SOIL EXHAUSTION

Northern Advocate, 9 April 1887, Page 3

SOIL EXHAUSTION

Tho cool, humid climate of England is so i favor able for the growth of grass, and so large 1 a proportion of land is left in permanment meadow which could be grazed pearly all through the mild winters there, that it is frequent pratice to allow the headlands, or turning spaces at the ends of large fields, to remain in grass permanently. Dr. Lawes says that on comparing the amount of carbon and nitrogen in the first nine inches deep of these grassy bolts,which have been unploughed for centuriesho found about 2,000 pounds more of nitrogen in it and 20,000 pounds more carbon to the acre, being rather more than he found in wood land, destitute of other vegetation than the thickly growing trees. To supply this amount in dung, even if it could be put on the hind for $1 per ton, would be too costly, and he says that it is impossible to restore lost fertility to ordinary field soil with any possible profit. All that can be done is to check or reduce and so postpone the exhaustion by feeding the tilled soil by all the ordinary means at command. In his investigations in this line Dr. Lawes found a remarkable constancy of proportion in the soil between carbon and nitrogen. Whether there was littl-3 or much of these there was regularly very nearly the same proportion of each — about one part of nitrogen to ten of carbon in the first nine inches of soil, but less of both and a larger ratio of nitrogen deeper down.