Small
farms
Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease
(The Soil and Health)

by Sir Albert Howard C.I.E., M.A.

Chapter 4
The Maintenance of Soil Fertility in Great Britain

Many accounts of the way the present system of farming in Great Britain has arisen have been published. The main facts in its evolution from Saxon times to the present day are well known. Nevertheless, in one important respect these surveys are incomplete. Nowhere has any attempt been made to bring out the soil fertility aspect of this history and to show what has happened all down the centuries to that factor in crop production and animal husbandry -- the humus content of the soil -- on which so much depends. The present chapter should be regarded as an attempt to make good this omission.

The Roman Occupation

At the time of the Roman invasion most of the island in which we are living was under forest or marsh: only a portion of the uplands was under grass or crops: the population was very small. After the conquest of the country the Romans began to develop it by the creation on the areas already cleared of an agricultural unit -- new to Great Britain -- known as the villa. These villas were large farms under single ownership run by functionaries each responsible for a particular type of animal or crop and worked by slave labour. These units followed to some extent the methods of the latifundia of Italy and were designed for the production of food for the legions garrisoning the island and those stationed in Gaul. Wheat -- an exhausting crop -- was an important item in Roman agriculture, for the reason that this cereal provided the chief food (frumentum) of the soldiers. The extent of the export of grain to Gaul will be evident from the fact that in the reign of the Emperor Julian no less than 800 wheat ships were sent from Britain to the Continent.

The exhaustion of the soils of the island began even before the Roman occupation. The heavy soil-inverting mould board plough, which invariably wears out the land, was already in use when the Romans arrived, and was probably brought by the Belgic tribes who conquered and settled in the south-eastern part of the country. They lived in farmsteads and cultivated large open fields. They were highly skilled agriculturists and exported to Gaul a considerable quantity of their main product -- wheat. This practice was developed by the Roman villas which followed and in this way the slow exhaustion of the lighter soils of the downlands of the south-east became inevitable.

After an occupation which lasted some 400 years and which contributed little or nothing of permanent value to the agriculture of the island beyond some well-designed roads, the legions evacuated the island and left the Romanized population to look after itself. This they failed to do: the country was soon conquered by the Saxon invaders, in the course of which much destruction of life and property took place. One result was the creation of a new type of farming.

The Saxon Conquest

The settlement of Nordic people in our island is the governing event both of British history and of British agriculture. The new settlers had inhabited the belts of land around the Weser and the Elbe and their first contact with Britain was as raiders; their operations were in the nature of reconnaissance to ascertain the chances of settlement. The Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain was a colonization preceded by conquest, in which the farming system of the Romanized population was, in the midland area at any rate, destroyed. In the east, south-east, and western portions of the island some relics of Roman and Celtic methods survived.

Our forefathers brought with them from the opposite shores of the North Sea their wives, children, livestock, and a complete fabric of village life. The immigrants, being country folk, wanted to live in rural huts with their cattle round them and their land nearby, as they did in Germany. The numerous villages they formed reproduced in all essentials those they had left behind on the mainland. Our true English villages are, therefore, not Celtic, are not Roman, but purely and typically German.

The Roman villas were replaced by a new system of farming -- the Saxon manor -- in which the tenants held land in return for service. The lord and his retainers shared the land, each bound to perform certain duties determined by custom. The manors took centuries to evolve. By A.D. 800 they had developed into a permanent system which provided the material for the Domesday Book of the Normans, by which taxation was assessed and a rigid feudal system became firmly established.

The Open-Field System

The first general feature that strikes us in early Anglo-Saxon England is the strip cultivation of the arable land on the open-field system. This system was a communal agricultural institution started by people who had to get a living out of the soil. They had progressed as far as to use the plough and had a common fund of experience. Everyone pursued the same system of farming. The arrangement of the open fields was, however, by no means uniform. No fewer than three distinct types arose, corresponding to as many different influences exerted by people who had early occupied the country. The large central midland area, stretching from Durham to the Channel and from Cambridgeshire to Wales, is the region where Germanic usage prevailed. The south-east was characterized by the persistence of Roman influence, a circumstance which implies that the conquest was less destructive there than in the north and west. The counties of the south-west, north-west, and the north retained Celtic agrarian usages in one form or another, which is easily understood in view of the difficulty with which, as we know, these districts were slowly overpowered by the invaders. The midland area was thus the region where the Anglo-Saxons were most firmly established and where the subjugation of the fifth century was most thorough. The Romano-Celtic people who remained were not numerous enough to preserve any traces of Roman or Celtic methods of tilling the soil.

Throughout this extensive region a two-field and a three-field system, or sometimes a mixture of the two, prevailed. This field arrangement was a custom prevalent in Germany, especially east and south of the Weser. The chief characteristic of the two- and three-field type of tillage was the distribution of the parcels of arable land (which made up the holdings of the customary tenants) equally amongst the two or three fields. The cropping was so arranged that one field in the two-field system and two fields in the three-field system were cropped every year, and thus one-half or one-third of the township's arable land lay fallow and was used for common grazing -- a point which is always emphasized in the midland system.

Besides the cultivated open fields, for which the best land was always used, the village lands consisted of grassland for mowing on the wetter parts, and commons or woodlands on the poorer parts.

Ploughing was the all-important operation of medieval tillage and was carried out on a co-operative basis, and demanded a team of eight draught animals yoked to a heavy plough. This, of course, was beyond the reach of any but the largest and most prosperous tenants. Communal ploughing in Saxon times was, therefore, inevitable. It was the difficulty of replacing this communal ploughing that delayed agricultural progress in many parts of the country.

The open-field system repeated itself for centuries, not only in England but in a great part of Europe -- nations living under very different conditions, in very different climates, and on very different soils adopted the open-field system again and again without having borrowed it from each other. This could not but proceed from some pressing necessity. The open-field system is communal in its very essence. Every trait which makes it strange and inconvenient from the point of view of individualistic interests renders it highly appropriate to a state of things ruled by communal conceptions -- right of common usage -- communal arrangements of ways and time of cultivation. These are the main features of open-field husbandry and all point to one origin -- the formation in early Anglo-Saxon society of a village community of shareholders of free and independent growth.

It must be borne in mind that the open-field prevailed during the period of national formation of the English people and its influence on the life of the village community must have been very great. The sense of personal responsibility, which the system of communal work created, made it a vital factor in the social education of the people.

The Depreciation of Soil Fertility

Open-field farming is, as a rule, balanced: the fertility used up in growth is made good before the next crop is sown. Compared with our modern standards, however, the yield is remarkably low and the removal of fertility by such small crops is made up for by the recuperative processes operating in the soil (non-symbiotic fixation of nitrogen and so forth). The surplus of available humus originally left by the forest is depleted at an early stage and an equilibrium is established, the yield adjusting itself to the amount of fertility added each year by natural processes, this in its turn is influenced by climate and methods of cultivation.

For example, in the peasant cultivation of north-west India at the present day a perfect balance has been established between losses and gains of fertility. The village land on which corn crops are grown has been cultivated for upwards of 2,000 years without manure beyond the droppings of the livestock during the fallow period between harvest and the rains. But the Indian cultivators use primitive scratch ploughs and are most careful not to draw on the reserves of organic material in the soil, as its texture depends on this. They produce crops entirely on the current account provided by the annual increments of fertility. The yield has settled down to 8 maunds (658 lb. per acre) of wheat on unirrigated land, and 12 maunds (987 lb.) of wheat on irrigated land, and this yield has been constant for many centuries.

The same processes were operating in the English open fields. The reserve of humus in the soils originally under forest, which the Saxons brought into cultivation, was soon used up and the yield was determined by the annual additions of fertility to the soil by natural means. But in our cold and sunless climate and on our ill-drained, poorly aerated soils this is far less than in the semi-tropical conditions of northern India. Moreover, and this point must be stressed, the Saxons from the earliest times used a soil-inverting plough, which has a marked tendency to exhaust the humus in the soil if provision is not made for the regular supply of sufficient farmyard manure. In fact, recent experience in many parts of the world is proving that the continued use of heavy soil-inverting, tractor-driven implements, without sufficient farmyard manure to manure the land, promptly leads to catastrophic consequences.

The first recorded references to the mould board plough speak of it in Gaul, but some authorities quoted by Vinogradoff (The Growth of the Manor) suggest that it was borrowed by the Germanic people from the Slavs, and in view of the soil types found in Slav territory this may easily be so. The evolution of the big plough was due to soil requirements as settled agricultural life developed in the heavy, moist soils of north Europe after the forests had been cleared.

The mould board plough determined the lay-out of the open fields. It divided the arable areas into a succession of lands. It needed a headland to turn on, and there was a limit to the length of furrow a team of oxen could plough before needing the relief got by stopping and turning. This furrow- long or furlong became one of our units of length. It was usual to keep the land in high ridges running along the slopes to facilitate surface drainage, an important point in England. The ridges varied in width according to the nature of the soil. In very heavy clays they were sometimes no more than three yards wide. In lighter soils they might be twenty-two yards wide. These ridges may be seen in many places to-day on grassland which was under the plough in earlier centuries. From this brief description it will be seen that the open fields cultivated with the heavy medieval plough were laid out in strips.

The main feature of the heavy mould board plough was its high penetrating power, and it could be used on the heavier types of soil where the light scratch plough of the Celts and Italians would be useless. It thus enabled the cropped area in England to be greatly extended by the cultivation of the heavy soil of the valleys and plains which first had to be slowly carved out of the forest. It owed its superiority to an iron share, a courter, and a wooden mould board so suitable on wet land. This primitive implement gave us the plough as we know it to-day. The principle of our modern plough is identical and, except for the fact that it is now made entirely of iron, it is almost the same in detail.

The open-field system of the Middle Ages was bound to fail because it involved burning the candle at both ends and also in the middle. First the natural recuperation processes in the soil were hampered by low temperatures and poor soil aeration; second, such supplies of farmyard manure as were available were by custom mostly bestowed on the lord's demesne lands, and besides were inadequate because only a portion of the livestock could be wintered; finally the soil-inverting plough led to the oxidation of the stores of soil humus faster than it could be recreated and was bound to wear out the land.

The Low Yield of Wheat

The failure of the open-field system is proved by the low yield of wheat. All authorities agree that the yield of wheat in England during the Middle Ages was at a very low level, though it does not appear to have varied greatly. It may be noted that there was never any question of complete exhaustion of the wheat-growing land, such as occurred in Mesopotamia and in the Roman wheat-growing regions of North Africa, where the soil, owing to over-cropping and in some instances to over-irrigation aggravated by special climatic conditions, became sterile and was transformed into desert. This could not so easily happen in the moist, temperate climate of Great Britain. What happened in the Middle Ages in England was that the yield of corn was not high enough for the requirements of the growing social and economic life of the country.

The material for a quantitative estimate of wheat yields in this period is necessarily very scanty, but in the case of some large estates records are available for a considerable period of years of the seed sown in one year and the grain threshed in the following year, and these form the basis of the best estimates of medieval yields. Sir William Beveridge (Economic Journal Supplement, May 1927), using this method, investigated the yield of wheat for the years 1200 to 1450 on eight manors, including that of Wargrave, situated in seven different counties belonging to the Bishop of Winchester. The average yield per acre was 1.17 quarters or 9.36 measured bushels, equivalent to 7.48 bushels of 60 lb. It is to be noted that these estimates were all from demesne lands which were probably better cultivated and better manured than the land of the customary tenants. Other authorities confirm these figures.

The figures of yield given above help to account for the changes which marked the end of the Middle Ages. The amount of food was becoming insufficient for the growing population. But another factor was steadily developing, which finally assumed the dimensions of an avalanche and led to the reform of manorial farming. This was disease, a matter which must now be discussed.

The Black Death

That the agriculture of the Middle Ages was unable to keep the population in health was first indicated by the frequent indications of rural unrest. But these were soon followed by the writing on the wall in the shape of the Black Death in 1348-9. This outbreak had been preceded by several years of dearth and pestilence, and it was succeeded by four visitations of similar disease before the end of the century. During its ravages it destroyed from one-third to one-half of the population. This seriously affected the labour supply, which was no longer sufficient to carry on the traditional methods of manorial farming, already beginning to be undermined by the growing tendency to replace service by money payments.

Land which could no longer be ploughed had to be laid down to grass and used for feeding sheep to produce more of the wool so urgently needed in Flanders and Lombardy. For the new farming the countryside had to be enclosed: first the lord's demesne and then the area under open fields began to be laid down to grass. The earth's green carpet not only fed the sheep, but gave the land a long rest: large reserves of humus were gradually built up under the turf: the fertility of the soil, which had been imperceptibly worn out by the mould board plough and the constant cropping of the manorial system, was gradually restored.

After a long period of rest of a century the land no longer returned only seven and a half bushels to the acre. The figures given above for the years 1200 to 1450 may be contrasted with the figures from a farm at Wargrave from 1612-20: in these years the average was 25.6 bushels of 60 lb. per acre (Beveridge, loc. cit.). In the latter part of the sixteenth century the general average was eighteen bushels to the acre and even more. That this significant change was due to the restoration of soil fertility by humus formation under the turf there can be no doubt.

It is more than probable that the slow regeneration of the soils of this country, which began after the Black Death, produced other results besides the improvement of crops and livestock. What of the effect of the produce of land in good heart on the most important crop of all -- men and women? Were the outstanding achievements of the Tudor period one of the natural consequences of a restored agriculture? It may well be so.

Enclosure

When increasing population led once more to the breaking up of the grassland and the farmer returned to tillage, the land, after its long rest of upwards of a century, was again capable of responding to the demands made upon it. One result of this experience was an increased interest in enclosure. Instinct was leading to a search for an economic arrangement which would prevent soil exhaustion from being repeated in succeeding ages. Enclosed farms offered a solution, as they gave the farmer the chance of keeping his land in good condition by individual management in place of the easy-going farming of the open fields of old English village agriculture. They also offered to the enclosed farmer the opportunity of composting his straw in his cattle yards and producing as much farmyard manure as possible. This, in most cases, he did, and the plan succeeded.

Nevertheless, the ancient open-field tillage husbandry had had in its favour the authority of long tradition -- a potent force with a suspicious and conservative peasantry. The peasant asked himself: In the case of a readjustment of holdings would not the strong profit and the weak suffer? There grew up a popular prejudice against enclosure and the improvement of the common fields, but in the end, after some centuries of contest, enclosure won.

The form which the enclosure movement took before it was completed was due to the peculiar form of government which came in with the English Revolution of 1688. By that event the landed gentry became supreme. The national and local administration was entirely in their hands, and land, being the foundation of social and political influence, was eagerly sought by them. They not unnaturally wished to direct the enclosure movement into channels which were in the interests of their estates. But in doing so they made some of the most outstanding contributions to farming ever made in our history.

The restoration of soil fertility which resulted from enclosure had a profound influence on both livestock and crops. The provision of more and better forage and fodder which followed the cultivation of clover and artificial grasses, coupled with the popularization of the turnip crop by Townshend in 1730, opened the door for the continuous improvement of livestock by pioneers like Bakewell. The result was that our livestock improved in size and in the quality of the meat. Between 1710 and 1795 the weights of cattle sold at Smithfield more than doubled. By 1795 beeves weighed 800 lb. as compared with 370 lb.; sheep went up from 28 lb. to 80 lb. The improvement in the yield of cereals was no less significant. That of rye or wheat rose from 6-8 bushels to the acre in the Middle Ages to 15-20 bushels; barley yielded up to 36 bushels, oats 32-40 bushels. All this was due to more and better food for the livestock and more manure for the land. More manure raised larger crops: larger crops supported much bigger flocks and herds.

Another change in the countryside accompanied the enclosures. The forests, which since Saxon times had been gradually cleared and converted into manorial lands, had by this process become exhausted. After the Civil War it was realized that the country was running short of the hardwoods needed for maintaining the fleet and for buildings and so forth. An era of tree planting, which continued for two hundred years, was inaugurated by the publication of Evelyn's Sylva in 1678. It was during this period that the English landscape as we know it to-day was created by the judicious laying out of parks, artificial lakes, groups of trees, and woods. All this planting provided an important factor in the maintenance of soil fertility. The roots of the trees and the hedges combed the subsoil for minerals, embodied these in the fallen leaves and other wastes of the trees and shrubs, and so helped to maintain the humus in the soil, as well as the circulation of minerals. The roots also acted as subsoil ploughs and aerating agencies. The cumulative effect of the trees and hedges, which accompanied enclosure, in maintaining soil fertility has passed almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, its importance in humus production and in the availability of minerals must be considerable.

While the policy of enclosure, combined with tree-planting and the creation of the existing English landscape, arrested the fall in soil fertility which was inherent in the open-field system, the freedom of action which followed enclosure afforded full scope to the improver. The restoration of British agriculture owes much to the pioneers among the landlords themselves, particularly to Coke of Holkham (1776-1816), who did much to introduce the Norfolk four-course system -- (1) turnips, (2) barley, (3) seeds (clover and rye grass), (4) wheat -- into general practice and so to achieve at long last an approach to Nature's law of return. Besides his championship of the Norfolk four-course system, his achievements include the conversion of 2,000,000 acres of waste into well-farmed and productive land, the prevention of famine in England during the Napoleonic Wars, the solution of the rural labour problem in his locality by means of a fertile soil, the demonstration of the principle that money well laid out in land improvement is an excellent investment. He invested half a million sterling in his own property and thereby raised the rent roll of his estate from £2,200 a year to £20,000. He transformed agriculture in this country by the simple process of first writing his message on the land and then, by means of his famous sheep-shearing meetings, bringing it to the notice of the farming community.

But the replacement of the manorial system by individual farming in fenced fields was attended by some grave disadvantages. The large profits obtained from the sale of wool, for example, while they enriched the few, led to a new conception of agriculture. The profit motive began to rule the farmer; farming ceased to be a way of life and soon became a means of enrichment. Enterprising individuals were afforded considerable scope for using their farms to make money. At the same time, large numbers of less fortunate individuals deprived of their land had either to work for wages or seek a living in the towns.

The various Enclosure Acts, which covered a period of more than 600 years, 1235-1845, therefore led to a new agriculture, the enthronement of the profit motive in the national life, and to the exploitation of coal, iron, and minerals, which is customarily referred to as the Industrial Revolution. This arose from the activities of the tradesmen of the manor, whose calling was destroyed by the Enclosure Acts.

The last of the Enclosure Acts, which finally put an end to the strip system of the open fields, was passed in 1845. About the same time the celebrated Broadbalk wheat plots of the Rothamsted Experimental Station were laid out. This field is divided into permanent parallel strips and cultivated on even more rigid lines than anything to be found in the annals of manorial farming. These plots never enjoy the droppings of livestock: till recently they never had the benefit of the annual rest provided by a fallow. Practically every agricultural experiment station all over the world has copied Rothamsted and adopted the strip system of cultivation. How can such experiments, based on an obsolete method of farming, ever hope to give a safe lead to practice? How can the higher mathematics and the ablest statistician overcome such a fundamental blunder in the original planning of these trials?

The strip system has also been adopted for the allotments round our towns and cities without any provision whatsoever on the part of the authorities to maintain the land in good heart by such obvious and simple expedients as subsoiling, followed by a rest under grass grazed by sheep or cattle, ploughing up, and sheet-composting the vegetable residues. Land under allotments should not be under vegetables for more than five years at a time; this should be followed by a similar period under grass and livestock.

The Industrial Revolution and Soil Fertility

The released initiative which accompanied the collapse of the manorial system was by no means confined to the restoration of soil fertility and the development of the countryside. The dispossessed craftsmen started all kinds of industries, in which they used as labour-saving devices first water power, then the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and finally electrical energy. By these agencies the Industrial Revolution, which continues till this day, was set in motion. It has influenced farming in many directions. In the first place, industries have encroached on and seriously reduced the area under cultivation. But by far the most important demand of the Industrial Revolution was the creation of two new hungers -- the hunger of a rapidly increasing urban population and the hunger of its machines. Both needed the things raised on the land: both have seriously depleted the reserves of fertility in our soils. Neither of these hungers has been accompanied by the return of the respective wastes to the land. Instead, vast sums of money were spent in completely side-tracking these wastes and preventing their return to the land which so sadly needed them. Much ingenuity was devoted to developing an effective method of removing the human wastes to the rivers and seas. These finally took the shape of our present-day water-borne sewage system. The contents of the dustbins of house and factory first found their way into huge dumps and then into incinerators or into refuse tips sealed by a thin covering of cinders or soil.

At first the additional demands for food and raw materials were met by the restored agriculture and the periodical ploughing up of grass. One of these demands was the vast quantities of corn needed to feed the urban population. The price of wheat was regulated for more than 150 years by a series of Corn Laws, which attempted to hold the balance between the claims of the farmers who produced the grain and those of the consumers and the industrialists who advocated cheap food for their workers, so that they could export their produce at a profit. But as the urban population expanded, the pressure on the fertility of the soil increased until, in 1845, a disastrous harvest and the potato famine compelled the Government in 1846 to yield. The "rain rained away" the Corn Laws (Prothero).

Deprived of protection, farmers were forced to adopt new methods and to farm intensively. Many developments in farming occurred. Particular attention was paid to drainage: the first drain pipe was made in 1843; two years later the pipes were turned out by a machine. Liebig's famous essay in 1843 drew attention to the importance of manures, While better farm buildings and the preparation of better farmyard manure were adopted, two fatal mistakes were made. Artificial manures like nitrate of soda and superphosphate came into use: imported feeding stuffs for livestock began to take the place of home-grown food. British farming, in adopting these two expedients, because they appeared for the moment to be profitable, laid the foundations of much future trouble But in the use of better implements for the land and the provision of improved transport facilities the countryside was on firmer ground. The result of all these and other developments was a period of great prosperity for farming which lasted till late in the seventies of the last century.

The Great Depression of 1879

Then the blow fell. The year 1879, which I remember so vividly, was one of the wettest and coldest on record. The average yield of wheat fell to about fifteen bushels to the acre: large numbers of sheep and cattle were destroyed by disease: the price of wheat fell to an undreamt-of level as the result of large importations from the virgin lands of the New World. The great depression of 1879 not only ruined many farmers, but it dealt the industry a mortal blow. Farmers were compelled to meet a new set of conditions -- impossible from the point of view of the maintenance of soil fertility -- which have been more or less the rule till the Great War of 1914-18 and the World War which began in 1939 provided a temporary alleviation as far as the sale of produce and satisfactory prices were concerned.

Since 1879 the standard of real farming in this country has steadily fallen. The labour force, particularly the supply of men with experience of and sympathy with livestock, markedly diminished and deteriorated in quality. Rural housing left much to be desired. Drainage was sadly neglected. The small hill farms, which are essential for producing cattle possessing real bone and stamina, fell on evil days. Our flocks of folded sheep, so essential for the upkeep of downland, dwindled. Diseases like foot-and-mouth, tuberculosis, mastitis, and contagious abortion became rampant. Less and less attention was paid to the care of the manure heap and to the maintenance of the humus content of the soil. The NPK mentality (Chapter 6, The Shortcomings of Present-day Agricultural Research) replaced the muck mentality of our fathers and grandfathers. Murdered bread, deprived of the essential germ, replaced the real bread of the last century and seriously lowered the efficiency of our rural population. The general well-being of our flocks and herds fell far below that of some of our overseas competitors like the Argentine.

But in this dark picture some rays of light could be detected. The pioneers were busy demonstrating important advances. Among these two are outstanding: (1) the Clifton Park system of farming based on deep-rooting plants in the grass carpet, and (2) the use of the subsoiler for breaking up pans under arable and grass, and so preparing the ground for another great advance -- the mechanized organic farming of tomorrow.

The Second World War

Such, generally speaking, was the condition of British agriculture in September 1939, when the second world war began and the submarine menace for the second time brought national starvation into the picture. What an opportunity was provided for a Coke of Norfolk for making use of a portion of the resources of a great nation to set British farming on its feet for all time by the simple expedient of restoring and maintaining soil fertility! What an opening was given to the pioneers of human nutrition and the apostles of preventive medicine for feeding the men and women defending the country on the fresh produce of fertile soil and so initiating the greatest food reform in our history! But the potential Cokes of Norfolk had been liquidated or discouraged by many years of death duties, which had destroyed most of our agricultural capital and deprived the countryside of its natural leaders who, in years gone by, had done so much for farming. The apostles of real nutrition and of preventive medicine, such as the panel doctors of Cheshire, were ignored. (See Medical Testament.)

A much easier road was taken. The vast stores of fertility, which had accumulated after the long rest under grass, were cashed in and converted into corn crops. The seed so obtained saved the population from starvation, but most of the resulting straw could not be used because of the shortage of labour to handle it and of insufficient cattle to convert it into humus. The grow-more-food policy was, therefore, based on the exhaustion of the soil's capital. It is a perfect example of unbalanced farming. It is therefore certain to sow the seeds of future trouble, which will be duly registered by Mother Earth in the form of malnutrition and disease of crops, livestock, and mankind.


Next: 5. Industrialism and the Profit Motive

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