When I was farming in Ireland I always noticed that the cottager's goat and donkey had abundant grazing long before there was any hope of pasture, even on the most forward leys, on my farm. The Irishman's 'long acre' —the banks and hedgerows of the roadside—upon which the landless maintained considerable numbers of grazing animals—provided lush growth a month or more before cattle could be turned on to even the best managed farm pastures.
This happens everywhere in the world, but it struck me more forcibly in Ireland because the 'long acre'—as the Irish call the free pasturing of the roadsides—is made much more use of in Ireland; and I became as green as the banks with envy, when my well-treated fields grew hardly a blade of grass, while a cottager with barely a back garden was feeding his goats, donkey, turkeys and maybe even a couple of cows, for nothing.
Why is the hedgerow growth so much earlier and quicker to recover after grazing than the field growth? Can we imitate the conditions of the hedgerow to reproduce the same early and abundant growth in the field?
It is not difficult to discover the reasons for this superiority of nature in the hedgerows and to apply them in establishing our cultivated pastures. The herbal ley comes as near as possible to this ideal pasture, so long as the soil conditions of the hedgerow, as well as the variety and type of ingredients, are imitated for the ley.
What, then, has the hedgerow grazing got that the field has not?
I summarize these desirable factors as follows:
(1) Ideal soil conditions—i.e. fertility, friability, moisture-holding capacity, and warmth from bacterially-generated heat.
(2) Shelter—the hedge acting as a cloche to encourage an early start to all crops growing under or near it.
(4) Deep-rooted ingredients and early-starting herbs.
Each autumn nature begins to prepare the soil for the early spring growth of the following year. Seeds of all varieties fall into an already warm, moist and friable soil. Then starts a succession of leaf-falls of various kinds, which, intermixed with a tiny proportion of animal wastes, covers the seeds. A slow process of decay, through which the fallen leaves then begin to pass, assisted by rain-given moisture held in the surface sponge of organic material, creates all the warmth and nutriment that the seed needs to germinate and grow. The seed which contains the nucleus of life is covered, warmed and fed by leaves which have died and fallen from the trees, bushes and grasses above the soil. During their growing period those leaves have gathered the raw materials of chlorophyll, vitamins, minerals, trace elements, proteins and sugars from soil, sun and air, and in addition, no doubt, many elements of which we know nothing, from sources of which we are even yet not aware. These are transferred by the leaves to the surface soil to join in the work of soil bacteria, mycelia, fungi and the minute living creatures of the soil, to supply, in adequate quantities and ideal proportions, every single requirement of health, nutrition and growth for the young plant as well as for the established bush and tree.
No synthetic nutrient need be added and, because the resultant crop is always naturally healthy, no poison sprays are needed to 'protect' the plants from pests and diseases.
In spite of the complete absence of artificial nutrients or stimulants, the roadside grasses, clovers and herbs, quickly recover and produce fresh growth after frequent cuttings by council, roadmen in Britain and the grazing of long-acre' livestock in Ireland. How much more ought we to harvest from our pastures, even without chemical stimulants, were we able to imitate these ideal soil conditions of the hedgebottom. For we have the advantage of generations of selective breeding of leafy strains of grasses and clovers, in addition to the natural herbage of the hedgerow, from which to constitute our leys.
But the fact is, that on most farms, little or no attempt is made even to observe, let alone profit by nature's methods of soil preparation and fertility building. When I first observed how nature got at least one month ahead of me in providing 'early bite', I too was following the accepted system of soil cultivation, with all its attendant costs in fertilizers and health supplements (which were made necessary by the inadequate diet which resulted). But once having recognized the superior method of soil management and manuring, I quickly started to adapt my ley preparation to it.
I needed no scientific confirmation of a method I had observed with my own eyes to be superior and less costly than any accepted method of achieving ideal soil conditions for early growth. The simple comparison of growth in the field and around the hedgerows, provided convincing evidence from the only really genuine scientist—nature. Facts are good enough for most farmers without the supporting explanations of laboratory-bound professors, though men who have gone to the fields for practical information have since supported nature's methods of cultivation and manuring as the best means of ensuring constant foolproof fertility, instead of the misleading and variable measure of chemical analysis.
Over twenty years ago Sir Albert Howard insisted on the importance of the biological, as distinct from the chemical, assessment of soil fertility. He declared that chemical soil analysis was, at very best, nothing more than a rough guide, to be checked against physical examination and a close observation of biological and botanical indications.
When he first visited me at Goosegreen, we discussed this subject at length. He had made suggestions which were contrary to the indications of a recent soil analysis. 'Forget the soil test', he said, 'look at the weeds that are growing there.'
I had grown up under old-fashioned farming conditions, and a father who was suspicious of the mathematical tyranny of soil-analyses and other scientific arrogance. The true farmer knew his soil by its feel in his hand and under his feet, and by the plants which nourished under natural conditions. We knew that the heaviest crops resulted from the most muck, whatever N, P, or K a soil analysis might suggest. So what Sir Albert said made sense to me.
When, with the change-over to surface cultivation, I found that keeping organic matter in the top few inches of soil resulted in increased crops and the apparent correction of 'soil deficiencies', I described the phenomenon in my book Fertility Farming. Dr. Dahr, head of the chemistry department of Alahabad University, visited me and said that what I was doing on a farm scale to demonstrate the biological release of plant nutrients, confirmed experiments in which he had shown that the chemical analysis of the soil was profoundly influenced by the method of application of organic matter; that surface application, in the presence of sunlight, added not only the chemical constituents of the organic matter itself, but collected and manufactured, by photosynthesis and bacterial action, additional quantities of essential elements and released further otherwise unavailable minerals in the top soil, during the process of decomposition. Soil analyses were thus useless, as they would vary according to biological activity, which in turn varied with seasonal sunlight, rain, and surface organic deposits of crop residues and insect and bacterial life.
Sir Albert's view of soil analyses was thus justified; my own experiments and claims recounted in Fertility Farming were scientifically confirmed; and our assertions regarding the complete adequacy of organic methods, and in particular organic surface cultivation, were firmly established.
As though to clinch the matter, we were further supported by Struthers and Sieling of Massachusetts University, who declared that organic matter on the surface of the soil has the ability to collect from the atmosphere 'aerosols' containing phosphates and calcium, and that adequate surface organic matter was the best means of maintaining and increasing essential available nutrients in the top soil.
Additional scientific evidence in support of Sir Albert's inspired judgment and my own practical claims has also now been published by the Soil Association.
I am grateful to Lady Eve Balfour, who inspired the Haughley Project, where this recent work has been done, for the following summary of a report which serious students of soil fertility should get from the Soil Association, 8f. Hyde Park Mansions, London, N.W.I, and read in full. The Haughley experiment is divided into three sections: (1) Organic only, (2) Mixed-organic and chemical, (3) Stockless. Monthly soil analyses on each of the three sections confirms the following:
(1) The fallacy of a single soil analysis to determine soil requirements.
(2) The relationship between high organic content and mineral availability.
(3) The effect that different crops appear to have on mineral availability.
(4) The fact that minerals recovered in crops bear little relation to fertilizer applications.
Numbers 1, 2 and 3 have been revealed by the soil analyses which were carried out every month on every field for the following: pH, Total Nitrogen, Available Phosphorus, Available Potassium, Humus, Water-holding Capacity. Some variations in pH occurred, but in the main the figure is fairly constant at around eight on all three sections. Sectional averages for total Nitrogen are: Stockless 15 per cent, Mixed 20 per cent, Organic 25 per cent. For Humus (determined by loss on ignition) comparative figures average approximately: Stockless 6 per cent, Mixed 7 per cent, Organic 8 per cent. In the case of available potash and phosphate, however, very striking seasonal variations were recorded. These variations occurred on all sections, but markedly less on the Stockless section. So far as it is at present possible to relate this release of plant nutrients to other factors, observations have shown that:
(a) all fields are low in available phosphate and potash during the winter;
(b) there is a tendency for the figures to rise steadily, as the season advances, to a peak in June or July, subsequently falling;
(c) the peak is highest in those fields which have a high organic matter and total nitrogen content;
(d) it is greatest under arable crops, which make a quick demand, and least under leys, which have steady growth and at the same time are continually grazed off;
(e) it is greatest of all under barley;
(f) it bears little if any relation to fertilizer application, except that the smallest release of these important plant nutrients occurs on those fields which have regular fertilizer treatment and no livestock.
The most dramatic variation occurred in the case of an old permanent pasture which was ploughed for the first time five years previous to the tests. Since then it grew four consecutive arable crops and, except for a light dressing of compost to one acre, received no manure or fertilizer treatment of any kind. In this field the analysis in June showed nearly ten times more available phosphate and potash than was present in January. The crop in this field was barley, and the actual figures compared with fields growing barley in the other two sections were:
January
10
6
500
June
81
44
580
July
38
26
500
November
27
8
450
MIXED
January
6
4
210
June
50
20
330
July
42
28
400
November
20
11
240
STOCKLESS
January
11
4
150
June
26
10
200
July
26
14
240
November
13
9
170
The peak figures occur sometimes in June and sometimes in July, thus ruling out weather as the only determining factor. Both the Mixed and Stockless fields received approximately the same quantities of NPK fertilizers, applied to the Mixed at the end of February, and to the Stockless at the end of March. Thus the rise in these two cases, though possibly affected by the fertilizer, bears little quantitative relation to it. There does, however, appear to be a connection between the release of the mineral and the total nitrogen content. Summarizing this part of the work, Dr. R. F. Milton, who conducted the experiment, says: 'Surprising variations were established throughout the year. These were most marked on the Organic section where no artificials were used—the highest rise in available minerals and nitrogen occurred in those fields with the highest humus content. This rise was due to the release of bound minerals by the action of soil bacteria and/or fungi and the soil bacteria are most active where the content of organic matter is high.'
The fact that minerals recovered in a crop bear little relation to fertilizer application can best be illustrated by comparing the figures for three fields under the same crop in the same section. The following table shows the amounts in cwts. per acre of P2O5 (phosphoric acid), K (potassium) and N (nitrogen) in the three barley crops on the Stockless section, side by side with the amounts (also in cwt. per acre) applied as fertilizer to the fields.
Bulk Mineral Yield Mineral
Yield in Crop per Application
Field Cwt. acre in cwt. cwt. p.a.
K. P2O5 N. K. P2O5 N.
S: No. 1 10 .04 .07 .13 .24 .43 .22
S: No. 2 19 .07 .11 .18 .19 .34 .40
S: No. 3 18-1/2 .08 .11 .28 .20 .36 .10
The Equivalent figures for the Mixed section field of barley were as follows:
M. 15-1/2 .06 .10 .24 2.29 1.03 1.79
(Application figures here include FYM.)
It is interesting to compare the above with the two fields of Organic barley which received no treatment,
O: No. 1 22 .09 .12 .23 Nil O: No. 2 18 .07 .12 .33 Nil
The most striking comparison to be noted in the figures, these particularly in regard to nitrogen, is between fields No. 2 and No. 3 on the Stockless section and No. 2 on the Organic section, since there was little difference in bulk yield between these three fields.
The practical results obtained on mine, and a number of other organic farms, by the mere maintenance of organic matter, without chemicals, supported by the scientific experiments of Dr. Dahr and the Soil Association, make it clear that soil analyses are useless as a guide to crop needs, or as a measure of soil fertility. Ample organic matter either supplies or releases all that is needed for soil and crop nutrition.
Sir John Russell in Soil Conditions and Plant Growth quotes a number of scientific authorities in support of the organic system of soil and crop nutrition. He even states that nature somehow manages without chemical additions, due to this complete nutritional process which we have observed in places where natural growth is earliest and best:
'While plants can grow satisfactorily and attain full development with inorganic nutrients only, yet, in natural conditions their nutrition always proceeds in presence of organic matter ... (My italics.—F. N. T.)
'In the Rothamsted field experiments with cereals, no combination of artificial fertilizers is as effective as farmyard manure in avoiding deterioration of yield on continuously cropped land, or in steadying crop yields from year to year, but the effects could be attributed to differences in nutrient supply or to physical and physico-chemical actions of the manure on the soil. . . .'
Russell says "The Rothamsted mangold plots receiving no organic manure, 'get into so sticky and "unkindly" a state that the young plants have some difficulty in surviving, however much food is supplied, and may fail altogether in a dry spring; the dunged plots rich in humus are much more favourable to the plant and never fail to give a crop." (My emphasis.— F. N. T.)
So marked are the physical effects of organic matter, he continues, 'that if 15 or 20 per cent, of organic matter is present in a soil the operation of other factors ceases to count for much, and the distinction between sands, loams, and clays tend to be obliterated.'
In other words: if we could imitate the soil conditions of the hedgerow closely enough, we could forget the perennial problems of the intractable clay or the blow-away sand. We should have only fertile soil as distinct from our accepted variations of clay soil, sandy soil, red marl or loam. Because the achievement of a universal fertile soil is difficult, that is no argument against striving to get as near to it as practical circumstances allow.
K. T. Hartley and M. Greenwood, writing in the Empire Journal of Experimental Agriculture in 1933, at the time I was an agricultural student at Leeds University, reported that in Nigeria 'small applications of farmyard manure at the rate of only one ton an acre had effects considerably surpassing an equivalent mixture of artificial manures'.
In 1872 Grandeau claimed that organic matter played the chief part in the nitrogen and phosphorous nutrition of plants. This has of course since been explained by the ability of decaying organic matter to release acids which render the insoluble phosphates freely soluble, and by the nitrifying action of bacteria which depend upon organic matter for their existence.
As a working farmer, I take the view (apart altogether from any other considerations) that if my land will produce good crops, which I know are of better quality, without any chemicals, I am better off without buying any. With fields of my size, if a test were taken in January, I should have to spend perhaps another £100 more, if I believed the salesman, than if he had done his analysis in June or July when the phosphates and potash were up. It is much cheaper for me to wait till I have farmed the minerals into an available condition in my soil, than to buy them in synthetic form because the genuine organic potash and phosphates happen to be 'out' the day the analyst calls!
Rothamsted figures show that the top eight inches of my soil have more than enough minerals to crop it for a century, and my deep-rooting herbs run lower than that, some down to ten feet and more. Some people who go by theory will then say that I, and the many others like me, are robbing the soil. If Dr. Struther and Professor Seiling are wrong about aerosols, which I take to be mineral dust blowing through the air, then maybe in about a thousand years I shall have made a desert!
To save the man who will be as far from me in time as the Saxons were before William the Conqueror came down my way, they consider I ought to add relatively trifling quantities (compared with what is already there) of chemicals, manufactured from synthetic acids and rock-deposit raw material which is going to be exhausted as quickly as coal. But I rather think that the man who has my farm in the year 2,054 is going to be pretty mean with the superphosphate and potash. For fertilizer prices are going to be wicked by then as they get scarcer, manufacturing costs increase and shareholders' dividends have to be maintained.
Taking a long view, longer than that expected of any other industry (for no one expects an oil company to think of the future with hard cash paid out now), there is a consolation:
All the deserts of the world have got the criminal who made them in plain view; shortage of water, resulting from the removal of trees, or letting the rain wash the nutriment out of the soil, by shifting cultivation as in Africa, or breaking up good pasture and robbing it by mono-cropping, as in America.
There is a good deal of first-class grass in the world—or there was until men started looting it for quick gain. Nature never farms the land into a desert by taking cash crops of oak trees, as an example, for a thousand years from one forest. Consider the American prairie, or the South African veldt, which is a balanced herbal ley that suits the climate. Either carried pretty heavy stocks of game, grazing on the rotational system as they moved about, just as I do with my cattle. This kind of land builds up a great store of fertility, until science moves in and tries to mass-produce groundnuts, or introduces some other way of short-circuiting nature to get rich quick.
This is of course a purely theoretical argument. For our whole idea of what plant foods there are in the land depends so far on soil analysis; and as we have seen how that varies so widely with the seasons, it is more like an elastic tape-measure than a scientific certainty. So, I go only by results; and if I can get my results without fertilizers, I shall keep my money in my pocket, and do my duty by my land as men have done through all the centuries of farming before chemicals were invented.
* * *
In getting the ideal soil conditions for the ley, and preparing a seed-bed of hedgerow quality and fertility, there are two things I have to achieve.
(a) A moisture-holding skin of organic matter on the surface of the soil. I have to give my soil a sponge-cake covering instead of a hard pie-crust! The sponge-cake absorbs and holds moisture, the pie-crust throws it off.
(b) Having achieved a friable humus-rich soil I must apply in the late summer or autumn of the seeding year a surface mulch of vegetation in imitation of the leaf fall.
If these two essentials are achieved I find that soil analyses can be utterly ignored. Conditions for perfect establishment of the ley are automatically created.
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