IMPORTANCE OF STEAM CULTURE ON CLAY LANDS.

Colonist, Volume V, Issue 468, 18 April 1862, Page 2

IMPORTANCE OF STEAM CULTURE ON CLAY LANDS.

In a lecture on ' the Economy of Steam Cultivation,' delivered before the members of the Reading Farmers' Club on the 7th December, Mr. J. C. Morton said—" I have not the smallest doubt, and it is not mere bumptiousness in me to speak in this way, because all through the summer I have been at work upon this subject, testing the matter in all parts of the country, that as the result of steam culture our clay lands will take their old precedence and superiority in a much more striking way than they ever have done, as the real granary and storehouse of English food. They are naturally much richer than the sands. Give a sample ot clay soil to the chemist, and ho will tell you it is full of the food of plants. What the farmer wants is a key which shall open this locked storehouse, and enable him to turn its contents to account. Such a key is fitting to the lock by draining and steam ploughing. It is the facilities which thorough tillage, such as steam power alone can effect, giving a free passage for air and water, that the immense fertilising influence upon clayi will be seen. For tillage is not merely a key to a full warehouse from which little has hitherto been got, because it was locked, but it is the means of enriching the soil, as well as of extracting its riches. He could not help repeating what had been said elsewhere—' A fine autumn well used v worth a guano island to the country.' The operations of the last two months upon our stubbles have been as good a guarantee of next year's crop aa if the contents of such an island had been spread upon their surface. It k no more alteration o£

character or * quality' by which a thorough fallow land in dry autumn weather fertilises the soil. It is as much by an actual addition of particles in the one case as in the other that tillage is the equivalent of dung. Guano, superphosphate, lime, act not only as direct additions of the food of plants, but also as re-agents in the soil, by which useless matters there, or even mischievous matters there, are converted into food. And so does tillage, and the more thorough the tillage the more striking would be the advantage thus obtained. It cannot, I think, be doubted that tims, by steam p »wcr, clay laud owners, farmers, and inhabitants aro to be especially benefitted, and that the economy of steam culture is proved by the advantage of its process, at least, as mucb. as by its cheapness."