SOIL FOR OUR SONS
By MICHAEL GRAHAM MR. R. S. HUDSON recently announced his intention to go on paying part of the cost of liming land, acting through the Land Fertility Committee. That is good, but there is an old proverb that husbandmen like to quote : Lime feeds the father, starves the son.
No one knows how old that saying is, but it is at any rate somewhat older than the Church of England, for it was "in common speech" nearly four hundred years ago. Liming was old enough then, and well enough understood for peasant to say to peasant, monk to monk, and squire to squire: Lime feeds the father, starves the son.
It is almost insolent to add that the saying is right, that modern soil-science confirms it up to the hilt.
"Starves the son." I doubt if we have sunk so low, or are in such desperate straits, that we are willing to feed ourselves at our sons' expense ; but we shall do exactly that, to some extent at any rate, unless we follow up the Committee's action by the proper sequence of husbandry, the big programme of organic manuring after the war that Mr. W. J. Blyton has called for, and that will cost money.
Lime and lime without manure Will make both farm and farmer poor, and by manure the rhymester did not mean chemicals ; nor would most modern soil-scientists.
There is evidently something odd about lime. Lime is one of fertility's most trusty servants, ranking third, below humus and clay ; but in the name of that committee fertility seems married to lime (with basic slag in attendance also). Now fertility of soil is liyeliness ; it is briskness and activity, of worms, insects, fungi, bacteria, and of electric charges on the atoms of clay and humus. To associate fertility with any mineral, even with such an important one as lime, savours of the inadequate ideas of a former generation of soil-scientists.
Yet the name of the committee is quite right if it is under- stood as "fertility-liberation committee," on the principle of the awakening of the Sleeping Beauty, because lime is a liberator of fertility. Lime has at least three actions : it is an essential mineral, and a direct " sweetener " and "cooler," because it neutralises acid, but its most important action is that it makes sticky things in the soil less sticky, which gives the soil better structure, more crumbly and aerated, which makes it drier, damper, warmer, cooler ; all qualities of modera- tion, which plants appreciate, and all making for better crops— feeding the father.
There are many other improvements when we lime land. Earthworms can get about better in the looser soil, insects find air to breathe at greater depth, bacteria that make plant-food are encouraged by the better aeration, by the greater traffic of insects and the greater supply of humus left for them by the worms. This increased activity below ground shows on the surface. The more succulent grasses oust the poorer kinds that could live in lirneless land ; wheat, barley, and turnip can all be grown now ; clover, vetch, and trefoil flourish; and the bees come to their favourite flowers. This is the flowering of fertility: on it the fathers wax fat.
But the raw material of all this is provided in the vegetable remains on which the earthworms feed, and which are now consumed in greater quantity ; if these remains are not also fed to the land in greater quantity than formerly the land will lose humus, go down in quality, perhaps not very far, but down nevertheless, towards what Mr. E. Moore Darling has called "dead dust," fit to grow nothing. And that is how lime can starve the sons. This exhaustion of humus can happen in arable land, but not in a well-grazed pasture, because increase of grass and clover lets a man keep more animals, which make more manure. So grassland is safer than arable: it usually conserves and accumulates fertility, even under liming.
But we do not need safe land now, conserving fertility. We have to win this war ; particularly we have to win the Battle of the Atlantic ; and it would be no service to the country to discourage liming because it can be dangerous when men are not scrupulous : other danger is greater. Indeed as a husband- man, and writing only as a husbandman without knowing the problems of administration, I should not feel content until I knew that we had limed all the land that was found to be short in the survey made a year or two before the war. But I am really more anxious about the prospect for our sons. When this war is over and we think ourselves out of danger, are we going to leave our sons to struggle along unaided on land exhausted by liming and by cropping with reduced supplies of animal manure ; or are we going to see that somehow the bullock and the folded sheep are paying propositions? For these two animals can restore and maintain the fertility of our arable land. When the future of agriculture is discussed there is no harm in remembering that Dr. G. V. Jacks has prophesied that it will not have one ; that Europe will go back to scrub, then forest, after the merciless cropping of a second great war. It may ; but it need not.
The man who first discovered liming found something like magic: nothing is more fascinating than to watch life increas- ing after the liming of a pasture that needed it ; clover where there was none ; the loud hum of bees where there was silence ; sleek coats on the animals where there had been dullness before. But, as in all ordering of live things—land, animals, or human beings—if power is abused someone will pay for it, sooner or later.
Lime feeds the father, starves the son.
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