CULTURAL PRACTICES

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLIX, Issue 149, 7 September 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

CULTURAL PRACTICES

WORK IN ROMAN ERA The exhibition of ancient farming implements at the British Museum in London, writes a correspondent of a Scottish paper, suggests that it is astonishing what a store of knowledge wa.s accumulated by the ancients on the subject of cultivations, and how ’ittle we moderns have added to it. All that we know about tilth and a good seed bed was known centuries ago, and in this department the only modern advance is in relation to first the use of iron, and, next, labour-saving implements. In answering the question what arc the three most important things in good husbandry, Columella, the ancient Roman writer placed first til’age, and second tillage, and only third manuring. By the last he meant, of course, dunging. And so it remained until the middle of the nineteenth century, when chemists discovered artificial manures. The ancients did and could not know that certain rocks when dissolved in acid made a good manure for turnips; still ’ess did they know that coal would one day yield ammonia; the substance they knew, and named it after Jupiter’s

temple of Anion in Libya, where it was made from camel dung. And farmyard manure is still the best fertiliser; but in modern farming there is not enough to give ten or fifteen tons once in four years. But it is fortunate that to a great extent, though not wholly, the socalled artificial or chemical fertilisers have come to the rescue. Science is not a’l theory, for these fertilisers are one of the presents of science to farming, as a result, be it. noted, of the theorising of chemists; and it is noteworthy that the latest development in chemistry, the making of fertilisers from the air, is as useful in peace as in war. For by the same process is made nitrate of ammonia, an explosive which played a great part in the war. So needful is this substance that, in spite of the efforts of the League of Nations, every civilised country in the globe is erecting factories for its manufacturefactories which, as long as peace ensues, will turn out useful fertilisers for agriculturists by the million ton.