes, and especially the sweeter maize. Guests began to inquire
if sugar had been used in the cooking. It seemed impossible to them
that these foods could be as sweet otherwise. If sugar and protein
content are actually related, is there a possibility that some time in
the future we may get enough sugar for our needs for the production
of body energy directly from our vegetables and will no longer need
sugar as a separate food item?
Incidentally, after leaving peas out of the market-crop list for
years, I expect to grow a few hundred feet experimentally for
market. Doubt that they would be profitable has been my chief
reason for not growing them heretofore. Now, in this better soil, it
seems worth while to investigate their marketability.
Strawberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and the various small fruits
and vine and orchard fruits—all perennials—I either am growing or
expect to grow for home use. Any surpluses will be marketed, of
course, if there is a demand for them.
One thing distinguishes this last-mentioned group of crops
from all the others that have been discussed. No stirring of the soil
whatever is done. My plan has been to mulch them, but such
mulching as has been done so far has been incomplete and
somewhat sporadic. Mulching also requires work. Often the
mulching should be done when the time cannot possibly be spared
from other pressing tasks. The asparagus, as an example, was to be
mulched by four inches of sawdust. One corner was prepared, but I
have never brought in the sawdust to complete this jot)—and the
original corner now has a very shallow layer of sawdust on it. Just
what to do with this patch is still one of my unsolved problems. It is
one-twelfth of an acre in extent and should yield a considerable
income if properly looked after. However, there has been no time
when the sawdust could be applied without interfering ruinously (as
it seemed) with some other crop.
The mulching has been more nearly complete and adequate
for the orchard trees. Since they have not yet come into regular
bearing, it is not possible to discuss intelligently the effects of this
mulching. The plan is to mow annually the 100-foot strip between
the fruit-tree rows. These mowings, or whatever may be necessary
of them, will then be moved into the tree rows. This has been done
faithfully, except in 1949, since the trees were first set in the autumn
of 1946. Readers may wonder how I plan to deal with mice. The
truth is that I have no plan. I have lost only trees that were
obviously in trouble for other reasons than mice. The soil itself was
not suitable for growing orchard trees when these were set in it.
Some have failed for this reason. The continuing effect of decay of
the mulch is gradually correcting the soil conditions, so that in a few
years I should be able to make a case against the mice if they
actually attack a tree. Privately, I expect no attack from either mice
or rabbits except on trees already ailing. I have done no spraying
and no dusting, and expect to do none. There was leaf curl on two of
the peach trees in 1947. In 1948 the same two trees were affected,
but a bit less seriously. In 1949 only one showed any sign of the
trouble, and by 1950 there was none even on that tree. With such a
record, I doubt whether even the man who manufactures the
chemicals would use them. Of course, he probably would not wait
to accumulate such a record. He would be sure that if he saw leaf
curl or any one of a dozen other diseases in his orchard, the loss of
the trees would be inevitable without spraying. I waited to see what
would happen if I did nothing except the mulching. The result is
exactly what I expected.
The family-size plot of rhubarb was generously mulched a few
years ago. It still contains some sawdust, its broad leaves probably
having prevented the wind from picking up the sawdust and
carrying it away. The mulch seems to have had just the right effect
on the flavour of the leaf stems. I can cook rhubarb when it is first
large enough in spring and, believe it or not, eat it without sugar.
Later on, the stalks are less sweet, and, I admit the earliest could be
improved somewhat by a little sugar. However, without the sugar, it
is tasty and tangy, as rhubarb should be. This rhubarb has been so
satisfactory that I have set a small additional space to this crop for
market.
 Strawberries have been a source of enjoyment every year
since we first started them in 1945. In the autumn of 1946 I moved
the plants to a permanent situation and, after they had grown tall
enough, mulched them solidly with sawdust four inches deep. Since
then no new plants have been set. In the spring of 1949 it became
obvious that the sawdust had so nearly disappeared that it no longer
prevented the runners from populating the whole surface of the soil.
As a stop-gap, I secured from a local chain store more than fifty
sugar bags of sixty-pound-capacity. These bags were ripped out flat,
spread between the twenty-four-inch rows of strawberry plants, and
weighted down along the edges to shut out light. This treatment
retarded the young plants that were overrunning the space between
the rows, but it was effective for only one season. Last spring it was
obvious that something more drastic must be done, because most of
the paper was just ready to fall apart. As an experiment I bought
tarred roofing material in the roll and split the thirty-six-inch width
of the rolls, laying a one-half of the width in each space between the
plant rows. The June crop was excellent, providing considerably
more berries than I could use or preserve, so for the first time some
were sold through the shops. The long-term effect of this type of
mulching remains to be seen, however.
Each year since 1948 I have depended upon the later
production of these everbearing plants for berries to freeze. Last
year there was very little production after June. Whether this
decrease in production resulted from seasonal conditions or from
the roofing-paper mulch I do not know. The plants showed little
effect that could be charged against either weather or mulch
material. Apparently the plants grew much as might be expected,
but simply did not set fruit as usual. I shall watch with much interest
what happens this year, for I should like to be able to freeze forty to
fifty pints this season. If it turns out that something about the tar-
paper mulch causes the plants to cease bearing, I shall indeed be
sorry, for it is a handy way to accomplish the mulching.
These strawberries are a Minnesota hybrid—the only hybrid
crop on the farm so far as I know. It has been interesting to study
their development since their start under the sawdust mulch. Under
usual growing conditions this variety seems to be poor in quality
and flavour, though a shining or glossy pale red in colour. For
several seasons the berries did not ripen uniformly. The top of the
fruit became deep red, while the portion next to the stem was still
green or white. It was necessary in the first two years in which we
ate the berries to cut out from one-fourth to one-third of each berry.
Last year, however, ripening seemed to proceed uniformly, and very
little trimming was needed.
Years ago I had a similar difficulty with tomatoes. One
season, frost found my plants with bushels of completely green
fruit, though we had gathered only a gallon or so of the ripe
tomatoes. That was before I had decided that ploughing was
incorrect, and these plants were growing in soil that had been
cultivated in such a manner that a layer of street leaves underlay the
whole surface of the market garden. This layer varied in thickness
up to as much as two or three inches. The following year tomatoes
were not set at the usual planting times because of long-continued
rainy weather, and the plants bought for setting were a foot or more
in height. Therefore, I set these tall plants in holes punched deep
enough to put their roots in the leaf layer. That season we had no
trouble with ripening. All fruit ripened fully and quickly, an
indication that there was some connection between the quantity of
organic matter in the soil and the ripening of the fruit. On the basis
of this behaviour of tomatoes more than a decade earlier, I
wondered whether the better ripening of last year's strawberries
might be the result of better soil conditions where their roots were
feeding.
I am glad to report, too, that these hybrid berries which
originally had no special flavour—almost no flavour at all, really—
have become so well flavoured as to cause guests to praise them. It
seemed that as the season progressed the berries became richer in
flavour. Last year I was not able to check this point because of the
failure of later production.
Some readers will wonder how I can hope to continue to
harvest strawberries each year without renewing the plants at least
once in two years—as it the almost universal practice. The answer
to that is almost too easy. The truth is that my plants do renew
themselves, but they are limited as to where they can establish new
runners. All new plants must be in the six-inch-wide space in which
the present plants are growing. The remainder of the area is
covered, to prevent runners from growing all over the patch. The
rather painful expense for roofing-paper mulch, therefore, saves me
many hours of work weeding these berries, and would make it
possible for me to pick the crop in my Sunday clothes if I liked. It
keeps the plants from crowding themselves literally beyond
possibility of growing anything more than wizened fruit. The results
so far have favoured this mulching system—at least when paper is
used. The results next year should indicate whether I am heading for
trouble by using tar paper instead of untreated paper.
Red raspberries grow in the place where I deposit all the
kitchen wastes. I simply dump the garbage pail wherever the waste
seems to be thinning out. That is the entire cultural treatment the
raspberry plants get, except that once or twice during the growing
season I have to do something about the weeds. Also, it is necessary
once a year to remove the dead canes and trim out enough of the
new ones so that I can get between the canes to pick the crop. As the
berries occupy only about fifty square feet, I can pick a great deal of
the crop from outside.
The interesting thing about these raspberries is that when I
first set them, I detested the fruit (my wife liked it). Now that the
soil has been improved (by the decay of at least one foot of hay
spread over the land before the plants were set, with the addition of
all the decay of garbage that has occurred there in the three years), I
find I can eat these berries with relish. I still prefer strawberries, but
the red raspberry jam on the cellar fruit shelf is dwindling fast as
spring approaches again. Just what was wrong with berries grown in
ordinary, undeveloped soil, I do not know, but I do know that these
taste much better.
Now for the 'crop' that has interested me more, perhaps, than
any other. I refer to mushrooms. I am not, or at least was not, a
mushroom fan. To buy them at the usual shop prices seemed to me
fantastic, especially since I grew up with a fear of mushrooms and
never ate them except at hotels or restaurants. I never went
mushroom hunting and knew very little about them. Yet I knew that
they grow only where some rich source of plant food has lain
undisturbed for some time, and that knowledge kept me from
ignoring them altogether. I began to wonder whether it might not be
possible to grow mushrooms in spots about the farm where no
tillage was done and where the products of decay were
accumulating. The mulching methods I was using suggested that I
was really creating such places as a by-product of mulching.
Then I had a happy thought. Many seedsmen sell mushroom
spawn. What would be simpler than to scatter some of this spawn
about these sawdust-mulched places and see what happened. Wild
and probably poisonous kinds of toadstools and other fungi would
doubtless come from these mulched areas anyhow, but I reasoned
that I would learn to know the kind that grew from the spawn I had
scattered. These I surely could trust to be edible. So I bought some
spawn and tried it out—with negative results that first year. No
fungous growths appeared at all. I tried again the following season,
and to my delight an abundance of mushrooms resulted. Some even
came in places where the soil had been cultivated the previous year.
These, however, were too small and pallid for use as food. The fact
that they came in the regularly cultivated soil, however, indicated
that it was also accumulating surplus plant nutrients.
The fact that mushrooms are edible and highly nutritious can
mean but one thing concerning their growth: lacking the green
leaves necessary for the manufacture of starch, they must find in
readily usable form in the soil all the nutrients they require for their
development; and this cache of material must include also such
proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and minerals as the mushroom
requires for its growth. Judging from the speed with which these
strange plants pop from the surface and assume full size, all this
material must be instantly available for transfer from below the
ground to above it. I have come to marvel at the subsurface storage
of nourishment which must await the living spawn if it is to perform
its functions.
Mushrooms, of course, odd as their ways are, are no more
mysterious than any other living thing. What makes them seem so is
the fact that we know so much less about them than about green
plants—or at least we think we know so much more about the green
plants. The fact is that our actual knowledge of what goes on within
a living plant or in the darkness of the soil from which it grows is so
thin that it ought rightly to be called conjecture rather than
information. We shall learn one day, surely, to be less awed by the
'marvels' of scientific discovery—so often proved to be spurious—
and to be more impressed by the capabilities of Nature when she has
been released from the limitations by which men have unwittingly
bound her. The redeveloped soil grows green plants amazingly
better than traditionally farmed land does. It would not be surprising
if in time a completely redeveloped area should be found to grow
edible mushrooms just as well as it grows cabbage and other green
plants. It seems clear that appropriate caches of nutrients may in
time be found to exist in such soil, and that, apparently, is what
mushrooms require of the soil in which they grow.
Regardless of what may lie in the future in that respect, here is
something that can be done by every city dweller who has a very
small piece of land, even though it be shaded. The leaves from
shade trees planted along suburban avenues (and from other
sources, of course) may be piled in some out-of-the-way place. The
mass should be a foot or more thick. Chopping or crushing the
leaves will help to assure prompt wetting of the entire pile, for until
they are wet, they do not begin to decay. After a year or two the
whole mass will have become black and, therefore, a suitable place
for mushroom spawn to develop. Seed the surface with spawn, then
be sure that the surface does not dry off. The ideal condition of
moisture can generally be maintained if a board, or any other
protecting cover, is laid over the surface for a few days. I do not
know how early you should expect to discover the white lines and
streaks that indicate that the spawn is developing, but the cover will
be needed less after this has occurred. Sprinkling the surface lightly
with water and often enough to prevent its drying out is the only
treatment the leaves will require after that. Before many weeks your
effort should be rewarded by the appearance of the buttons on the
surface of the leaves. They should be more satisfactory eating than
you can get elsewhere, besides having cost you little more than the
price of the spawn. Also, if you allow a single button to spread its
'umbrella' and cover the leaf mould beneath with spores, your site
will be 'seeded' for the following season. Try this, you city dwellers
who wish for but do not have space for a garden. The mushrooms
you grow will be just as good as meat qualitatively, not pound for
pound. They will replace some high-priced meat. And you will have
a right to be proud of your achievement. If, by chance, you do not
succeed the first try, do not give up. I failed the first year,
remember. Of course you will take proper precautions not to
confuse any other fungi—toadstools—that may grow up with the
mushrooms for some of these other growths are very poisonous
indeed.
That my adventures with crops have been intriguing should
now be clear. It should likewise be obvious that only a start has
been made towards establishing the virtues of the fully redeveloped
soil. One man alone can do little. Eventually there must be
leadership in this field by professional agriculturists, who can teach
farmers the new methods. The wrong ideas have had their day. It is
high time we faced about and faced the shocking fact that we have
been heading the wrong way all the time.
Nothing I have done is impossible for a host of other people. It
is possible that there are areas where it would not be practicable to
attempt to redevelop farm soils. However, until somebody has used
essentially the same methods that I have used—with the officially-
recommended applications for the first few years thrown in—and
failed to re-create better conditions of production in the soil, it is a
fair presumption that these methods would work in most parts of
this country. Unmechanized peasants the world over use such
methods with success. Surely mechanized peasants can do as well.
 CHAPTER TWELVE

Pauper Soils
*

D
ARE I be so frank as to attach the adjective 'pauper' as a
qualification of any soils that have given us such life as we
have? They cannot rise up and smite me, so I am safe in that
direction; but even so, it seems a shame to have to resort to such
name-calling in order to rouse the public to sufficient action to
correct the abuses which have made our soils into paupers. The
description is so apt, however, that I think I shall risk the
imprecations that may come down upon my head from interests that
may be irked by the revelations that must be made.
American soils at least have certainly done the best they could
at all times completely to nourish our population in the United
States. It is no fault basic in our soils that has made it necessary for
our people to gather in their food from the ends of the earth in order
to compensate for those known shortcomings in the quality of our
food which result from the impoverished condition of our soils. Or
had it occurred to you that the necessity for orange juice every day
might originate from the inability of a soil, that is almost completely
mineral, to conjure up a particular vitamin in sufficient quantity to
enable us to enjoy health?
Vitamin C is only one of a number of essentials on which our
soils must be assisted by other soils if we are to live in reasonably
comfortable health. And what, I wonder, will you who know say
about English soils in this respect? Our entire food supply in the
United States certainly requires a system of checks and balances on
the part of the kitchen mechanic the mother or the wife must be if
pellagra, beriberi, tooth decay, and a long list of other deficiency
ailments are to be avoided. Calorie content of the meals must be
watched carefully to avoid obesity because American soils no
longer can supply continuously the crops that are being grown with
enough minerals and nitrogen to enable plants to manufacture
complete proteins. The alternative is to create an undue proportion
of starch, fat, or other compounds of less value in good nutrition.
Hence, unless the American housewife keeps constantly on her
guard to balance meals properly, her family will certainly lack some
of the essentials for good health. Probably the problem is very
similar in the British Isles. You will know the truth of that better
than I.
There is no doubt that the soils of the United States—and of
other parts of the world where soils have been misused during the
recent past—originally possessed a heritage of accumulated growth
power such as can be imagined only by those who have seen the
performance of such soils. The soils on the Great Plains in the
United States—often many feet in depth, were assumed to be
inexhaustible when first broken by the plough. They were the result
of ages of natural development in which each season's remnant of
buffalo-grazed grass fell down, rotted, and helped feed the next
year's grass growth. Always there was a surplus of partially decayed
grass left over to continue decaying and adding to the already
enormous store of 'composted' dead grass.
Even the soils that originated from forest development had
some of this character—not so much in depth, because each year the
trees stored permanently in the annual ring of growth a portion of
what, in the case of the non-woody grass, had to become part of the
accumulating growth reserve of the soil. Now neither the forest soils
nor the grassland soils in this area have more than a fleeting
remnant of this former glorious stock of accumulated wealth.
The European settlers came from land that had been
mismanaged until it could no longer supply everything its people
needed for health. Columbus was searching for a shorter route to the
far eastern land of spices, then desperately needed by Europeans to
supplement the foods which their pallid soils failed to endow with
appropriate flavours. In Europe at that time, just as in our country
now, people were dying of deficiency diseases because the lack of
minerals in the food supply made necessary supplementary foods
that lack of transportation made it impossible to get. Maybe you had
not realized how necessary to health, under our present soil
conditions, railways, highways, and sea lanes may really be. They
are certainly indispensable to us in America, at least until we
awaken to our peril and redevelop our soils so that they can again
fully support us in health. No doubt you will agree that the same
may be true in England and in many other parts of the world that
have had the land farmed in a way that is comparable with the
treatment it has received at the hands of well-meaning American
farmers.
European newcomers to our western hemisphere in the old
days revelled in the belief that now they had nothing to worry about
because of the 'inexhaustibility' of the super-soils they had found.
India and its herbs and spices could go hang. These soils endowed
their products with flavours that needed no enhancement. Do you
think I am imagining things? Well, I am. But that speculation is
based solidly on my having found precisely that same thing, to a
degree, in the foods that now grow in my partially redeveloped soil.
My soil is no longer a pauper, thanks to natural forces designed
neatly to repeat anywhere the identical processes that made the
original soils of my country.
The extent to which redevelopment of our soils can liberate us
from present diet rules would surprise most of us, I daresay. Enough
has happened to my soil to produce the condition that I no longer
need imported vitamin C. In fact, I have scarcely tasted citrus fruit
or juices for six months or more and have not been inconvenienced
by not having them. Yet I doubt if it would be possible to exist
solely from the products of this soil of mine as yet. Its refusal to
grow quite a number of food crops properly indicates that its
development is still far from complete, so I am not trying to
abandon such standbys as milk, coffee, brown sugar, dark molasses,
dried milk, and wheat germ. They are still making up for some
things lacking in the soil, I feel sure. But I think it likely that in time
I shall not actually need any of these things. Indeed, meat, which
seems essential to many people, has been a very minor item in my
diet for a long time.
I hasten to add that I am not a vegetarian, militant or
otherwise. I like meat as well as most people do, but I find it less
and less necessary as the garden crops become more completely
nourishing. Of all places in the world to be a vegetarian on
principle, the worst perhaps is the United States. Unless one can
ignore costs or has access to the products of an exceptional soil, the
alternates are not nice: one must either subsist largely on our
abundant, but still too costly, 'cheap' foods, or go hungry. If a man
has not enough cash to enable him to buy the 'protective' foods to
make up for the deficiencies in those he can afford, he is out of luck
in this country. It is almost the same as a sentence to obesity.
Our domestic animals 'screen out' for us some of the unwanted
fats and starches of our grains, so that when we eat meat we do not
have to swallow a lot of these superabundant 'energy' compounds in
order to get a little of the protein our bodies must have. By using
much of the excessive energy-producing portion of the foodstuffs
our misused soil produces, the animals supply their own bodies with
fuel that the human population certainly does not need, and transmit
to us in their muscles and other edible tissues food that is somewhat
less objectionable. Yet, knowing the frailties of our soil in its
attempt to grow healthy plants and knowing the extent to which
animals must see their doctors after eating such questionable
foodstuffs, we may wonder just how 'protective' much of our meat
may be
Imagine, then, how 'unprotective' must be the 'energy foods'
widely advertised and dispensed in packages that cost several times
as much as their contents! Many of these are frankly highly refined
(Should we say 'robbed'?) forms of our plentiful grains. They must,
of necessity, be very low in the protein, mineral, and vitamin values
for which our bodies cry out in hunger. The low cost of the food
itself to the manufacturer is what makes it possible for its dispensers
to put so much money into advertising and packing these things.
Keep that in mind when you buy.
When we take time to consider that all this trouble with our
foods originates from soils that were solvent in the beginning but
have been spent into pauperism, it seems imperative that something
be done to bring about the necessary changes to enable our soils to
feed us properly again. The urgency of this matter should inspire
someone to organize such a reformation in the countries where the
damage has been done. I believe that if soils were redeveloped,
there would no longer be a farm problem. Apart from the gains to
health that could be achieved, it would be a great relief to
everybody, at any rate in the United States, to have that political
football disposed of permanently.
It should be said here, too, that such a sweeping reform could
not be accomplished without broad dislocations in the economy of
different countries. But the key fact to which we should all have to
adjust ourselves would be an essentially cheaper food supply as well
as more wholesome foods of every kind. To adjust other things to
cheaper food should be immensely easier than the constant
readjustments most, if not all, countries have now been forced to
make in the opposite direction for many years.
To some extent, such a development is already under way in
America, but it lacks the crusader spirit necessary to accomplish
such things with speed. Grassland farming is a step in the right
direction. Under grass our land can redevelop itself. Whether it will
be allowed to do so is something else. Periodic ploughing-up and
reseeding of grasslands should not be needed. The fact that such a
procedure seems necessary is merely a symptom of mishandling of
the land while in grass. Unnecessary stirring of the soil is a
hindrance to redevelopment and should not be a part of grassland
farming practice. There are good reasons behind this statement.
If the stand of grass appears to be thinning out (grass, not
legumes), that fact is evidence that there has been too much grazing.
The land has been 'spending' itself when it should have been
hoarding away below ground excess energy for use through
droughts, freezing periods, and other difficult times. Grass farming
can be just as hard on the soil as row-crop farming, even though no
erosion may be evident. To get the best possible benefit for the
soil—and eventually for its owner—grazing should be so adjusted
that the soil surface can never be seen. It should be so light that the
grass under foot has the spring of a mattress. That, of course, in a
depleted soil, means extremely light grazing, or extremely heavy
use of manures, or both, until such time as the soil has become alive
again with all the community population that goes with a well-
developed soil. The fact that such care must be taken in the
beginning to make grassland farming as beneficial as it should be
simply registers the fact that the start is being made on soils of
pauper quality. Maximum grassland growth cannot be developed
immediately on such soil. Once the soil has regained its old
resiliency, grazing can be heavier without penalty, and then the
owner will begin to reap real financial benefits.
One happening that will cause many a farmer to worry will be
the final disappearance from such a grass stand of most if not all the
leguminous plants. Agricultural teaching has been such that this
event may prompt the ploughing-up and reseeding of a field. That
would be a mistake. Just remember the ancient buffalo pastures of
the Great Plains, with not a legume for miles. Legume crops
function as suppliers of nitrogen in soil that lacks inherent ability to
procure enough nitrogen through the agency of non-symbiotic
organisms. But once such a soil has become abundantly and
permanently populated with free-living, nitrogen-gathering
organisms, the problem of nitrogen is at an end, and the legumes
naturally disappear because they cannot successfully compete with
the more vigorous grass. So the owner should not allow himself to
be stampeded into a plough-up, the net effect of which will be to
delay rather than hasten the ultimate redevelopment. Such handling
of grassland means, of course, the abandonment of crop rotation on
that land. A pasture that has been husbanded up to the point
indicated will produce more value than the land would be likely to
produce if put to ordinary row crops. It might make a wonderful
cabbage patch after several years in such a well-administered
pasture; but unless some drastic economic change has occurred in
the community meanwhile, grazing is still likely to be the best use
even for fine cabbage land. It is no crime to grow grass on perfectly
good cabbage land. In fact, that is what I mean in my dainty quarrel
with the idea of land use. My idea is that the land should operate
always at its highest possible level. Then it will produce no food or
forage crops that will be deficient. The fact that three-fourths of our
American land would have to be given back to the Indians or
somehow disposed of for uses other than ordinary farming, once it
has been redeveloped, is a problem I do not propose to tackle in this
book. That it will be an actual problem, however, there can be no
doubt. I do not offer a problemless situation; merely a ploughless
one that offers more of life and living, for sure, than anything else I
can think of.
We have been discussing grassland, which the recent immense
increases in grass farming could develop if it were permitted to do
so. Of more immediate importance, of course, is the manner in
which the land devoted to commercial vegetables and fruits is
managed.
The ultimate solvency of the pauper soils of to-day depends
not on fertilizers or other additions from the outside. Suitable use of
these aids may be part of the best procedure for the redevelopment
of soils. But to continue the present practices of land treatment,
designed solely for ensuring the current crop, is merely to continue
the pauperizing process. A clean break away from such practices is
needed, but it may be accomplished more easily and with more
speed if the initial break is merely changing from the use of the
mould-board plough to some other form of tillage. That change is
imperative. The abandonment of fertilizer practices is not.
As for the implements that may best be used in place of the
mould-board plough, that seems to be a problem the farmer himself
must decide. Some men have removed the mould-boards from their
ploughs and used them as before. Such procedure seems to be
indicated for areas where a turf has to be broken which would not
yield to available disc implements. The turf would be cut loose from
below, and from the land side, so that its destruction would be
assured. Where clean-tilled row crops are to be grown, it may be
difficult from this kind of ploughing to make a seed-bed that can be
planted later and cultivated with ease. One possible solution for this
problem might be a second ploughing, using the mould-boards and
running only a couple of inches deeper. There perhaps would still be
some rubbish on any surface that could be made, but probably it
could be worked successfully.
To suggest extra ploughings is to invite the criticism that this
way of handling the land makes too much work. Few people know
better than I the amount of work that really may be required,
especially when disc implements only are used. My sympathies are
with the objector on that score. Nevertheless, the future will fully
justify the trouble that must be taken for the first few years. Those
early years are the ones that are most trying to the farmer's patience.
Those are the years when the soil is still hard and difficult to cut
into, so that rubbish tends to accumulate on the surface instead of
being worked into it. That, however, is merely a phase. After two or
three years, judging from my experience, the surface begins to yield
more easily, and as a result less rubbish is left on the surface to
interfere with later operations. I should say, too, that if sufficiently
heavy tools were used during those first few years, better results
would probably follow. The ordinary farm-weight disc harrows in
the United States are not heavy enough for real land breaking when
the surface is as hard as much of American land is to-day. Later on,
the surface becomes so easy to work that these same implements
that were too light in the beginning are perfect for the job.
We badly need the co-operation of those whom we pay to
teach farmers how to farm. However, the fact that these men know
nothing about the possibilities for redeveloping our soils makes it
certain that for some time to come we cannot have such help. We
shall have to continue paying these people to teach expedient and
easy methods that will perpetuate the poverty of these soils, while
those of us who wish to restore our soils to solvency will have to
proceed as if there were no United States Department of Agriculture
or experiment stations or colleges of agriculture. To them, we shall
be cultists and, therefore, beneath notice. And until enough people
to constitute a factor in public affairs have joined us, there will be
no change of front in official circles. At least, that is how it seems
from the efforts that I have made to get co-operation heretofore.
These pauper soils are not our responsibility. None of us now
living started the chain of events that has finally reduced them to
their present anaemic condition. Nevertheless, the future health of
our people demands that we assume responsibility for their
rehabilitation. That is a job we dare not shirk unless we are willing
to drift from bad to worse. Good economics, good public health,
good business and good labour relations for the future, good morals,
good educational facilities—all demand to be based on solvent and
exuberant soils instead of weakly trying to exist on the pauper soil
basis of to-day. Soils that must be publicly supported are not a
sound basis for anything other than the sort of public confusion that
now characterizes our so-called civilization. Let us shake off that
situation and climb to a better status in every way—through soil
restoration.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Something for Nothing

*

W HETHER you can get something for nothing in this world

or not depends upon what you are trying to get, where
you are searching, and how you are going about wangling
real costless value. Do not forget, of course, the many 'best things in
life' that are actually free. Those who warn us against expecting to
get something for nothing are not thinking of these richest of life's
blessings, of course; they have in mind things you can buy in shops
and markets on the barrel heads. And, naturally, such things are not
free.
In this discussion we're going after the good things to eat that
somehow are concocted mysteriously by plants that grow out of our
soils. The point is that, contrary to the generally accepted view,
these things are free, or so nearly free that they seem to cost
nothing.
To begin with, the agronomist will tell us that if we are
expecting to grow good crops on ordinary American farm soil
without 'paying' out a good proportion of what we expect the crop to
be worth for soil improvement in the form of fertilizers, lime, and
other aids, we are in for disappointment. His idea is to test the soil
and match its shortages of ready-to-use plant foods with
applications of these in suitable forms.
Oddly enough, I'm going to agree completely with that point
of view. The agronomist is wholly right, because he thinks solely in
terms of the usual impotent, substandard stuff that exists on
practically every farm in this country to-day, the hard-packed
remnant of what used to be soil. He certainly isn't thinking of that
'unreconstructed, rebellious' acreage after it has been redeveloped.
Indeed, it would be impossible for him to visualize the normal,
spontaneous behaviour of such a soil, for that would be entirely
outside his experience.
The purpose of this chapter is to show that the American
scientist's failure to sense the change of character that can occur as a
soil is redeveloped is due to a 'blind spot' acquired in his agricultural
college. From experience I know the basic information that was
taught to students in the United States about thirty-five years ago.
To-day's teaching must include these same items, because they are
the fundamentals upon which facts later discovered must be based.
Here are a few random soil facts as I learned them in Soil Physics.

(1) Organic matter exposed to water absorbs several times its own
weight, the water being taken into space within the organic particles.
(2) No mineral mass, regardless of how fine its particles, can absorb
as much water as does an equal weight of organic matter, for the mineral
can hold water only on the surfaces of the particles.
(3) Conditions favouring decay are practically perfect beneath the
surface of the soil so that decomposition must be occurring continuously
when temperature and moisture are within suitable limits.
 (4) Since organic matter is about 50 per cent carbon, the most bulky
product of organic decay is the gas, carbon dioxide.
(5) Carbon dioxide dissolves readily in water, so the continuous
decay going on in the soil normally generates continuously a fresh supply
of carbonic acid (which is the name of the solution of carbon dioxide in
water). In Soil Chemistry we learned that carbonic acid is the most potent
'reagent' known for dissolving plant-nutrient elements from the mineral
particles of the soil.
(6) Organic decay is thought to be one cause of granulation of soil
particles.
(7) That water literally climbs upward through the soil was taught
and demonstrated by soil tube tests. Large tubes were filled with soil
particles of two different finenesses and with a mixture of the two. The
three tubes then were set in a pan of water and we watched how rapidly the
water rose in the 'sand' tube. Movement in the tube filled with
miscellaneous-sized particles was slower. Slowest of all was the rise in the
'clay' tube, but movement continued for many days, finally reaching the
top of the five-foot tube. In the 'sand' tube the rise stopped at about two
feet. I helped another boy fill an extra tube with fine particles, in which we
modified the conditions by placing a quarter-inch or so of finely-chopped
organic matter of some kind about an inch below the top and filled the rest
of the tube with clay like that below the organic layer. As we half
expected, the water refused to rise above the layer of organic matter. The
professor was not edified by this irregularity in the procedure, but we
thought the results corresponded with the ideas we had obtained from the
first two points, mentioned by number in the foregoing. Our little layer of
organic matter had been more attractive to the rising water than the clay
above it could be. Q. E. D.

These are but a few of the facts we were taught, just as I

happen to recall them as I write. They were true then. They are true
now. And soil may be expected to behave (if permitted) in
accordance with these facts. That has been my reasoning all along;
and that reasoning was the basis of my faith, long before the present
work was started at my farm, that if given a chance, soil is
absolutely self-sufficient. I knew, from similarly basic facts taught
in Soil Chemistry, that the gross quantity of minerals useful to
plants (and present in practically all soils) is almost beyond
calculation. These minerals are relatively insoluble, of course. If
they could be dissolved as readily as common salt, we could not
expect them to resist weathering. An earth made of such highly
soluble stuff would have vanished into water solution (because the
available quantity of water would be able to liquefy it) within a
relatively short time, so that this planet would not have been
habitable. Are we not lucky in the fact that water cannot readily
dissolve away all our plant nutrients in a short time and leave us to
starve!
Point 5 in the foregoing, however, looked to me like a ray of
hope, as I reached the conclusion that soil must be able to generate
its own supply of ready-made plant nutrients. I depended upon the
truth of the teaching that I remembered from college days, and
proceeded accordingly. That is, I did not expect that normal water
relations within the soil could exist when a layer of organic matter
lies between the surface and the deep-down source of rising water,
so I resolved not to 'muddy the water' by allowing my land to be
ploughed (an operation which establishes such a layer of organic
matter). Then I expected to supply as much organic matter as was
practical, as often as possible, and watch the results. That, briefly,
tells the story of my work here during the past seven years. And
production of crops that were sold wholesale for more than $900 per
acre each of the last two years attests the validity of the ideas on
which this project has been based. I do not expect, naturally, that
such a scale of income per acre can be maintained on a larger
acreage, but the productiveness of the land can be just as high on a
thousand acres as on the small scale to which my operations have so
far been confined.
What the scientists have forgotten are these basic facts. What
probably caused them to overlook these basic facts was their
introduction to the mould board plough as an object for study. They
were taught all the fine points of the engineering involved in plough
design, its balance, its provisions for cutting towards the land and
for drawing towards the subsoil in order to make it easy to keep the
horse-drawn ploughs of those days in the ground. Then there were
the problems of side draft, three-horse and four-horse hitches, and
so on. All these intricate problems served to distract the mental
abilities of students from the inherent facts of the soil in which the
plough was to operate. All this apart from the fact that a hundred or
more years earlier the plough had been accepted as the only
practical implement for conquering the turf that must be broken on
farms where the customary crop rotation is practised. Unquestioning
faith in the plough was easy, since it already was universally
accepted and had no detractors except the hired man who had to
follow it.
Never once have I, on the other hand, doubted the self-
sufficiency of the soil since I first decided that I had caught the
plough at its deviltry in July, 1937. Following several years of soil
treatment similar to ploughing, but several times magnified in its
effects, I finally decided that the ugly disposition of my soil was due
to the very thing that I was doing in an effort to improve it. I had
been digging deep trenches, filling them with tramped-down leaves,
and throwing the soil from the next trench on top. This was, in
effect, ploughing, with ploughing's effects much magnified by the
fact that I often had a three-inch layer of leaves, whereas the plough
seldom would put more than a single inch of material into the
ground.
And, while I have been sure of my ground all along, I still
have been able to understand why scientific men, who had not had
the chance to see these effects that I had spent several years
experiencing, could not agree with the view which I was forced to
adopt. It is logical that I should think as I do, and equally necessary
that they should continue to think in their accustomed ways. So, I
was not seriously disturbed when at Athens, Ohio, in June, 1946, at
a soil and food conference, one of the country's most famous men in
soils made the scientists' point of view 'official' by labelling my
efforts and my line of thinking as 'bunkum.' I quote partially a single
sentence from his speech: 'To say that chemical fertilizers . . .
should (my view would put it "need") not be used to make up
inevitable deficiencies of nutrient elements that cannot be supplied
through the use of organic matter is just pure bunkum.' This man is
said to have trained more of the country's soil scientists than any
other one man in the country, so his opinion of my philosophy
represents the authentic view of the profession.
 I think the gentleman expected to get a rise out of me with that
crack. He knew I was in the audience, for we had sat at the same
table at lunch that day and had engaged in pleasant conversation to
our mutual pleasure. I still rate him as a friend, knowing that he
could not possibly think differently, since he lacks the experience
that would force him to think otherwise.
At that time my ideas lacked facts to back them up, so that I
should not have attempted to answer him. It would be different to-
day, since I have the soil's own refutation of the 'bunkum' idea. That
happens to be even more authentic than the ideas of any
professional group could be! The argument now would be against
facts established by the soil's behaviour, not against any theoretical
opinions of mine. I am perfectly willing to have the agronomic
fraternity tackle that argument. The longer they wait, the more facts
will be available. Of course, as the scientist works things out, the
expectation is that while a soil may be able for a few years to
maintain its production at a high level without additions of any kind,
the time will come when additions will have to be made. He expects
that the future will confirm his views. From the spontaneous and
exuberant way in which this soil of mine seems to produce better
each succeeding year, I am glad to await the final issue.
In the soil expert's completely honest effort to combat what to
him is a dangerous new philosophy of soil management, he
advances the idea that, while I may actually have soil to work with
which will respond favourably over considerable periods of time to
methods that do not replace with fertilizers the minerals that my
heavy crop yields remove, the same methods could not be expected
to work successfully in all soils. In view of the general belief that
soils are basically different, this argument seems valid and is
accepted by most inquirers. But I seriously doubt that that
interpretation can explain my results here. I believe my reasons for
doubt are good.
Witness what has happened to our American soils since they
were first cleared of trees. At first no one could have determined
whether the mineral portion of the soil was sand, silt, clay, or a
mixture of them all. The whole mass was midnight black, the colour
caused by the partially carbonized organic matter that made up not
the 1 per cent or less that it does to-day of those same soils, but
possibly 10 to even 30 per cent. Peat-soil lands might have any
proportion up to practically 100 per cent of organic matter. In other
words, if a 'soil survey' had been ordered at that time, the surveyors
would have been helpless to distinguish between the various 'types'
of upland soils. The thing that has differentiated these same soils
into recognizable 'types' is the manner of handling that has
permitted the proportion of organic matter to be decreased as the
decades have passed, until now so little remains in most of our farm
land that no hint of black appears.
This removal of the masking organic matter leaves the soil
minerals revealed in their nakedness. The anatomy of the mass can
now be determined. There are differences in physical make-up of
the soil which, because they are physical (certainly not because they
are significant chemical differences), cause differences in
production behaviour. While all soils in such a sad plight to-day are
refractory by comparison with their disposition a century ago, there
are degrees of behaviour that correspond with the particular make-
up of the various soils. These differences are defined by the soil
physicist as textural, and soils of different textures are actually
suitable or unsuitable for a given crop, depending upon texture—
among a number of factors. Hence, the cry for a survey of all the
country's soils. It appears to be a needed move, does it not? Well,
consider this.
What might be the effect, if, instead of spending a thousand
million dollars or so, say £300m., to survey completely American
farm soils, farmers began to redevelop their soils—a process which
reverses the trends which have brought our soils to their present
disgraceful state? That, I maintain, is a valid question. And, to my
own way of thinking, it answers the agronomist's fear that my
methods would not work on all soils. They would not, indeed, work
as promptly on some soils as on others because of these differences
in texture. But the chief differences in behaviour would be erased by
time. My silt loam soil has responded handsomely after four years
of the redevelopment routines. My heavy clay of the low fields may
require eight or ten years to respond as fully, just because the
textural difference will slow down the permeation of the soil mass
by the influences which bring about the completion of the
transformation. For, indeed, it is a transformation, both in the
appearance of the soil and in its behaviour.
This, then, is my reply to honest criticism of the success of my
work here as being of an accidental character, related to the
particular soil type I am working. I believe it is a completely valid
answer.
The inherent ability of the soil to give something for nothing is
restored by reversing the processes which robbed it of that power. In
other words, by redeveloping in the soil those ancient qualities
which made it the normal home for an incalculable host of living
organisms, we have, in effect, reopened the surface pores that
enabled the original soil to take in inches of rainfall per hour as
handily as would a pile of sawdust. By recalling the soil's tenants of
yesteryear, we right the wrongs perpetrated by unthinking
generations of farmers that have preceded us.
Soil that can take in all the rainfall can grow enormous crops
again, at a ridiculously low cash outlay. It may or may not be able to
maintain those farm ponds we have constructed on the premise of a
non-porous watershed. That is one problem to think over, and it will
be extremely interesting to see whether we again have to go to the
river for our fresh fish. Also, the land now inundated by our
conservant lakes, might again become normal farm land, if the
retaining dams were not there. That, also, will be something about
which we shall have to wait and see. We have struck out on many
tangential ideas in our following of what seemed to be the lead of
Science, while all the time actual Science was beckoning us to
complete the circle of Nature by retaining in our soils the magic
cause of their black colour.
Will it not be fine not to have to do all the expensive research
we have been planning? For that is precisely what lies at the end of
the road when we have returned from our debauch of the soil and
start redeveloping it. Research will be needed. But it will not have
to be of the corrective character that has marked practically all the
research of the last few decades. No other industry wastes its
research efforts mired in the mud of past mistakes—at least not to
the extent that farm research has been preoccupied with such
problems. The reason for recurring research problems in agriculture
is to be found in that constantly changing character of the soil I have
already emphasized, which in one way or another affects the need
for research in problems which seem not to be related to the soil at
all.
Indeed, if the implications of this redeveloping soil are to be
trusted, the researchers can forget insects and diseases as problems,
once the acreage needed to grow all our food and forage crops has
been redeveloped. And this would apply both to animals and to
plants, not to mention people. Naturally, at this time, when we are
painfully conscious of the threat of diseases and insects to our crops
and livestock, such a statement seems rank nonsense. I let it stand
on record and suggest that we proceed to recondition our soils and
see what happens. We shall not be free of these troubles so long as
our soils are unable to provide plants and animals with the
substances needed for building up immunities.
If, in addition to growing our crops at a ridiculously low cash
outlay, we find that we no longer need to dust or spray for the
destruction of crop and animal pests, that would be even more of
something for nothing. I am all for it.
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Meanwhile, What to Do?

*

M ANY a serious reader will by now have reached the

conclusion that living is uncomfortably precarious in the
United States and perhaps in his own country too if he is
not an American, and will feel that he must do something himself to
better his chances of survival while the real goal of soil restoration
is being achieved. There are some ways to avoid the worst effects of
our almost universally deficient food.
The most obvious of these plans is to follow carefully the
detailed instructions of scientifically trained dieticians. If you
cannot have your own garden and grow your own food or are unable
to arrange to have your food grown by someone whose methods are
substantially those that I have suggested, you can at least plan to
balance your meals carefully from every one of the categories of
'protective' foods and shun as completely as possible the worst of
our highly-refined foods. To do this will be an important step in the
right direction if you have heretofore had no special dietary plan,
but have selected your food principally with regard to its cost and to
your preferences.
If you feel lost in the maze of dietary suggestions that are to
be had free, chiefly from commercial concerns whose object is to
sell some food product, perhaps you should buy a good book as a
guide in planning your new way of life. There are many valuable
books, but I am not acquainted with most of them. Two that I have
found useful are these: Food and Life, year-book of the United
States Department of Agriculture for 1939; and Let's Cook It Right,
by Adelle Davis (New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company).
The year-book can be obtained by Americans without charge
through their senator or representative in Congress, if he still has a
supply. Otherwise, they can get it from the Superintendent of
Documents at Washington for a nominal charge, and my overseas
readers can purchase it through their own booksellers in England or
elsewhere, from the same source. This volume is encyclopaedic in
character, and you will need to read only selected parts of it. It has
special value as a guide to the significance of the numerous
vitamins and to sources of them.
Let's Cook It Right is quite a different kind of book. The
author assumes that her reader lacks a scientific basis for charting
his way towards a better diet, and she provides a running lecture on
better foods and upon ways to get them. Throughout this lecture she
includes carefully-written recipes which differ from those in
bookstall cookery books in that they introduce new and better raw
materials for use in the kitchen. You probably have been told that
you ought to use dried milk to improve your cookery, and dark
molasses, whole wheat flour, wheat germ, brewers' yeast, and a
number of other items of higher food quality than our usual
foodstuffs. This book shows how these new raw materials can be
introduced to the delight and great benefit of your family. So far as
the practicability of the individual recipes is concerned, as with any
cookery book, much will depend upon the cook. The best recipe can
be spoiled by careless methods, while a cooking genius, such as
many of our mothers were, can take ordinary materials and turn out
confections.
Do not expect to make full use of Let's Cook It Right
immediately. The majority of the recipes most commonly used in it
call for one or more of the special ingredients mentioned above.
You will have to lay in supplies. In some cases this will not be easy.
You may have to persuade your local baker to sell you some of the
items. Whole wheat flour, especially, will be hard to come by in
many places, and it may be troublesome to keep in hot weather if
your home has a warm climate. One solution may be to buy a
supply in winter and stow away enough to last through the summer
and autumn in glass jars in a refrigerator or freezer. This is a
tiresome chore. Its justification is that it makes a better diet possible
and that goal must be reached even if a little trouble is incurred in
attaining it. As demand for these unusual but better food materials
increases, it is likely that local food stores will stock them more
generally, so that getting them will present less of a problem.
What we in America call pancakes are a good example of the
superiority of the recipes in this book. The wheat cakes we
ordinarily get seem to me as nearly no food as anything I ever ate.
With this thought in mind, I tried out the Davis recipe for pancakes,
using the inferior baking-powder variation rather than spend the
time necessary for yeast cakes. The result—the very first time—was
a batch of delightful cakes. The best evidence of their excellence is
the fact that when I had finished baking them, I had only a few left
to eat. The others I had eaten while the cooking was going on. There
was nothing ordinary about these cakes. They were real food. Some
day when I am not too hungry to wait long enough for the yeast to
work, I am going to try that method. I am told they are much better.
If you like uncooked foods, you can take advantage of a
number of short cuts to better nutrition. And you need not be a
cultist either, unless omitting altogether from your diet such items
as white bread and white sugar makes you one. So long as these two
high-calorie foods are eaten, it is difficult to introduce better foods
in sufficient quantity to have noticeable value. If they are omitted,
the way is open for the introduction of dried fruits of all kinds, nuts,
cheese, and the highly-coloured fresh fruits such as blueberries,
blackberries, grapes, and strawberries. It can be said for fruits in
general that their relatively high mineral content makes their use
important in the diet. By omitting everything made of white flour
and substituting enough highly-coloured fresh fruits and dried fruits,
such as dates, prunes, and raisins, to satisfy the appetite, you can
make an amazing improvement in your health—assuming, of
course, that you continue some source of protein such as cheese,
milk, eggs, or meat. The point at issue really is that for the best
nutrition the stomach room usually taken up by high-calorie white-
flour products should be occupied by fruits and protein-rich foods
instead.
The best guide to what foods to eat is your own taste. In other
words, eat what you like. But very likely your taste is no longer
keen because of the super-abundance of calories that there are in
your diet. If you undertake the reforms just suggested, you will
probably find that within a short time your appetite again
discriminates as it should and your taste again becomes a good
guide. Unless you are already hopelessly past managing your own
dietary affairs, try the foregoing suggestions and see how you get
along. If you are in the hands of a doctor, take his advice, by all
means.
Commercial whole wheat bread is not made from whole wheat
flour alone. In order to have the unadulterated product, you must
usually bake your own. Here is a pet recipe of mine, which can be
used as a basic recipe and varied to suit your personal taste.

INGREDIENTS
8 cups (or two pounds) of flour,
finely ground from hard wheat
2 cups of water, warmed to body heat
1 tablespoonful salt
½ cup of dark molasses or honey
2 oz. butter or margarine
1 large yeast cake

METHOD
Before you begin mixing ingredients, be sure that you have a warm
place for the dough to rise, since before baking it must double its volume.
(Making whole wheat bread is a shorter process than making white bread,
since working it down and allowing it to rise again is not only unnecessary,
but harmful.) My oven has a pilot light, the warmth from which keeps the
oven at near body temperature, so I simply set the pans in the oven after
the loaves are ready, allow about an hour for the rising, then turn on the
heat and bake—not touching the pans from the time they are placed in the
oven until the bread is baked and ready to be removed.
Mix the ingredients in a pan or bowl of one gallon or larger size,
using the following procedure: Melt the fat over flame, add the water and
warm if necessary to about body temperature. Mix in the salt, molasses,
and crumbled yeast. Then add the flour. Stir with a wooden spoon until the
mass is uniformly mixed. This requires a bit of muscle for a few minutes.
Spread a square of waxed paper on a table and sprinkle it very lightly with
flour. Invert the pan over this paper. The dough should slowly come away
from the pan. More flour dusted lightly over the dough will enable you to
handle it without trouble. Knead only enough to complete the uniformity
of the mass. Gut into two equal parts and weigh on the scales, pinching
from the heavier enough to even up the weights. Knead each batch of
dough again, just enough to smooth into a passable loaf. Put each loaf into
a tin, stretching it to its full length. Let rise until double in size. Bake
fifteen minutes at 400 degrees, then reduce heat to 350 degrees and bake
for thirty more minutes. Remove the tins from the oven and invert over a
clean cloth on your bread board, parallel, about a foot apart. Leave in this
position until it is convenient to remove the bread. Allow something like a
half hour or more for the loaves to sweat loose from the tins. At the end of
this time, the loaves should come free with little or no shaking. Throw the
loose ends of the cloth over the loaves and bring them together to cool in
the cloth for several hours. One loaf can be frozen for later use.

This recipe makes a loaf that is quite sweet. It suits my taste,

but may be too sweet for you. One-third of a cup of molasses should
be enough to feed the yeast, and some recipes suggest only one-
quarter of a cup. My experience has been that the yeast needs more
than one-quarter of a cup for its own growth. There must be enough
molasses to keep the yeast growing so that the loaves go into the
oven before the yeast has exhausted this source of food. Otherwise,
the loaves will not rise. The same trouble will occur if the dough is
allowed to rise too long. You will have to try such variations as
seem wise to you in order to arrive at the quality of loaf you want.
Under the best conditions this loaf is only a little heavier than the
loaves you buy in shops, and the flavour is delightful. If you want to
impress company, use honey and butter. You are apt to have regular
visitors.
If you wonder how a man knows how to bake, I shall have to
let you into the secret of family history. I was the eldest of eight
children, six of whom were girls, but the girls arrived last. Before
the eldest girl could begin to cook, at about eight years of age, I had
long been in training as second cook. I have cooked meals for
harvest hands, under my mother's supervision, of course. But this
bread baking I have learned only in the past few years, taking the
original recipe from a magazine and modifying it to suit myself—
just as I am suggesting that you modify my recipe to suit yourself.
This bread becomes the better part of a full meal. I often do a
half-day's work on a breakfast consisting solely of a quart of milk
and coffee (milk two-thirds, coffee one-third), three or four slices of
bread, and a liberal serving of blackberry puree, apple sauce, or
some other fruit.
Another 'dodge' that helps people to feed themselves better in
the midst of deficient foods is the use of whole wheat as a cereal.
For this purpose our best plan in the United States is probably to
obtain hard wheat from the West or North-west. My overseas
readers will seek out a source for themselves. They should crack the
wheat just enough to make sure that no whole grains go through the
mill. An old coffee grinder can serve the purpose of cracking the
wheat, or it is possible to get a mill especially designed to do coarse
grinding such as this. Americans who live near a modern bakery
may be able to persuade the baker to sell them some of the 'cracked
wheat' he uses in baking cracked-wheat bread. Such an arrangement
can be a great help for families trying to steer away from food
deficiencies and towards good nutrition.
The cooking of cracked wheat is quite easy. In fact, it
probably is true that the easier you make this task, the better results
you are likely to get. My method is to moisten half a cup of the
cereal and gradually add enough cold water to amount to a total of
one and one-fourth cups. After removing any bits of the rubbish that
seems unavoidable in cracked wheat, I put the cooker on the fire,
stir the mixture enough to prevent sticking, and cook until it
thickens—three to five minutes. A half teaspoonful of salt and a
teaspoonful of butter mixed into this hot gruel makes it fit for a
king. For my taste it needs nothing else.
To many, such practices will seem like mere juggling with
dietary items, virtuous though they may be. Perhaps that is true, but
I think such practices are justified, if not actually imperative, in our
present situation which makes completely wholesome foods so
difficult to obtain. In my own case I have rather definite evidence
that these practices have been highly beneficial. Despite my age, I
am able to do whatever heavy work must be done on the farm; and
although the day's work may exhaust me, the next morning finds me
ready to tackle an equally hard day's work again. That could only be
the case on a diet that nourishes properly.
 Instead of resorting to the purchase of special foods, you may
like to grow your own food. That, of course, is the best possible
solution of the problem, but a lot of city dwellers have not the
necessary soil. If you do possess a garden, select the sunniest areas
for growing your choice vegetables. Then hoard all the leaves
possible into some damp, shady corner where they can rot. After a
season or two, get some mushroom spawn from a seedsman and
scatter over your leaf pile. By following the method for growing
mushrooms detailed in Chapter eleven, one day you are likely to
find the surface liberally sprinkled with edible mushrooms. There
may be an odd one here and there. Such specimens should be
considered as doubtful and discarded unless an experienced person
can identify them as edible. The edible ones will add both variety
and excellent quality to your diet.
Many a would-be gardener does not feel strong enough to dig
the ground he wants to devote to a garden. There is a good way to
avoid that chore, too. Scrape the soil bare of weeds or sod where
your rows are to be or just where the plants are to stand. Provide
loose earth, either scrapings from the surface just cleared or dirt
brought in from elsewhere. You are now ready to transplant
purchased seedlings or to plant seeds. Make sure the soil is firm at
the place where a plant is to stand, or where seeds are to be placed.
Lay the roots of your plant, or place the seed, on that spot. Cover
lightly with mellow earth and firm by tramping lightly. Your
planting is done. Leave the plant lying flat. In twenty-four hours or
less it will have assumed an upright position, providing that you
have connected it with a permanent supply of water which has
already begun to be absorbed by the plant.
'Crazy' as such a method of transplanting sounds, it will work
in all cases, except in extremely light, sandy soils during a long-
continued drought. If your conditions are such that no moisture
could be expected to be in the soil, moisten it by a moderately heavy
wetting a day ahead of the planting. Then proceed as directed. In
territory where dry farming or irrigation is practised, it may be
necessary to water your garden regularly. In such cases the practises
of local people are a good guide.
So long as your garden space is too small to grow your entire
supply of vegetables and fruits, you will still do well to practise
some of the changes of diet suggested above. And, even if you have
a large enough area but it is not completely developed, which still is
my situation, you should make sure of the quality of your diet by
such measures. The ideal, of course, is to produce your complete
supply from your own land, and this can be done after the
redevelopment of your soil is complete.
If for any reason it is not practicable for you to undertake your
own gardening, find someone to grow part or all of your supply for
you. There are many people who are farming or gardening
'organically.' The crops they grow will be much more tasty than the
produce usually found in the market—this tastiness is due to the
better mineralization made possible by the methods used. Any such
gardener who grows a surplus will be glad to arrange to supply you
with vegetables and fruit. If you know of no such farmer or
gardener, a 'want ad' in your local paper might locate one for you. If
it does, it will be money well spent.
 These are some of the things you can do while the commercial
food-production system is becoming organized for growing the
foods we need in such a manner as to assure their complete nutritive
quality. In some cases, the suggestions I have made are not easy to
follow, but they will prove helpful and may tide you over until you
can make better arrangements. Quite a proportion of our city people
in these days are striking out for the country on purpose to have
their own little plot of earth upon which to depend for their food
supply. Such a move may or may not be wise for you. Before you
tear up stakes, I might suggest that you should get into touch with
Ed Robinson of Norton, Connecticut. He and his wife made the
move from city to country several years ago, then later they moved
back to the city, and found it so unendurable after those fresh
vegetables and fruits they had been enjoying from their own land
that they made the final move out of the city. For many years now,
they have been in the business of helping other people to make that
move under conditions that will be workable. I might suggest you
should ask their advice. They know your problems, and better than
anybody else of whom I know can advise you wisely.
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

No General Utopia
*

O
NE of the world's greatest needs is something infinitely more
important than the 'five-cent cigar' suggested by a former
vice-president of the United States. The imperative need, if
we are to solve our complex and threatening problems both in
national and world-scale affairs, is perspective in our thinking.
Perhaps the good five-cent cigar might help in the necessary
cogitation, but it would be a means to the end, not an end in itself.
In perspective the British far outstrip us Americans when they
are working through their tenser situations. Even though a member
of parliament may own many stocks or shares that will be adversely
affected by a proposed measure, he is often able to discuss the
probabilities as impersonally as if he were not financially
concerned. Few American public figures would claim to be so
nonchalant in such a situation. Hence, our legislative bodies can be
effectively moved by lobbying interests that would be wholly
ineffective before that august body of legislators in London.
This chapter is being written to help the reader to achieve a
fair point of view on the matters involved in this book. To many a
reader, I shall seem to be a cultist of the worst order. Naturally, to
myself, I seem anything but that. Perhaps it is somewhere between
that the truth lies. Here and now I want to point out some of the
undesirable effects which I believe would follow an immediate
change from our traditional ways of farming to the method I have
suggested, for there are many ways in which our general economy
might suffer temporarily from such a change. Nevertheless, I
believe that the benefits of such a change far outweigh any
immediate disadvantages.
First, however, I must say that the immediate adoption of the
ideas set forth in this book would react to my own financial
disadvantage. I am definitely planning to make my living in the
future from the products of a soil that is handled in the manner I
have suggested in the present volume. It should be clear that if all
market gardeners everywhere began at once to practice non-
ploughing techniques and, therefore, began to grow greater yields
per acre of better-quality food crops, the competition for my
products would become too great to permit me to make a living. I
know, of course, that such a change cannot come suddenly, so I
expect to be able to weather that hazard nicely! The more slowly, in
fact, that other food growers change over, the greater my chances of
success will be. It should be clear, then, that I can have no sinister
motive in urging haste. My sole chance to profit from proclaiming
these ideas is the probability that the public will buy this book.
If I were offering some panacea for sale, my motives would be
suspect from the start. Years ago, however, I studied that angle of
the matter carefully and decided that there is nothing whatever that
could be patented in the entire procedure I am recommending, and
that my sole chance to finance any effort to get public action lay in
writing books if I could get a publisher.
 While I thus approach this matter with 'clean hands' so far as
the profit motive is concerned, I should like to say here and now
that thousands of people who will strenuously oppose the
improvements I am fighting for have equal integrity in their
motives. Among them will be found the overwhelming majority of
college-trained American agricultural scientists, whose training will
not permit them to accept views that to them seem untested theories.
The fact that this book reports chiefly the soil's reaction will not
greatly impress such men. They know how different are the various
soils of the country and they can easily assume that what happens
on my farm would not be possible generally. What they do not
realize is that the differences in soils are chiefly physical, not
chemical, and that physical differences will be reflected chiefly in
the time required for redevelopment of the soil. Most experts,
therefore, will ignore what is happening on my land with a perfectly
good conscience. Generally speaking, the few who will know how
valid my ideas are, occupy policy-making positions and have reason
to oppose rather than favour these ideas.
Men in the commercial-fertilizer field and those who
manufacture and sell chemicals for dusts and sprays are for the most
part equally honest in their conviction that their products are
essential to the productivity of the soil and to the saving of crops
from pests. The integrity of the vast majority of the people in all the
businesses that exist to 'serve' farmers is unassailable. However,
here, just as in the professionally-trained group, not everyone can
thus be cleared of base motives. A few among the higher officials
know that approval of completely organic agriculture would doom
their business. However, both among these men and among those in
the colleges and experiment stations, I have many personal friends.
Most of them believe that if my ideas were right, the facts would
have been discovered and proclaimed by the colleges or experiment
stations long ago. Thus I am tolerated, though considered badly off
in my reasoning.
By thus accounting for such opposition as exists in business
and in the professions, I hope to make that situation clear and
prepare you for the fact that this book is something of a threat to our
'American way of life,' as popularly conceived.
The American way of life is essentially an almost complete
interdependence of everybody on everybody else. I do not make the
car I drive, as the peasant makes his cart. The fellows who do make
my car take and divide among themselves quite a share of my
income. (The peasant, it should be pointed out, does not need
income in order to get transportation.) The typical American does
not even grow his own food, and that fact accounts for an even
bigger chunk of his income—which disappears only to be divided
among growers, fertilizer interests and other chemical industries,
truckers, railroaders, wholesalers, retailers, delivery men, and so on.
(Again, the peasant short-circuits this expense.) A book could be
filled with instances of this all but complete dependence in this
country of me on you. Indeed, I share the income of every American
who buys my book, so I am strictly American. I am willing to share
in that way the income of as many other people as possible, even if
they live overseas.
From the foregoing paragraph it should be obvious that much
lobbying must precede any change that might be proposed by any
agency of government in the United States. However, the chances
that any proposal to change our methods of handling the land will
ever be made if it is not forced upon our government are slim,
indeed. How far this is true of countries overseas I shall not hazard
an opinion, but I shall leave the examination of that question to
those who know fully the conditions that prevail in those countries.
In the United States there are compelling reasons for maintaining
things as they are, with gradual 'improvements' of a character to
meet the approval of those whose opinions count. For instance,
since much has been said about the nutritive crime of removing a
high percentage of the value of wheat before selling the residue as
flour, it would seem easy to get whole wheat flour milled and
distributed instead of the roller patent white flour now being
'enriched' as a sop to complainants. Well, do not wax enthusiastic
about the prospect of getting whole wheat flour easily next week or
even next year. There are important reasons against it, some of them
difficult to ignore, even though the commercial interests involved
were willing to see such a sweeping change forced on their well-
established business.
To begin with, how could flour made from the entire wheat
kernel be distributed nationally without becoming rancid on the
grocer's shelves during hot weather? One of the reasons for white
flour in the beginning was the high perishability of whole wheat
flour. Handled under normal conditions, it loses value in two ways
at high summer temperatures: the oils of its germ become rancid,
and the inevitable inject eggs hatch into pretty white grubs that do
not seem attractive to the housewife. These are among the minor
reasons for not changing from white to whole wheat flour.
In addition, the farmer himself would be one of the chief
objectors to such a change. He buys the bran and middlings—
containing most of the valuable nutrients of the wheat—to feed to
his poultry, dairy cows, and pigs. What would he do if he could not
get these 'protein concentrates'? The answer—just between us—is
that if he had his farm soil redeveloped, he would not need these
things. But the farmer does not know that. Indeed, his advisers do
not believe it possible for our soils to be made to produce
completely nutritious feeding-stuffs for all the farm animals,
because for two or more generations now farmers have been
drawing heavily on other areas for supplemental foodstuffs for their
stock.
Think, too, what a complete change to whole wheat flour
would do to the sales of vitamin B and vitamin E, both of which
would be supplied naturally in plenty in ordinary diet if only people
had access solely to whole wheat instead of having to make do with
the present extracted starchy dust 'enriched' by the millers.
That word 'enriched' deserves passing mention, too. Flour is
so lacking in food values that as a result of popular protest the
millers agreed to 'restore' certain substances, the restoration being in
forms that would not deteriorate on the grocer's shelf. I do not
profess to know the complete result of the restoration dignified by
the term 'enriched,' but I suspect we are in the position of the man
who got his bus fare back when he protested about the loss of his
purse and its contents. Some authorities seem to agree that this is
the case.
 Now, as I stated in an earlier chapter, it seems reasonable to
assume that we might safely ignore the white flour situation if we
righted our blanched soil by making it black again. Such a change
would more than compensate for what goes to the cows and
chickens in the processing of wheat into flour. If all fruits and
vegetables grown commercially actually brought to the table all the
nutrients they are supposed to contain, we should not miss the
vitamin B we ought to get, but do not, from our bread. Also, if the
movement of oranges and grapefruit was prevented by strikes, we
should not miss them, because tomato juice and other sources would
supply all the vitamin C we needed. In other words, we could
dispense with citrus fruits as a vital necessity and could enjoy them
just because we liked them. Eating food because you like it, instead
of because the doctor ordered it, may have its advantages.
There are so many ways from the health point of view in
which redevelopment of our soils would benefit us that a good-sized
book could be written about those gains alone. We can merely hint
at them here. Allergies and deficiency diseases, with all the
implications that redeveloped soils have for them, have been
discussed earlier, but it is worth while to make a summation of the
facts now. It seems plausible that foods grown in a deficient soil
may, because they lack vital elements, fail to supply extra individual
needs and may thus promote the condition we term 'allergy.'
As I have said before, the entire field of deficiency diseases
would be affected by including soil redevelopment in our farming
methods. Just what diseases would be eliminated or alleviated is not
likely to be agreed upon even by doctors. My personal opinion is
that no disease can actually be freed from the suspicion that its
primary cause is faulty nutrition. Whatever may be the role of
bacteria in any disease, the finding by some of the earliest students
that bacteria could attack successfully only weakened cell tissues is
still a valid premise. If we admit that premise, then it becomes
difficult to assume that germs actually cause disease. Rather, germs
determine the character of the disease that is really caused by the
inability of incompletely nourished tissue to ward off attack. But do
not expect the medical profession to abandon an age-old concept
just because the logic of that last sentence is valid. However, if
disease can attack only such tissues as are weakened by lack of
nutriment, then a change in management of our soils might easily
stop the occurrence of many diseases within a generation. I warn
you, though, that the ability of a redeveloped soil to do this still
lacks scientific proof. It is merely a belief held by a great number of
people, including myself.
To get down to a discussion of why there could be no general
Utopia immediately, even if we were so fortunate as to accomplish a
complete change in the management of our soils—to begin with, the
effects on our smoothly working economy would be catastrophic, to
put it mildly. What, for instance, would the employees of our
fertilizer industry do? Or what would the workers do who are
employed in manufacturing chemicals used in agriculture? Or,
considering that the lack of troubles from plant nutrition, insects and
diseases would make unnecessary all trouble shooters in those
fields, what would the specialists, now working hard to eradicate
diseases and insects and to help feed plants properly do for a living?
These are only the most obvious of the dislocations that would
follow closely the universal adoption of proper practices in the
handling of our soils. All these people would have to live. They
would be entirely surplus so far as agriculture is concerned. Some
would be absorbed into other industries, but certainly not all
immediately.
Fortunately, and I mean just that, no such prompt change
could take place. There would be time to anticipate and prepare for
these inevitable developments in our economy. If those persons who
would be affected were alert to the impending transformation within
agriculture, they could arrange things so that the blow would be less
staggering when it came.
Agencies of the government, the heads of the industries to be
affected, and the alert employees, all will do their utmost to prevent
a change; and this opposition will, in fact, be helpful. It cannot
prevent the eventual adoption of better practices by such farmers
and market gardeners as awaken to the facts, but it will so slow
down that development as to give opportunity for those whose jobs
are jeopardized to jump to something else while there is a chance.
Odd as it may seem to those who know how deeply I feel in this
matter, I should heartily approve all such opposition as a preventive
of what might otherwise be disaster. All I hope to accomplish is to
establish a stubborn determination among thousands of people to
accomplish the necessary change. That the change will be hard to
bring about will not be odd. Nothing worth while has ever been
done easily. This will be no exception.
Within agriculture itself there is likely to be considerable
change, which in some cases may amount to chaos. When every
potato, for instance, is the full equivalent in quality of the best
Idaho—much appreciated at American dinner tables—what will
become of the Idaho baker project for carrying these desirable
potatoes from farmer to distant consumer? The freightage on
potatoes will be almost prohibitive if after they arrive in the eastern
market they are not enough better than others to command premium
prices. Milk, to mention one food item that has become a classic
essential, will be just another food, when the need for correcting the
deficiencies of all our fruits and vegetables vanishes. The volume of
milk produced can be greatly reduced, and its price, doubtless, will
have to be greatly decreased if it is to hold any considerable
proportion of its present market. Similar disturbances of the markets
for butter, eggs, meat, and all the foods now known as 'protective'
may be expected.
Equally great changes in prices within the fruit and vegetable
markets are to be expected, too. Greater yields per acre, together
with less production costs per acre, will justify great price cuts. And
eventually these will be to the advantage of everybody. Wage
earners in industry will find that they can buy food items at a mere
fraction of what they cost to-day, and of much better quality, too; so
they may be less opposed to decreases in wages that will permit
decreases in prices of the products they manufacture. Price
reductions have been feared in the United States as the forerunners
of depression. But when decreases result from such a basic cause as
will account for these changes, the change will be the forerunner of
a boom instead of a bust. That happened when Ford decreased the
price of his car early in this century, for it was a basic change in cost
of manufacture, not a change forced by unhealthy economic
conditions. The great increase in demand that resulted is well
remembered, and it fully justified the heroic move made by Mr.
Ford, who was at the time considered foolish by others in the
industry.
The tropical fruit and vegetable industries may suffer even
more drastically. Improvements in nutritive quality of all our locally
grown foods will make unnecessary the importation—now
essential—of exotic foods. The availability of freezing to almost
everybody will make it possible to hold springtime in reserve for
winter use, and, as far as the United States is concerned, California,
Texas, and Florida growers will experience the same effect as the
Idaho potato growers. Drastic changes to bolster their economic
condition would be likely to be necessary in all those areas now
supported richly by distant parts of our country.
By now somebody may have wondered what effect all this
will have on the threat of inflation. I am not sure I could begin to
unravel that puzzle. We shall probably have to wait and see! It
seems likely that the ultimate effects will be deflationary, since the
trend towards lower prices would seem to be certain. However, such
a change, taking place over a long period of years, might have other
effects that would tend to keep up the free circulation of money to
such an extent as actually to maintain prices at a high level. For
instance, the increase in available people who might work in
factories after losing their jobs in the chemical and fertilizer
industries would encourage the establishment of new industries that
were just waiting for such a change. Such absorption of excess
labour could amount to salutary evolution instead of to those
destructive effects we have sometimes seen following lowered
prices. Thus it would be foolish to attempt now to forecast the
future of inflation as related to these changes.
One change I hope to see is that farmers will be able to spend
the money they heretofore have had to put into fertilizers and other
chemicals, and for grass and leguminous seeds for rotation
meadows and pastures—spend it on such silly baubles as
bathrooms, central heating, paint, pianos if they want them, and best
of all, travel—to the ends of the earth, if they like. I would be
among the last to urge foolish expenditure of money; but other
people have for so long virtually held the farmer's purse strings that
I should delight to see him and his wife buy themselves a measure
of convenience and happiness.
In the end, after the change-over is complete and all
adjustments have been made, everybody will be better off,
regardless of just what our exact situation may be with reference to
inflation and other problems. Indeed, when this influence extends to
other parts of the world, enabling people to live more easily in such
overcrowded areas as the Far East, I should hope for a voluntary
lowering of the tensions that now exist. Warfare should be less
attractive to people whose stomachs are full. Many areas now
apparently too densely populated will prove not to be so, once these
people have mechanical means of providing their soil with plenty of
organic matter. If those who handle American plans for feeding the
Far East would busy themselves with providing gasoline-driven
small machines that would effectively stir into the soil all surface
rubbish, many more pretentious projects could be forgotten, for the
crying need of much of the Orient is for some effective way to get
rid of rubbish without burning or composting it. I should not attempt
to suggest the type of machine, except that it ought to be both
simple and cheap—a requirement not found in mechanical devices
which now dominate the American scene.
The completion of soil redevelopment in the United States
will release many people from worry about the possibility that soil
conservation practices may not be adopted fast enough by American
farmers. Soil conservation will cease to be important once farmers
have learned that if they open the surface of their soil to the entry of
water that now runs off, they need not follow any specially
engineered routines. The whole thing is so simple compared with
what is usually recommended and so much more effective in
accomplishing desirable results that the conservation of soil, as now
conceived, will cease to be a virtue.
These, then, are some of the reasons why I expect the United
States to take its own good time in adopting what has been
suggested in this book. The soil Utopia involved will not become a
general Utopia—could not, indeed, because of the tremendous
impact of the consequent dislocations upon our economy. I hope the
reader will be as patient as I shall be, even though he rightly keeps
up a persistent pressure upon his congressmen and members of
parliament to insure that they do not fail to assist such changes as
are at the moment feasible both in my country and yours.
The outstanding and most obvious fact disclosed by this book
is the heartening proof that the world is not yet the burned-out
cinder some writers have suggested in their fear of Malthusian
certainties for the future.