LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Sia,—If Mother Earth is misused long
enough she hits back and wipes out her misusers. This has happened often in history, as witness many man-made deserts that once blossomed as the rose. It is an actual fact that character is largely a product of the soil. Many years of murdered food from deadened soil has made us too tame. We are becoming a nation of yes-men and she-men. We must restore our soil into life again or go under and be dominated by a more manly race.
For some fifty years we in England have been progressively killing with chemicals the live moulds, bacteria, earthworms, and other living things which create what is called " humus " (Latin for "ground "), without a continually renewed supply of which the soil becomes increas- ingly deadened and dried up, and finally completely infertile and desert. Mammonism, the worship of money with which to buy power—which is always abused—has drugged our soil with chemical de-fertilisers to stimulate k into giving unnaturally large crops of inferior fodder and food to form an inferior folk, has thereby murdered our soil's teeming population of microscopic unpaid labourers for our health, and has mined out our soil's fertility for money instead of farming it for food and always replacing the fertility extracted. England was originally mostly forest, with the usual deep humus fertility found under forest trees. This forest fertility was slowly used up for centuries without being replaced ; until its low fertility so reduced the disease resistance of our people that the Black Death, between 1348 and 1352, wiped out more than three- quarters of the population of England. Once again Mother Earth had hit back. The subsequent sheep farming, necessitated by the lack of farm labour, re-fertilised our soil by the natural labourless sheet- composting resulting from flocks of sheep. From that new fertility there sprang the great Elizabethan Englishmen. Collation of old records shows that our greatness rises and falls with the living fertility of our soil. And now, many years of exhausted and chemically murdered soil, and of devitalised food from it, has softened our bodies, and, still worse, softened our national character. The character-forming hormones are now known to be affected by the food eaten. That "you are what you eat" is true physically, and largely true mentally and spiritually as well. Physically, we cannot do what our grandfathers could do. Mentally, many have become less like self-reliant men and more like cattle, easily "directed," " planned," and " social-serviced " to be eventually herded by some more
i manly domineering race to slaughter in causes other than our own.
But now, just in time to save us, the introduction and extension of the age-old composting method of returning to the soil all taken from it is beginning to revive English soil and English men. Among intelligent people, the health-motive is becoming stronger than the profit-motive. The two motives do not necessarily conflict. They can in fact help each other in many ways. Composting is beginning a new era of soil fertility in England similar to that begun by the sheep after the Black Death. The recently perfected mechanical power grab for digging up and loading the farmyard muck heap into carts for transport to the compost-heap cuts out the heavy hand-labour of digging it out and loading it. To regain a sufficiently deep reserve of living soil fertility, air must somehow be let into the subsoil below the tillable upper layer, to sustain there the life of the bacteria, burrowing worms, and other living things of a living soil. The natural way to let the air in would be to allow England to revert to forest for a hundred years. A quicker way is to use basic slag from our steel furnaces to loosen the subsoil. The quickest way of all is to use the powerful yet light-stepping cater- pillar tractors now available (which could have producer-coal-gas or hydrogen engines to use British coal instead of foreign oil) to drag through suitable soil deep enough for it a vertical blade about two feet deep. A one foot wide horizontal wedge at the lower end of the blade lifts and breaks up, for two feet on either side of the blade, the two feet of soil above the wedge, and then lets it drop again. This leaves a four-foot breadth of shattered earth two feet deep, with a two inch wide
slot cut along the middle of it by the vertical blade to let the air in. This operation is called " subsoiling." One man on one tractor can subsoil nine to ten acres in a day. Ploughing the top soil is better done more slowly by those natural composters, horses, whose wastes are worth more than their work. By subsoiling and composting our soil we could entirely feed ourselves in two years, and actually export food in five years.
The only way to regain our punch, our character, our lost virtues, and with them the freedom natural to islanders, is to subsoil and compost
our land so as to allow moulds, bacteria, and earthworms to re-make living soil to nourish Englishmen's bodies and spirits. Chemicals have had their poisonous day. It is now the worm's turn to re-form the manhood of England.—Yours faithfully, GEOFFREY BOWLFS. 25 Catherine Place, S.W. r.
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