A SOIL SURVEY FOR ENGLAND
By S. L. BENSUSAN
IF events, foreseen or unforeseen, should compel this country to mobilise the resources of our farms, the task would find us almost unprepared. English soil is a mosaic ; there are hundreds—literally hundreds—of important varieties. On suitable ground certain crops can be sown with ample expectation of a good return ; on unsuitable land the seeds of failure are firmly estab- lished. In time of crisis there would be no leisure for experiment ; hasty conversion and production would be a gamble, with heavy odds against the cultivator. Records of compulsory cultivation in the last years of the Great War will confirm this statement.
The condition of affairs at home can be best understood by a report made a few years ago by a German, Professor Stremme, who produced the first soil map of Europe on a very rough scale and said that he had received soil surveys of a kind from all European countries, with the exception of Greece, Bulgaria and Great Britain.
Turning from the general to the particular, an instance may be quoted of a man who had paid the deposit for a farm of nearly two hundred acres in a southern county with the intention of growing choice fruit, and then on the sound advice of a friend called in an expert soil surveyor before completing his purchase. He wished to plant dessert apples, and was told that less than ten acres of the farm land were suitable for this purpose, and that even this acreage was in patches. Had he proceeded with his original plan, failure must have been inevitable. It is not too much to say that the soil of England at 'a depth of something between three and four feet con- stitutes an almost unknown country; there has been exploration here and there, but the mass is literally terra incognita; only the surface above and the geological formation beneath are known.
A certain amount of work has been done ; our Agri- cultural Colleges have been as active as resources permit Cambridge, Reading, Wye, Bangor, Aberdeen, Newton Abbot and Harper Adams are among the centres that have carried on soil survey and have trained experts, but on account of the expense they have only been able to produce small maps, and many results obtained are lost in the depths of specialist' magazines. If We turn to the United States, we find that coloured soil-survey maps, one inch to .the mile, cost no more than fifteen cents ; they carry a descriptive tabulation and an indi- cation of the most desirable crops for each area, together with instruction as to the best systems of raising and marketing. If a man should buy a farm in the States tomorrow, he has only to apply to the Land Utilisation. Organisation, where the soil surveyors are to be found, and an official, referring to his index, can see the data that will enable him to dictate a letter with all the information required. No visit is called for. In the course • of a morning such an official can set fifty farmers on the right track, telling them what each field on their holding can do.
We need a central body in this country that would collect and disseminate like information. The cost of the whole work would in all probability be less than a quarter of a million pounds, while the advantage would remain to the country for all time, in peace and war. The technique is simple, the stages are classification, mapping and, obtaining cropping records, the men required for any centre would be two field surveyors, one chemist and one crop recorder. Nowadays elaborate agricultural analysis is no longer sought by the experts who use an auger 11 inches in diameter on a handle 8 feet 6 inches long, and can examine soil to this depth in two or three minutes. At the present time there are very few parts of England in which we are farming to capacity, and we cannot be sure in any of the unsurveyed districts that we are finding the most suitable soil for selected crops. Our geological work is of .the first class, but a geological map and a map of the soil are two different things that should not be confused. For example, on what are known as the Hastings Beds in Kent, geologists find three major sub-divisions, and soil surveyors find 16 soil series. On the Lower Greensand in Kent geologists find four major sub-divisions and soil surveyors find 26 soil series. In an agricultural district a single man can survey from 100 to 600 acres a' day, it would be safe to say, taking all soils into considFration, he could cover 75;000 acres in a year. The ground covered in a day depends upon the nature of the soil ; in some parts it is very patchy and subject to constant variation, in other districts as in East Anglia there are broad stretches of one type. The Ministry of Agriculture has a Soils Correlative Committee, but the members are to some considerable extent the advisory chemists of an agricultural province with little time to devote to the work; their duties and responsibilities are too heavy. What is required is a central organisation and a permanent staff with an admitted expert in charge. Soil secrets respond to a well-ascertained technique of investigation ; indeed a skilled surveyor can recognise soil as a botanist recognises , plants, he plies the auger, passes the soil through his fingers and the secret is revealed. There are 20 different textures known to experts as the land changes from sand to clay, and there are five characteristics of soil recognition : (1) The geological origin of the mineral part of the soil.
(2) The manner in which soil conversion has taken place through the ages.
(3) Natural drainage—a most important factor.
(4) Topography of the soil (certain soils take a definite position in the landscape).
(5) Soil profile (that is a vertical section from four inches to four feet).
It doesn't need an agriculturist to recognise the enormous and enduring value of a soil survey, or to understand how it would lighten the labours of the Ministry's advisory officers and help to make the farmer less dependent upon State support. A survey would enable a central authority in case of need to tell each agriculturist what he can grow on his various fields with the best chance of a good return. There have been pioneers in this country, Sir Daniel Hall and Sir Edward Russell, for example, but the work has been overlooked, presumably on the ground of expense, while in the past decade improvement in methods has reduced that expense to a figure that leaves small excuse for further neglect. It is reasonable to suppose that no year passes in which untutored cultivation does not cost farmers more, far more, than a soil survey would cost the nation.
We are fortunate in having a small body of expert soil surveyors available, though there may not be enough of them to put the work through quickly in view of the large area that awaits investigation. But it will be apparent to everybody that the development of a measure of cultivation along haphazard lines must prove very expensive, and might conceivably be disastrous in times of crisis, while the right cultivation on land whose potentialities • have been examined and recorded will yield results that must be satisfactory both to the farmer and to the nation.
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