Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Review of the Agriculture of Lower Canada, With Suggestions for Its Amelioration: First Published in a Series of Communications, in the "Montreal Gazette,"
The different substances necessary to the growth of a plant, or the different articles of their food, are all of equal value; that is to s ty, if one out of the whole number be absent, the plant will not thrive. A soil is fertile for a given kind of plant when it contains the mineral food proper to that plant in due quantity, in just proportion, and in a form adapted to assimila tion, or available for the plant. The increase of fertility in a soil by fallowing and mechanical preparation, if the mineral matters removed in the craps be not restored to the soil, produces, sooner or later, a permanent barrenness. If the soil is to retain permanently its fertility, the mineral constituents removed in the crops must be res tored to it from time to time, at shorter or longer intervals, or, in other words, the original com position of the soil must be restored. Two plants, Whose root fibres have an equal length and extent, do not thrive so well beside each other, or in succession, as two whose roots being of unequal length, received their food from differ ent strata or depths of the soil. The more rapid a plant is developed in a certain time, the more food it requires in that time. The fertile soil takes up from the air, in the plants grown on it, more carbonic acid and ammonia than the bar ren one; this absorption is in proportion to its fertility, and is only limited by the amount of carbonic acid and ammonia in the at mosphere. If, after a time, the soil is to recover its original fertility, the mineral substances ex tracted from it in a series of years, must be again restored to it. If the land, in the course of ten years, has yielded ten crops, without restoration of the mineral sub stances removed in those crops, then we must restore them in the eleventh year in a quantity ten-told that of the annually removed amount, if the land is again to acquire the power of yielding a second time a similar series of crops. After a series of years, and a corresponding number of harvests, the fertility of the soil or field diminishes. While all the other conditions re main the same, the soil alone has not done so it is no longer what it was at first. The change which is found to have taken place in tts composi tion is the probable cause of its diminished or lost fertility. By means of solid and liquid manure, the lost or diminished fertility of the soil is restored. The foregoing propostions of Leibig are, I believe, generally correct; and assuming them to be so, we must admit that the system of husbandry which prevails in a considerable por tion of the country is well calculated to diminish the fertility of the soil, and reduce it to compara tive barrenness. His views confirm as well theexpediency of adopting a rotation of crops, as the necessity of maintaining the fertility of the soil. He also speaks of the effect of what is called the weathering, or action of the weather upon the soil, by the process of summer fallow that carbonic acid and ammonia are conveyed to the soil by the rain and the air, and that the ammonia remains in the soil. He also says It is a matter of undoubted and indubitable ex perience, that land, of whatever quality, does not retain its capamty of yielding good crops of the same plant for an infinite series of years; but that, at the end of a limited number of years, the plant no longer thrives on the same soil.
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