Chapter 2
General Principles

In the treatment of almost any subject it is hardly necessary to say that there is generally some leading point, or principle, which mainly governs it, and which should be constantly kept before the attention. As regards religion, for instance, Confucius was once asked whether it might all be condensed into one word. 'Certainly,' he replied; 'is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself do not do to others.' And so, to take another instance, the whole of the agricultural competition we mainly suffer from may be condensed into one expression -- the cost of heat, for those who compete most successfully with us are enabled to do so because they obtain gratis from the sun a large supply of what we have to pay very highly for in the shape of clothing, lodging, and fuel; and it is hardly necessary to point out that in India and mild climates, like the best of Argentina, the labourers' expenses are necessarily far less than those of our islands. To turn to the point with which we are more immediately concerned, it may be said that the solution of all our agricultural difficulties, so far as they can be solved by the wit of man, resolves itself into one expression -- the cheap production of a good turf. That is the principle which, as I shall show, dominates the whole subject, and that it does so is evident if we consider carefully the following points:

  1. The success of our agriculture depends on the cheapening of production.
  2. The cheapest food for stock is grass.
  3. The cheapest manure for soil is a turf composed largely of deep-rooting plants.
  4. The cheapest, deepest, and best tillers, drainers, and warmers of the soil are roots.

But before proceeding to prove that a cheaply created turf is the only solution for our agricultural difficulties, it may be well to notice the solutions that are thought by some to present certain prospects of cure for the unfortunate conditions of our times; for, by first of all disposing of these, we shall be able to fix our attention more exclusively on those factors which alone can set our agriculture on a footing with the requirements of the age.

Only let us have bi-metallism, assert some, and prices will rise, and our old system of farming again become profitable. only, declare others -- and no doubt a very considerable number -- let us have Protection to an amount that would raise corn to a paying level, and all would go well with our agriculture. Only let us have good land legislation, and improved means of securing the interests of the farmer, and our agriculture, with a vastly increased capital spent upon it, owing to proper security for the tenant having been provided, would again flourish exceedingly. As to the first, we have no means of proving what would occur if bi-metallism was adopted, and there seems to be no prospect whatever of any such general agreement on the subject amongst the nations of the world as would enable any system of bi-metallisin to be carried out. And, as for the second point, there seems to be quite as small a prospect of Protection ever being adopted in England within any time worth considering. Nor, unless; it were carried out to a very high amount, have we reason to suppose, judging by what has taken place close to our shores, that Protection to a moderate amount could so far favour the farmer as to make grain for sale profitable. For in France there is Protection, which gives the agriculturist there 8s. 2d. more per quarter, and yet what have the farmers in La Manche, in Normandy, done? As we have seen, they have given up the growth of cereals for sale in favour of permanent pasture, and now only produce enough grain for consumption on the farm. Then, as to the third point -- land legislation -- we have only to turn back to the most prosperous times, to the time when farmers laid out most capital on the land, to see how little the laws can affect the farmer; for in these good days we had the laws of hypothec, which were always said to be so injurious, and we had neither the Agricultural Holdings Act nor the Hares and Rabbits Act. These were the days of high rents, too, and yet one of the largest scale cultivators in the south of Scotland once said to me, 'I could make money in those days, but I cannot do so now.' Nor, with the present system of farming, could he do so with the aid of all the laws that human folly could devise. Those, then, who hold up bi-metallism, Protection, and land legislation as cures for our agricultural difficulties have little idea of the harm they are doing in dangling false hopes before the eyes of the farmer, and so retarding the adoption of the only practical remedies for the present agricultural situation. For is it not evident that all our attention should be concentrated on the practical remedies within our reach, and which can be immediately applied?

Lastly, in this connection, it should be considered that, whether the remedies held out by bi-metallists, Protectionists, or the legislative cure-mongers come to pass or not, the steps recommended by me will be equally advisable; for if corn growing should never again become profitable, there can be no doubt of the good that will arise from the adoption of the farming system recommended in these pages; and should corn growing for sale again become profitable, then the land laid down to temporary pasture, on a system of not less than four years in grass, may have the system shortened to three years, or even to two, and both such lands, and those laid down to permanent pasture, again brought under the plough will be the more fitted for profitable corn growing than ever they were before.

I have said that the production of stock at the lowest possible cost is what the farmer has solely to rely upon, and this, of course, involves the production of their food at the lowest possible cost. Both these facts must obviously govern the farming policy of the future. How, then, can the farmer most cheaply provide food for stock? This, again, depends, of course, as to the way manure can be most cheaply supplied. Now, as every gardener and cultivator well knows, the cheapest and best form of manure is a good turf, for the decaying sod not only supplies the plants with food, but, what is nearly as important, and some might say of even greater importance, provides a good nest, or, in other words, good physical conditions in the soil. And it was on this turf that for so long a large proportion of our agriculture in Scotland depended, when vast quantities of land, enclosed within the last fifty or sixty years, were ploughed up. But in the process of time this resource has become exhausted. It must be again supplied, and this can only be effectively done within a moderate period of time by growing a mixture of large-rooting and deep-rooting plants, managing them well after they have grown, and giving them four to six years' time to form into a turf. When, then, the farmer again ploughs up the land, he will start his rotation with the same advantages which the farmers had when they enclosed and ploughed up old pasture lands; he will thus be enabled to produce good crops at the smallest expense, and without the aid of any manure, excepting some artificials with his turnips, and eventually without any when the land has become sufficiently charged with humus.
(It is important to remember that the farmer using the four- or five-course rotation has to go to the expense of sowing grass seeds twice, while with my eight years' rotation there is only one sowing of grass seeds.

(Potatoes and turnips have now been successfully grown at Clifton-on-Bowmont farm without the aid of any manure, except that supplied by the turf (vide Appendix 3).

But this process must only be continued for four years, during which a turnip crop, taken after ploughing up the grass, should be taken, followed by a cereal crop. Then a root crop should be taken, and the following year the land again laid down to grass with a light cereal crop, and the process of forming a good turf recommenced. Every time that this course is repeated the land will become richer, and warmer, and the soil more thoroughly and deeply disintegrated by the roots of plants, and therefore more able to yield better and more certain crops, and crops less liable to the attacks of disease; this is especially so as regards the turnip crop, which is little liable to finger-and-toe if repeated on the same land only after a long interval. The formation of this turf will also cheapen the processes of cultivation in two ways, for it is hardly necessary to say that land deeply and thoroughly permeated with vegetable matter is much more easily ploughed and worked; and I have found that if the land is well filled, when laid down, with a mixture of plants which have a large and powerful root system, the couch grasses are extinguished, or nearly so, and the expense of cleaning the land, when again brought under plough, absolutely abolished. (For the last fourteen years there have been no weeds worth removing. Subsequent experience has shown me that, in order to abolish the growth of weeds, taking a turnip crop after grass is essential; but, as shown elsewhere, when the farm has once been so thoroughly cleaned that there are no weeds on it worth removing, then the farmer, if his plans make it expedient, may begin his rotation with oats out of lea instead of turnips.)

On the rapid creation, then, of a turf composed of plants calculated to leave the largest amount of vegetable matter in the soil, and of plants well able to resist drought, and contribute by their qualities to keep stock in good health, the future of our farming, so far as the arable portion of our lands is concerned, depends; and it is hardly necessary to say that the same principle applies to the creation of permanent pastures. Chicory, it is worth noting here, would decline and almost disappear (though we still have some of it in a pasture fourteen years old) from a permanent pasture, but it must be remembered that its very deep roots which have been traced down upwards of four feet, will, when the plant has died, leave passages in the soil down which the roots of other plants will descend to feed at greater depths in the soil than they otherwise would. Having thus stated what I conceive to be the governing principle of the subject, I now propose to advance, in the following chapters, to a careful consideration of the whole important subject of the best, most rapid, and the cheapest way of creating a good turf; but before proceeding to do so, I wish again to recur to what I have previously alluded to -- the danger of misapplying the general principle I have dwelt upon, and it is the more necessary to do so because I know of no subject as to which you will hear so many contradictory opinions, and as to which one is more liable, from various causes, to come to erroneous conclusions, seeing that the reckoning to make a farming conclusion correct consists of so many items, that there is therefore a great difficulty in collecting all of them into one view, and a still greater difficulty in estimating their comparative value. A guide to the understanding, then, should be ever near, and I know of none equal to Locke's Conduct of the Understanding -- a small book of about 100 pages, the most convenient edition of which (Fowler's) may be bought for a few shillings. A careful study of this little volume will keep the mind active to the reception of new ideas, and aid it in carefully collecting and weighing, and re-weighing, all the points that bear upon the present complicated agricultural situation; it cannot be too highly recommended to all those who are engaged in carrying out the changes that are necessary to enable us to manage profitably the land of Great Britain. The situation, indeed, with reference to foreign competition, and agriculture itself, is so complicated that the student might well turn away from the whole subject in despair, unless he follows the admirable counsel of Locke in the section on 'Despondency', where, as the reader will observe, his teacher leads to the inference that it is of much more importance to teach method than to impart knowledge. And if Locke is to be recommended to the farmer, he is still more to be advised for the use of agricultural chemists, who have, as I have shown in my paper delivered at Cambridge (vide Appendix IX), led the farmer to most pernicious conclusions, because, as Locke puts it, in his section on 'Reasoning', 'something was left out which should go into the reckoning to make it just and complete.'

And, besides the danger of misapplying general principles, there are numerous cases where erroneous conclusions are readily come to, as, for instance, that because one seed is cheaper than another it will therefore afford a larger return of grass for the outlay, or, that because some of the richest pastures contain certain plants it is therefore most advantageous to sow the seeds of them, or that because you want much clover it is therefore desirable to put down much seed. The whole subject, in short, is a jungle full of traps by which the unwary are only too liable to be caught, and it is therefore important to begin with that attitude of mind, so difficult to attain, which enables the individual neither to believe, nor, what is of even more importance, disbelieve anything whatever without sound reasons for forming a decisive opinion in one direction or another.

Since writing this chapter Lord Leicester has been kind enough to inform me, in answer to a letter from me on the subject, that he has no objection to my publishing a paper on the system he has adopted, and which, in principle, is exactly the same as the one I have pursued, so far as leaving the land for a certain number of years in grass, and then taking four crops in succession, is concerned. His Lordship's paper is as follows:

'As many inquiries are made as to the system I adopt in treating poor lands under temporary pasture, I may state that it is necessary to carry out the following plan to obtain a satisfactory result. The seed should be selected from those natural grasses that appear to thrive best in the waste places in the locality in which the pasture is to be formed. The seed should be purchased guaranteed as to purity and germinative power. It is most important not to feed the pasture close with sheep during the summer, when the grasses are in full growth, or the more valuable grasses would perish, and weeds and moss take their place; more especially is this necessary in the treatment of permanent pasture. I have, as an experiment, left on very poor soil a pasture down for sixteen years, and I do not find that the herbage has diminished; but there is no doubt that pastures are of most value for the first few years after being laid down, when they are exclusively given up to the feeding of sheep. If the land is to accumulate fertility, and enable four profitable crops to be obtained without the application of any manure, the minimum time under which the land should remain in pasture would be six years.

'I believe that it is generally the practice that the first crop on breaking up of a pasture should be a corn crop. I think that this would be fatal to obtaining three crops following without the aid of manure. If the land were thoroughly clean, as it should be when laid down to grass, when broken up after being down for several years it will be very foul. It is probable that no merchant can deliver natural grass seeds absolutely free from the seeds of couch grass.

(Note by Mr. Hunter, Chester. The seeds of the true couch grass (Triticum repens) are seldom found in grass seeds of other species in general use, and they should never-be-present in properly machined seeds, because, being larger than ordinary grass seeds, and as two or more of them usually adhere together, their removal from other species is easily effected. The reproduction of Triticum repens is not, however, from seed, but from the creeping underground stems which send up shoots from every joint. Other species of grasses, such as smooth-stalked meadow grass and bent grass, are also known as couch grass, and both these species produce abundance of seeds, which may be either in the land sown down or in the purchased grass seeds. The seeds of all agricultural grasses in ordinary use can be obtained absolutely free from the seeds of couch grass, and all kinds of grass seeds may now be obtained of as high a degree of purity as that of clovers.)

Clover seeds may be obtained free of all weeds, but not so grass seeds. The cost of cleaning after a corn crop, when the land is foul, is very considerable, and nearly the value of the crop is consumed in the process; besides, I believe that the constant cultivation that would be necessary would utterly pulverize and destroy the flag (flag is equivalent to turf) that had been ploughed in, thus reducing the land to its former unfertile state, and precluding the possibility of its producing, without the aid of manure, three more profitable crops.

It is a fact well known that very poor soils (vide 'Decomposition of Vegetable Matter on Warm Slopes', Appendix 3) are injured by constant cultivation and exposure to the sun, though such a procedure is necessary when the land is foul.

If a root crop is first taken the pasture should be ploughed in the winter, and cross ploughed in the spring. I have never known a summer when, between March and July -- till which latter month rape or turnips should not be sown -- it has not been easy, at a trifling expense, to destroy any vitality that may exist in the flag. The flag should be ploughed in just previous to the sowing of a crop of rape or roots, pressed with a drill-roller, and, should there be any life left in thistles or couch, the extraordinary luxuriance of the rape or turnips would entirely destroy all life; during the time the land was under cultivation not a weed of any kind, except the annuals, the seed of which is in the soil, would appear.

'I think that it is evident that under this system the accumulated fertility of the pasture is not exhausted by the four crops, as I have this year had nearly six quarters of barley per acre, the fourth crop on a forty-acre field, and a considerably better yield than I have obtained on the good land farmed under the four-course system; these poor lands after pasture usually produce better crops than the better lands. The root crop would in the first year disintegrate the flag, and prepare the land for a much heavier crop of corn than if the corn was sown immediately after the pasture. In fact, in my opinion, a crop of roots preceding a crop of corn on the first breaking up of the pasture is in every way the more desirable process.'

The seeds used by Lord Leicester were the following:

    Seeds for Temporary Pasture on Light Lands
    -
    lb.
    Cocksfoot
    4
    Perennial Ryegrass
    2
    Italian Ryegrass
    2
    Timothy
    1
    Tall Oat Grass
    1
    Golden Oat Grass
    1/2
    Meadow Fescue
    2
    Hard Fescue
    1
    Tall Fescue
    1
    Alsike Clover
    1-1/2
    White Clover
    1
    Yarrow
    1/2
    Total, 17 lb. per acre

It will be observed that Lord Leicester says that the minimum time during which the land should remain in pasture is six years, and, with the mixture he uses, I have no doubt that that time would be required in order to accumulate a sufficiently good turf. But if a mixture is used containing a large quantity of cocksfoot and yarrow, and other plants calculated to fill the land with vegetable matter, then I think that a good turf, and one much better than would be obtained in six years from the mixture Lord Leicester uses, could be produced in four years, and with the aid of the following mixture, which I have used with success:

    -
    lb.
    Cocksfoot
    10
    Tall Fescue
    5
    Tall Oat Grass
    5
    Crested Dogstail
    1
    Hard Fescue
    2
    Burnet
    8
    Chicory
    4
    Kidney Vetch
    3
    Parsley
    1
    Alsike Clover
    1
    Golden Oat Grass
    1
    Rough-stalked Meadow Grass
    1
    White Clover
    2
    Late-flowering Red Clover
    2
    Yarrow
    1
    Total, 47 lb. per acre

The cost of this mixture ought to be (prices vary almost every year) about 50s., and if the land is left in grass for five years, the cost per annum will be about 10s. per acre, the same as a farmer now spends per annum if he leaves his land two years in grass. As Lord Leicester has pointed out, it is most essential that, on ploughing up the pasture, a green crop should first of all be taken; and I may even go so far as to say that to adopt any other course would be to insure a partial, and, perhaps, a very considerable failure when the system is first begun, though, as I have elsewhere pointed out, the second rotation may be begun with oats, should this be more suitable to the circumstances of the farmer. I may here mention that there are two objections to beginning the rotation with oats -- the first, and by far the most important, is that weed seeds blown on to the surface of the land are ploughed down and so conserved all winter to germinate in the spring, where along with other weeds that may be present in the land, they must be left undisturbed till the corn is cut, when all the seeds ploughed down add to the expense of cleaning the land for turnips in the year following. But if turnips are taken the first year, nearly all the weed seeds are sprung, and the plants from them, along with other seeds present, are destroyed by the cultivation, and then by the second turnip crop of the rotation the land is so thoroughly clean that to begin a second-rotation with oats is less objectionable on the score of weeds. After the land is thoroughly cleaned by the two turnip crops of the rotation, turnips might be taken out of lea and the land laid down the year following with a crop, should this suit the plans of the farmer -- in other words, the eight years' rotation I recommend and practise, could be turned into a six years' rotation. I may here add that the main principle of my system is that the land should not lie less than four years in grass, for, as shown by Dr. Voelcker's analysis (see Appendix 4), there is much more rootage in the fourth than in the third -- in other words, much more vegetable matter to plough down for the obvious benefit of the fertility of the soil.


Next: Chapter 3: On Disintegrating the Soil and Permeating It with Vegetable Matter

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