Talks on Manures | Page 6

make the land very rich. The plan I have adopted to guard against the loss of nitrogen is this: As soon as the land is cleared of any crop, after it is too late to sow turnips, I sow it with rye at the rate of one and a half to two bushels per acre. On this rich land, especially on the moist low land, the rye makes a great growth during our warm autumn weather. The rye checks the growth of weeds, and furnishes a considerable amount of succulent food for sheep, during the autumn or in the spring. If not needed for food, it can be turned under in the spring for manure. It unquestionably prevents the loss of considerable nitric acid from leaching during the winter and early spring.
Buckwheat, or millet, is sometimes sown on such land for plowing under as manure, but as these crops are killed out by the winter, they cannot prevent the loss of nitric acid during the winter and spring months. It is only on unusually rich land that such precautions are particularly necessary. It has been thought that these experiments of Lawes and Gilbert afford a strong argument against the use of summer-fallows. I do not think so. A summer-fallow, in this country, is usually a piece of land which has been seeded down one, two, and sometimes three years, with red clover. The land is plowed in May or June, and occasionally in July, and is afterwards sown to winter wheat in September. The treatment of the summer-fallow varies in different localities and on different farms.
Sometimes the land is only plowed once. The clover, or sod, is plowed under deep and well, and the after-treatment consists in keeping the surface soil free from weeds, by the frequent use of the harrow, roller, cultivator or gang-plow. In other cases, especially on heavy clay land, the first plowing is done early in the spring, and when the sod is sufficiently rotted, the land is cross-plowed, and afterwards made fine and mellow by the use of the roller, harrow, and cultivator. Just before sowing the wheat, many good, old-fashioned farmers, plow the land again. But in this section, a summer-fallow, plowed two or three times during the summer, is becoming more and more rare every year.
Those farmers who summer-fallow at all, as a rule, plow their land but once, and content themselves with mere surface cultivation afterwards. It is undoubtedly true, also, that summer fallows of all kinds are by no means as common as formerly. This fact may be considered an argument against the use of summer-fallowing; but it is not conclusive in my mind. Patient waiting is not a characteristic of the age. We are inclined to take risks. We prefer to sow our land to oats, or barley, and run the chance of getting a good wheat crop after it, rather than to spend several months in cleaning and mellowing the land, simply to grow one crop of wheat.
It has always seemed to me entirely unnecessary to urge farmers not to summer-fallow. We all naturally prefer to see the land occupied by a good paying crop, rather than to spend time, money, and labor, in preparing it to produce a crop twelve or fifteen months afterwards. Yet some of the agricultural editors and many of the agricultural writers, seem to take delight in deriding the old-fashioned summer-fallow. The fact that Lawes and Gilbert in England find that, when land contains considerable nitric acid, the water which percolates through the soil to the underdrains beneath, contains more nitrate of lime when the land is not occupied by a crop, than when the roots of growing plants fill the soil, is deemed positive proof that summer-fallowing is a wasteful practice.
If we summer-fallowed for a spring crop, as I have sometimes done, it is quite probable that there would be a loss of nitrogen. But, as I have said before, it is very seldom that any water passes through the soil from the time we commence the summer-fallow until the wheat is sown in the autumn, or for many weeks afterwards. The nitrogen, which is converted into nitric acid by the agency of a good summer-fallow, is no more liable to be washed out of the soil after the field is sown to wheat in the autumn, than if we applied the nitrogen in the form of some readily available manure.
I still believe in summer fallows. If I had my life to live over again, I would certainly summer-fallow more than I have done. I have been an agricultural writer for one-third of a century, and have persistently advocated the more extended use of the summer-fallow. I have nothing to take back, unless it is what I have said in reference to "fall-fallowing."