THE OLD RULE OF THUMB AND

Colonist, Volume II, Issue 181, 15 July 1859, Page 4

THE OLD RULE OF THUMB AND

THE NSW CHEMICAL FARMING. In the Old Country at home, where land has been cropped and impoverished for centuries, the old empirical Rule of Thumb processes have been found to result in certain failure; and have compelled farmers, even the most wedded to ancestral prejudices, to have recourse to other newer methods of:culture. The strong brazen wall of ill-founded opinion ha 3 thus been breached in numerous places, and let in streams of light, where, a few years ago, all was darkness and uncertainty.

In the Colonies again, the newer and virgin lands, not impoverished b} r successive cropping, yield, in most cases, even by the worst systems of culture, quite enough to foster rather than to break down the' dogmas of the old school, how absurd or unfounded soever these may be. It is, I believe, mainly from this cause, that our Colonial farming is about fifty years, or more, behind the improvements in England, Scotland, and Belgium; and all reform in this respect, is rendered difficult or impossible, by the strong prejudice so prevalent against what is contemptuously termed Book-farming and Agricultural Chemistry—which has* saved European farmers from universal bankruptcy and ruin. I will give a Colonial example in proof. A few years ago, on going round a farm with the proprietor, we came to a field of barley, thin, patchy, and scarcely worth reaping. He said the badness of the crop was all owing to the unfavorable season, as he was wont to have very excellent crop 3 from that, field. I enquired what had been his course of cropping, and his answer, to my undisguised astonishment, was " barley, barley, for 22 -successive years, without any manure or fallowing; but of late the seasons had changed so. " As this farmer, till he settled in the bush, had never farmed nor nor seen farming, it would have been wasting words for me to talk to him about rotation of crops, or the analysis of his soil, to ascertain in what it was deficient, with a view to judicious manuring to supply such deficiency. If a few of his neighbours had been consulted about the failure of the barley, some would have agreed with him that it was entirely owing to the bad season; others would dissent from this, and recommend manuring with bone dust, because it had answered well where they had tried it; others, for a similiar reason, would advise lime, besides being cheap there; others would be eloquent on deep ploughing as bringing up fresh soil to the surface; and others would praise guano as far superior to all other things. Now, all of these would eagerly volunteer their opinions, and what they call their practical experience (worth-. ] egs —worse than worthless—when founded on ignorance) without ever dreaming of examining the soil as to what it might want ■to restore its fertility; all, all empirically dabbling in the dark, and advising something that did good, most probably in cases altogether different or quite opposite. Such, with few exceptions, is the state of farming all over the Colonies.

It is a common feeling among men of all descriptions to think they can cultivate the ground without having learnt the art, in the same way as almost every body will volunteer medical prescriptions for coughs, colds, headaches, without any inquiry into causes, or knowing anything whatever of the effects of their boasted remedies. A farmer's daughter is seized with erysipelas—a large, spreading, bright rose red, swelling with burning pain—(inflammatory of course, according to Buchan, Graham,, and the old empirical school), and the mother, having, much old school experience in such 2ases forthwith applies dry flour to '■ draw out the fire, and gives a rigid starving diet of gruel and slops. The poor girl sinks rapidly, and is dying. A doctor of the new rational school is called in, and knowing the case to be What he terms asthenic, the very reverse of inflammatory, and akin to mortification, he shocks the whole family by denouncing the dry flour and starving system and boldly prescribes copious brandy poultices, and plenty of brandy punch made with milk, along with devilled kidneys and spiced omelets, standing by'the while" to see •'his orders enforced, till the low sinking of the patient is changed irito merry gaiety, and the dying girl is speedily better. The continuing of .the slops would have been certain death.

In the case of the barley-field, also asthenic • (to borrow the doctor's Greek), from the exhaustion of 22 years' cropping, carrying away tho .alkaline salts, indispensable to the vigorous growth £f the green stem, no less ""than-to the plumpness and firmness of the ripened grain; a slight examination by the eye, showed this field to be rich in one of the ingredients of

those salts, namely, quartz sand (seldom indeed deficient in the most barren soils;) though barley cannot feed on quartz sand more than the farmer himself could feed on bone-dust, but if such bone-dust were dissolved into jelly in Papin's digester and made into savoury soup, and if the quartz sand were decomposed by potass, ammonia, or soda, the nutriment in both cases would be good and efficient for the farmer as well as for his crop. Bone-dust alone applied to such a soil would be something similar to the mother's starving her sick daughter above; whereas the potass in wood ashes, or the soda in sea-weed, or nitrate of soda (introduced as a manure some years ago), or the ammonia in guano, would all prove excellent in producing salts of "silica in the soil—salts readily dissolved by rain and dew, and when bo dissolved easily sucked up by the spongioles in the fine root tips of the grain crop, which would not admit the smallest particle of the quartz any more than the farmer could swallow a haunchbone. In this way, ona remedy might be obtained for the barrenness; while the other organic elements usually present in guano, besides the ammonia, might supply other ingredients wanting in such a field, from having been exhausted by previous cropping.— Victorian Agricultural Gazette.