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 THE
LABOURING EARTH

A SURVEY OF AGRICULTURAL CONDITIONS AT

HOME AND ABROAD

By
C. ALMA BAKER, C.B.E.

With an Introduction by
THE RT. HON. LORD ADDISON

"Moreover the profit of the earth is for all,

the King himself is served by the field."
Ecclesiastes

“God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail."
JOHN RUSKIN

HEATH CRANTON LIMITED

6 FLEET LANE, LONDON, E. C. 4
 First published in 1940
Reprinted July 1942

THE TYPOGRAPHY AND BINDING OF THIS BOOK CONFORM TO

THE AUTHORIZED ECONOMY STANDARD

Printed in Great Britain for Heath Cranton Limited

by Northumberland Press Limited, Gateshead-on-Tyne
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bio-Dynamic Farming and Gardening, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. (Rudolf
Steiner Publishing Co.)
British Medical Journal of the 15th April, 1939.
Chemistry of Food and Nutrition, by H. C. Sherman.
The Chemistry of Wheat Flour, by C. H. Bailey.
Conserve Your Soil, by the Bank of New South Wales.
Culpepper's Herbal, 1799 Edition.
Death in the Pot, by Harold W. Keens. (C. W. Daniel Co. Ltd.)
Ergot and Ergotism, by George Barger. (Gurney and Jackson.)
English Farming Past and Present, by R. Prothero (Lord Ernie). 1912.
Farmers of Forty Centuries, by F. H. King. (Jonathan Cape.)
Fifty Years of Field Experiments at Woburn Experimental Station, by
Russell and Voelcker, 1936.
Food and Feeding, by Sir Henry Thompson. (Warne.)
Food, Health and Income, by Sir J. B. Orr. (London, 1936.)
Food, Health and Vitamins, by R. H. A. and V. G. Plimmer. 1933.
Formative Forces in Crystallisation, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. (New York,
1936.)
The Golden Stool, by E. W. Smith. 1926.
Humus, by Selman A. Waksman. (Baillière, Tindall & Cox.)
Humus, the Key to Prosperity, by Sir Albert Howard. (Costa Rica.)
The Health of the Nation and Deficiency Diseases, by John Maberly.
(Baillière,Tindall & Cox.)
The Land Now and To-morrow, by R. G. Stapledon. (Faber & Faber.)
The Land our Larder, by George Godwin. (Acorn Press.)
Land Tenure and Agricultural Production in the Tropics, by Dr. Martin
Leake. 1928.
Latter-Day Rural England, by S. L. Bensusan. 1928.
Man and Animal, by Hermann Poppelbaum. (Anthroposophical
Publishing Co.)
The Manufacture of Humus by the Indore Process, by Sir Albert
Howard. (Royal Society of Arts lecture.)
Memorial Volume to Sir Daniel Hall. Moon and Plant Growth, by L.
Kolisko. (Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.)
A New Angle on Health, by D. H. C. Given. (John Bale, Sons and
Danielsson Ltd.)
New Methods in Agriculture and their Effects on Foodstuffs, by
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. (R. Steiner Publishing Co.)
Our Secret Friends and Foes, by P. F. Frankland. (S.P.C.K.)
Our Mysterious Universe, by Sir James Jeans.
A Pilgrimage of British Farming, by A. D. Hall. 1912.
The Planning of Agriculture, by Astor and Keith. 1933.
The Plough-Up Policy and Ley Farming, by Sir George Stapledon.
(Faber & Faber.)
The Progress of Science, by J. G. Crowther. (Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trübner & Co. Ltd.)
The Rape of the Earth, by G. V. Jacks and R. O. Whyte. (Faber &
Faber.)
The Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy,
Mixed Committee of the League of Nations.
Report on British Health Services, Politic and Economic Planning.
Report of the Poultry Technical Committee of Great Britain. (H.M.
Stationery Office.)
Report and Proceedings of the Conference of Colonial Directors of
Agriculture. (H.M. Stationery Office.)
"The Restoration and Maintenance of Fertility," by Sir Albert Howard.
(Journal of the Farmers' Club.)
Rural Britain To-day and To-morrow, by J. A. S. Watson, London.
The Secret of the African, by E. W. Smith. 1929.
Self-Subsistence for the Unemployed, by J. W. Scott. (Faber & Faber.)
Sensitive Crystallisation Processes, a demonstration of formative forces
in the blood, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. (Emil Weises Buchhandlung—
Karl Eymann —Dresden.)
Science Lends a Hand in Your Garden, by Sir Frederick Keeble.
(Putnams.)
Soil Condition and Plant Growth, by Sir J. E. Russell. 1932.
A Short Study of British Agriculture, by Sir J. B. Orr. 1922.
"Studies in Deficiency Diseases," by R. McCarrison. {British Medical
Journal.)
Survey of National Nutrition Policies 1937-8. League of Nations.
Symptoms and Comments, by C. A. Mirbt.
The Universe Round Us, by Sir James Jeans.
The Waste Products of Agriculture, by Sir Albert Howard. (Oxford
University Press.)
This Surprising World, by Gerald Heard. (Cobden-Sanderson.)

And many bulletins and pamphlets issued by the British Ministry

and U.S.A. Department of Agriculture and University Authorities in
Great Britain and the U.S.A.
 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY THE RT. HON. LORD ADDISON 9
QUOTATION FROM "AFRICAN SURVEY", BY LORD HAILEY.
CHAPTER XVI,: SOIL EROSION 13
AUTHOR'S PREFACE 15

SECTION I: THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE

I. EXPLANATORY 19
II. THE NATIONAL HEALTH 22
III. THE SOIL AND THE COSMOS 30
IV. THE STATE OF MAN (STUDY OF A LEAGUE OF NATIONS REPORT) 35
V. MINERAL FERTILIZERS AND NATIONAL HEALTH 42
VI. THE EARTH IS PASSING HER DIVIDENDS 44
VII. THE WASTING OF THE WORLD 51
VIII. THE AFRICAN PROBLEM 54
IX. HEALTH AND DEFICIENCY DISEASES 61
X. THE WORLD CRISIS : A VIEWPOINT 63
XI. THE ANCIENT WISDOM AND THE MODERN NEED 65
XII. A PERSONAL BELIEF 69

SECTION II :THE HEALTH OF THE LAND

I. COSMIC RAYS AND FOOD PRODUCTION 77
II. THE CASE FOR ARTIFICIALS 81
III. THE STEINER METHOD 84
IV. PEACE WITH THE SOIL 88
V. CURRENT OPINION 97
VI. PROVED BY POULTRY 103
VII. ERGOT IN RYE-GRASS 105
VIII. FROM A FARMER TO FARMERS 111
IX. PROGRESS IN AGRICULTURE 120
XI. FARM OR FACTORY? 124
XII. HUMUS 127
XIII. SCIENCE IN THE GARDEN 129
XIV. ORGANIC OR INORGANIC FERTILIZERS ?
THE CONCLUSIONS OF SIR JOHN RUSSELL 132
XV. CONFESSION 137

SECTION III: THE ROAD TO SECURITY

I. THE NON-STOP SOIL OF CHINA AND JAPAN 141
II. THE TEACHINGS OF DR. STEINER 147
III. THE HIVE AND THE FARMER 156
IV. BIO-DYNAMIC FARMING : SOME OUTSTANDING FIGURES
AND THEORIES 159
V. WANTED : A POLICY 163
VI. SIR ALBERT HOWARD'S CONTRIBUTION 165
VII. INVISIBLE HELPERS 173
VIII. THE CURE OF THE SOIL 175
IX. MEDICAL OPINION 177
X. WHEN PEACE RETURNS : SOME PROPOSALS 179
XI. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE : A TEMPORARY COMPROMISE 182
XII. FORGOTTEN FAITHS 185
XIII. A COURSE FOR FARMERS 188
XIV. THE IMPERIAL EFFORT CALLED FOR 192
XV. PARLIAMENT AND THE EARTH PROBLEM 197
XVI. OLD AND NEW KNOWLEDGE 199
XVII. EPILOGUE 203

INDEX 211
 INTRODUCTION

THIS IS A CHALLENGING BOOK.

It challenges much of what is called Progress. It challenges
much that is common practice in present-day farming methods. It
challenges many of the food habits that have become prevalent
during late years. It challenges powerful vested interests in more
ways than one.
These are all reasons why the book should be read and its main
contentions given that study and trial the author pleads for so
passionately and with an almost superabundant wealth of learning
and illustration.
I confess that I myself, in many places, had to place a check on
my established habits of thought.
There is no doubt as to the justice of the author's first main
contention—that, in the desire to make money out of it quickly,
mankind has wasted the precious earth wholesale, turned fertile
lands into deserts and presented us with wide landscapes of
rubbish in place of cultivated fields. We have systematically taken
organic matter from the soil and not replaced it. The author urges
that the farmer and the gardener should return it by the adoption in
appropriate form of the compost methods adopted by Dr. Steiner,
Sir Albert Howard and others.1 One cannot but believe that in
pleading for this utilization of what is now wasted, the author
establishes his case. More than this, if the results obtained by Sir
Bernard Greenwell and others in the compost utilization of town
waste are confirmed, we are presented with the possibility of the
profitable return to Mother Earth of a prodigious tonnage of useful
material. In any case if these methods were generally adopted they
would lead to a transformation of present cultivation methods as
well as to an immense enrichment of the soil.
The earth is regarded as a living entity and we cannot
systematically deprive it of vitality without hurt to ourselves who
live upon its produce. This seems to be unanswerable logic. Like
Sir Frederick Keeble the author claims that "of all problems that
should pre-occupy mankind that of the fertility of the earth is of
the most fundamental importance".
I, for one, am disposed to be sceptical of the teachings of the
old astrologers; but one cannot refuse the demand of the author
that there should be well-conducted research into the influence on
the soil and upon growth and nutrition of the vast unseen forces
with which we are surrounded, of the sunshine and the rain, and of
the "two hundred and fifty million tons of cosmic dust" that we are
told "fall upon the planet every minute the sun is shining". He does
not ask us to share own unconcealed convictions in this as in other

1
In this connection the reader should study Chaps. II and III in Sec. II and Chap.
VI in Sec.III. (See pages 82, 84 and 165.)
matters, but he asks, with justice that, not one nation only, but the
comity of nations, should share in well-ordered researches into
these things that must be of incalculable importance.
The author believes that there has been a great increase in
deficiency diseases and he attributes it to the consumption of “de-
natured" food grown in soil deprived of its essential ingredients.
Here he is clearly on more debatable ground. The fact that modern
science has revealed much of the causes of malnutrition and that
bio-chemists during the past generation have added greatly to our
understanding of them, is no evidence that these diseases have
increased. The stature of modern man is undoubtedly greater than
that of the knights of old days we have read about. Most of us of
average size would find it difficult to squeeze into the suits of
armour we see in our museums. There is less rickets than there
used to be, and medical examination has revealed an undoubted
improvement in child stature and nutrition. Whilst this is so and
the author is tempted, I think, to seek to prove more than is
necessary for his case, there cannot be a doubt as to the desirability
of enquiry into the relative nutritional values of food grown on
earth properly fed and the produce of artificial stimulants. As
Keeble said, "until recently the drug habit was confined for the
most part to mankind, but now plants are rapidly becoming
victims". Somehow I suspect the author will be found to be right in
his suggestion that the tomato grown "in shallow tanks fed by
minerals" is not as wholesome and good for us as one grown in
well-supplied earth that has had its share of sunshine and rain.
The use of artificial fertilizers may well have been pushed too
far—certainly too far when they have led, as they often have, to
the neglect of the proper use of humus and the return to the earth
of the organic material it has yielded for our support. We must
therefore be on our guard that the far-reaching trials and
experiments the author asks for are not prejudiced by interested
opposition.
Whilst there may not have been the increase in nutritional
deficiency diseases the author suspects, there is little doubt that the
work of biochemists supports his claim for the value of simple,
wholesome, well-grown food, undoctored in manufacture, or
deprived, as bread flour has been, of some of its most valuable
constituents.
I understand that the average daily consumption of modern
white flour contains only one-tenth of the vitamin elements that
the wholemeal bread of a century ago did, and that the increased
consumption of fruit and vegetables has by no means made good
the deficiency. In this case, as in the case of the use of mineral
fertilizers, there has grown up a great and powerful industry whose
processes are adapted to modern fashions. The difficulty of any
change-over is the reason why the Ministry of Food is now
arranging to fortify white bread with artificially produced Vitamin
B.
 The whole book is so full of points that provoke comment, that
one is tempted to allow this Introduction to exceed its proper
limits, but I must particularly commend the reader to study
Chapter XII in Section I ("A Personal Belief") and Chapter VIII in
Section II ("From a Farmer to Farmers"). They are specially
attractive and afford a key to the whole book.
At a time like the present we naturally look for suggestions as
to how the author proposes that the problems he raises should be
dealt with "When Peace Returns", and the last seven chapters of
the book are largely concerned with these questions. They reveal
an intimate understanding of the work of the Government machine
and contain specific proposals for the researches required, for
farmers' education, and for the institution of an "Imperial Bureau"
whereby international co-operation may be secured.
An immense knowledge of agricultural research and writing is
displayed throughout the book and it is written with passionate
conviction—often eloquently expressed. In particular, the candid
and charming chapter that forms the Epilogue leaves us in no
doubt as to the sincerity of the author in his claim that "he seeks no
greater reward than can come to any worker than the knowledge
that he has thrown a beam of light for those who work in
darkness".

NEIGHBOURS, ADDISON.
RADNAGE,
HIGH WYCOMBE,
BUCKS.

July 21st, 1940.

 "It is now a commonplace of agricultural practice that the
restoration to the soil, in form of artificial fertilizers, of those elements
taken from it by plants, is not enough to maintain fertility, however
carefully the chemical loss may be made good. Without the addition of
humus derived from organic matter, the land 'loses heart', the tilth
deteriorates, and the soil's capacity to absorb and retain moisture
becomes seriously impaired. In this condition it falls an easy prey to
erosion. An important factor in conservation, therefore, is to maintain
the humus content of the soil. It is probably true to say that if there is one
panacea which conservationists would like to see more generally applied
than any other, it is the spread of mixed farming. This system ensures
that a fair proportion of any given farm shall be kept under grass cover,
and provides the means, in the form of manure, for maintaining the
humus content and the physical condition of that part of the farm which
is cultivated. If a grass ley is rotated with crops, moreover, the system
ensures that every part of the farm in turn shall be rested, and its humus
content restored.
Attempts are being made to introduce mixed farming in parts of
Africa. Where mixed farming is impracticable—as, for instance, in parts
subject to severe animal diseases—the humus content may be maintained
by the addition to the soil of green manures or of compost. Green
manuring with leguminous crops only proves effective in regions where
rainfall is fairly well distributed; in regions of low and rigidly seasonal
rainfall the ploughed-in crop does not break down satisfactorily. In these
areas the break-down of organic matter—in this case crop residues,
weeds, and waste material of all sorts—can best be effected not in the
soil but outside it, in compost pits or heaps; the resulting humus, in a
fine state of division and ready for use by the plant, is then applied to the
soil. Adaptations of the method of humus manufacture in compost pits
devised by Sir Albert Howard at Indore, by which plant and other
residues which would otherwise be wasted are put to good use in helping
to maintain soil fertility, are being examined in several parts of Africa.
In Kenya, for example, a District Officer has evolved a simplified system
for the native farmer, and the Agricultural Department has conducted a
campaign in favour of a compost pit for every village."

Extract from Chapter XVI, “Soil Erosion",

in Lord Hailey's African Survey.
PREFACE
THE FASHION IN WHICH SCIENCE has outstripped morality in the march of
world progress is common knowledge. Moral progress has been
limited to speech and theory, scientific progress has been
manifested in the heavens above, in the earth beneath and in the
waters under the earth, by aircraft and submarines to destroy the
living and by the misuse of Mother Earth in a way that threatens
the life and happiness of generations yet unborn. Morals are
morals, but Business is Business, and the nation that will stand for
righteousness or even sanity before profit has yet to arise or,
having arisen, to persist. In all probability the English-speaking
races will be the first to find that there can be no true progress
without a moral basis and that correct husbandry, the foundation of
all true progress, involves the performance of a great moral duty.
The responsibility of our Empire towards its component parts
is enormous, and if that responsibility be recognized and met in
relation to the soil, we can create a new world and a new life for
all the nations who dwell therein. Nature has presented a problem
that we must solve. This day it has set before us life and death,
good and evil, and has left us with the responsibility of choice.
Look round, study, enquire. You will find that vast tracts of
once fertile soil on this planet have fallen into ruin during the past
century, that virulent diseases have invaded the human, animal,
and vegetable kingdoms. Moreover, the nervous system of
mankind has been undermined, with frightful results, and the
nations of the earth are living under conditions of intolerable
strain. Hence, some think, the release of the evil forces that ring us
round.
It is the theory of the writer of this book that all these evil
conditions are traceable to one source, that the sickness of
mankind, physical or mental, with its long range of varied
symptoms, together with the sickness of the earth and the animal
and vegetable kingdoms, may be and probably is related to a single
overwhelming cause.
We, the children of Mother Earth, have disregarded the
conditions under which she will fulfil her functions, and through
this disregard all these troubles have befallen us. "The fathers have
eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge." How
deeply, as we ripen for the grave, do the eternal verities impress
our minds! We find in them the one stabilizing factor in a
distraught world; truly they are as the shadow of a great rock in a
thirsty land. It has come to me as the reward of many years of hard
work and deep reflection that the world's troubles are in very truth
the results of our indifference to Nature's law, and that if we will
return to the straight and narrow way, a sane and healthy life
awaits us with peace, tranquillity, and goodwill among men.
We have greatly erred, for we have sought to tamper with
divine processes that maintain divine balances. Remember that for
all our promise and performance, for all our hopes, ambitions and
fears, we are literally children of the Earth. If we interfere with her
secret methods in pursuit of advantages that must elude us, the old
curse will pursue and overtake us. "I will shut up the Heavens that
there shall be no rain and ye shall quickly perish." For rain read the
cosmic influences brought to us by invisible rays, and you can
learn precisely where you stand. We must look below the surface
of words to understand Sacred Writ and to learn the way of life
that has been set out for us. This has been my practice for a long
time past, and in the following pages I have endeavoured to
explain the grounds on which my assertions are based and to
outline practical plans, calculated to appeal to agriculturalists, that
may bring about the changes the world is crying for.
It is my intense conviction that what we are doing to-day is to
concentrate all our attention on effects such as war, disease,
premature death, and to ignore the causes. We have interfered with
the proper action of the divine order of things, and this is as
dangerous as to put the machinery of a liner or the controls of an
aeroplane into the hands of a blind man. "Against stupidity,"
declared Schiller, "the Gods themselves fight in vain," and this
stupidity appears to me to be due to the wrong aims of our times.
People are working as though the only purpose of life were the
making of money and this end justified all and every means. In his
pursuit man has not only exploited his fellows, but greatly daring,
has exploited the earth by whose gifts we live. There are thousands
all over the world who recognize or suspect the evil, but they do
not know how best to deal with it. For them I wrote my earlier
books and established contacts that have provided me with ample
justification for further efforts; for them I am writing this larger
book in the hope that it may provide them with the weapon they
need to combat world dangers.
All I have to ask them is to put my case fairly before thinking
men and women who have not heard it, urging them to try the
theories out; it does not matter whether the trial is on a ten rod plot
of garden ground or on a thousand acre farm. There is no occasion
to doubt the results, and with the truth made manifest there will
come the necessary revolt against conditions of soil cultivation that
are synonymous with soil destruction. "The time may come when
the world will starve in the midst of plenty." From the ranks of the
great dead I hear the voice of Dr. Rudolf Steiner proclaiming the
terrible truth that has informed my own acts of husbandry and
stirred my pen to what may be a final? effort. Our eyes have grown
dull and our ears are deaf to the ever manifesting mystery of life.
The Victorians, despite their fashionable agnostics, recognized it
more clearly than we do to-day.
Tennyson's lines to a flower in a crannied wall have a
significance not to be overlooked in this matter, for the poet was a
naturalist and seer, and his observations had a quality of pene-
tration rarely encountered among his contemporaries, the men who
were the high priests of agnosticism. Few read Tennyson to-day,
so the half-dozen lines may be quoted:
 "Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here root and all in my hand
Little Flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all
I should know what God is and man is."

The thought expressed here is as significant as when it was

first set down, perhaps even more significant, for though we have
taken so much knowledge to be our province we are still where the
world stood when Tennyson wrote. Mysteries of plant growth
elude us now as they did then; all we have learned is that mightier
and unexpected forces take a part in them, and that the unity of the
universe is a profound truth to which an ever increasing number of
thinkers bear witness. To-day, when the discoveries of science are
so wide-spread and startling that claims of scientists to hold the
right to bless or ban pass almost unchallenged, fragments of
forgotten knowledge and abandoned lore rise and assert
themselves. The influence of the stars and planets upon the Earth
is being asserted again as it was in years before the dawn of
Christianity; the effect of the moon upon the planting of seeds and
the cutting of timber, never forgotten by some of the backward
races, can be demonstrated (in the first of these cases at least) by
the man whose gardening equipment is a window-box and a
twopenny packet of seeds. These are facts that cannot be
disregarded by those who can understand the possibility that we
have drifted into a wrong attitude towards the land, mother of us
all.
It often happens that the poet is far in advance of the scientist.
Was it not Tennyson who foretold the coming of aerial warfare,
decades before Bleriot had crossed the Channel ? In looking out
over the agricultural scene we must learn to do as Sir Joshua
Reynolds advised his pupils, and look with a dilated eye.
If one has been privileged to see the light, to work and prosper
in it, he dare not keep his knowledge to himself; he must know that
he has been chosen as a vehicle through which it may be
transmitted to one and all, he must strive to the best of his ability
to fulfil a duty he can only regard as sacred. I am happy to think
that I have not sought to make a commercial proposition of my
theories. Freely I have received, freely I give, in gratitude and in
the sure faith that I am helping my fellow-men. "The world is too
much with us," said Wordsworth, meaning the material world of
gain and loss; I seek to promote the knowledge of a world that is
working in our service all the time silently and powerfully, the
world of cosmic forces without whose aid the Earth would soon be
as empty as the loneliest desert it contains.
I would not like any reader to think that I am appealing on
other than practical grounds for a change in our attitude towards
the Mother Earth. If I have emphasized the moral side of the
question it is the same moral side that belongs to all great human
movements—the side that must be borne in mind whether we are
concerned with the destiny of Empires or the sale of small articles
over the counter. Agriculture calls for its practical idealists, the
men who will tell us that while we must trust in God we must also
keep our powder dry.
Immense practical work lies ahead, but I feel that the greatest
incentive to the performance may be found in the thought that we
are restoring to Nature the harmony we have disturbed and are
consequently doing God's work instead of the Devil's. Right and
wrong are at stake; the whole modern conception of life is
involved. If my views are correct we have been following a wrong
road, and our consequent deterioration is moral as well as physical.
As I see things, morality and the soundest common sense are one
and the same. If we live sanely we live in harmony with Nature,
while if we continue to act as we have been doing since we
surrendered to a purely materialistic outlook we shall perpetuate a
discordant attitude. This can only have one end, and that end is our
own. I may be wrong, but the belief that I am right is the
foundation of this book.
 SECTION I
THE HEALTH OF THE PEOPLE
CHAPTER 1 Explanatory
IN SETTING OUT CERTAIN FACTS that have become familiar to me
through actual soil experiment carried out over a long period of
years, I wish to make it clear at the outset that it is neither my
intention nor my wish to attack men or systems. Everybody has the
right, at present, to cultivate the land as he thinks best, but as we
all know that the health of the soil is the very foundation of an
ordered existence, I am quite sure that if I can satisfy the tillers of
the soil that they have left the straight and narrow way for the
broad path that leads to destruction they will be ready and willing
to retrace their steps. The onus of proof is upon me; I have to
present facts that are not familiar and theories that have not yet
won general acceptance. This is a great task for one whose long
term of working years might well justify a little space of ease, and
I might hesitate to resume my pen and plea if it were not for the
widespread response that my earlier efforts have gained. From all
cultivable parts of the globe men and women have written to say
that my previous work has helped them, to tell me that they too
have been conscious of trouble threatening the health of the world,
to assure me that I have brought light to their darkness. So the
work must not, cannot, end; it is up to me to use my strength to its
limits, content with the thought that it was given to me for this
purpose. I desire so to marshal my arguments that my readers may
understand that they are conversing with a friend rather than
listening to a lecturer. All who are interested in my theories can
test them out; it should be possible to establish a clearing-house to
examine, sift and collate results on behalf of people throughout the
world.
We must remember that we all depend for our subsistence
upon a shallow layer of the earth's surface. If the health of this
cultivated soil is impaired the result will be seen in the spread of
diseases due to malnutrition; if these diseases are unmistakably on
the increase it is reasonable to examine the conditions under which
food is produced, since in our physical aspect at least we are what
we eat. Granting agreement here—and it is hard to see how it can
be withheld—we are face to face with certain phenomena that call
for investigation.
But you may say that this investigation goes on ceaselessly
through-out the world, that we have never known in the history of
civilization so many clinics, research institutions, hospitals,
schools of medicine, facilities for the treatment of the sick. Let this
be granted freely and gratefully, it is still necessary to point out
that we are dealing with symptoms rather than causes, that we
dress the diseased leaves or branches of the tree of life, while
ignoring the canker at the roots. The best way of justifying this
new point of view is to enquire into the statistics of deficiency
diseases since the far-off days when Nature's processes were aided
but not forced, to consider how far forced production and spread of
disease have moved along parallel lines. If the evidence of a close
relationship can be established, a case will have been made out for
examination by the heads of all States in the interest of all people.
I do not ask for any acceptance of unproven theories; I do not
plead for any interference with established procedure until it has
been examined impartially; I realize that any changes found
advisable should be brought about, so far as is possible, by consent
as the result of conviction.
At this stage, proof in the sense that scientists would use the
term cannot be forthcoming, but inferences and deductions are not
hard to reach through the medium of the health statistics available
to the student. On the other side we have to consider the work of
those writers who, passing beyond the world that is governed by
our sight and hearing, can tell us of forces and influences that
affect us all. These writers are men of world-wide reputation, their
researches command respect and create a lively interest. We know
them for pioneers and we know that their research is merely
beginning, an opening of doors through which succeeding
generations will pass on the way to a still wider knowledge of the
mysteries of malnutrition, food values, health, and a national
security not yet envisaged by mankind. The marvels of the years I
have lived through will be commonplaces of those who come after
me, but I regard them all with reverence as well as wonder, and am
further stimulated by the knowledge that I have been permitted to
see a little in advance of my time.
I set out my views for critical consideration; if they are sound I
shall have helped my fellow-men to live more healthily and
consequently more happily. My plan is to consider what has
happened to the earth, mother of us all, since production was
speeded up as a national policy for all nations. My plan is to
consider what has happened to mankind while the earth has been
exploited and thrown out of balanced cultivation. Finally, I hope to
produce some reasonable theories of saner methods that may yet
enable us to win back what we have lost through a period in which
we surrendered to greed and haste and endeavoured unwisely to
force the pace of Nature for purely commercial ends. At least I can
claim that I am no armchair investigator. I have been the servant of
the soil for more years than I care to count, and have learned
through the results achieved that Nature can be conquered only by
obedience to her decrees.
The one point I would like to urge here and now is that we
should keep our minds receptive. If we will look round the world
we live in, we see at once that the surprises of the past hundred
years have come along at a rate without precedent in the history of
the world. England when Queen Victoria ascended the throne a
century ago (and the fact that she must have nursed our present
King unites the present with the past) still relied on the horse-
drawn coach and the turnpike road for its transport. Our suburbs
had no real connection with cities, electric light had not attacked
the darkness, neither telephones nor telegraph had come to the aid
of commerce; the ships that sailed the sea did so by the grace of
favouring winds and the skilled craft of sailor-men. The wireless
system of communication we had not dreamed of; the radio had
not been contemplated as a possibility; the air itself was
unconquered. The work of the land depended on the muscles of
horses and men; lighting systems, sanitation and water supply had
not travelled beyond the confines of a few big towns, and even
then left much to be desired. When we look back and see the
unparalleled extension of human capacity, the widening of the
boundaries of knowledge, we ought to be prepared for still further
developments, even if they enter the realm of invisible forces.
Remember, we utilize some we cannot see at present and have
already harnessed the ether to our service. Great thinkers tell us of
cosmic forces that produce growth and promote progress. I say let
us expand our survey and recognition of our allotted place in the
scheme of things until we can see ourselves a part of the
harmonious working of a vast scheme of creation.
Let us realize that the secrets of growth and nutrition are not
yet revealed, and let us follow the indications that have been noted
in the past few years by such diverse thinkers as Sir James Jeans
and Dr. Rudolf Steiner, to name but two leading workers in a field
that as yet is hardly surveyed.
We cannot all hope to have master minds. Such a grace is
rarely given to men of any generation, but we can at least have
receptive ones and cultivate the belief that Browning set out in his
famous poem:

“The best has yet to be

The last of life for which the first was made.''
CHAPTER II The National Health
"SOMETHING IS ROTTEN IN THE state of Denmark," declared Hamlet.
"Something is rotten in the state of Britain," declares in effect the
report on British health issued by the Political and Economic
Planning Group in a bulky volume, twice the length of the average
novel and, I would add, of more than twice the interest.
The report has been condensed effectively by Mr. Mervyn
Herbert (Britain's Health, 1939), and Lord Horder has written a
spirited preface to this resume, in the course of which he writes:
"We must do our best to control diseases due to preventable
agents." In this statement he summed up the great need of our
times, for the report tells us that the economic burden of ill-health
costs this country something in the neighbourhood of
£300,000,000 per annum. I am convinced that good health would
not cost more than a small fraction of this vast sum.
Figures in connection with sickness and curative treatment call
for quotation:

Estimated work lost through illness

in Great Britain ...........................£120,000,000 a year
Cost of treatment and maintenance of
the sick .......................................£185,000,000 a year
National Health Insurance ................... £44,000,000 a year
Hospitals, Institutions and Public
Medical Services .......................... £40,000,000 a year
...... Doctors take in fees an estimate..............£70,000,000 a year
The State cost of prevention service
is about........................................ £13,000,000 a year
But our total outlay on Medical Research
is only............................................... £200,000 a year

Now the most significant part of these figures and the facts
that follow is that the State is making a great, determined and
costly effort to help men to lead normal healthy lives and that to do
so it has attacked effects and paid singularly little heed to causes.
This is why we magnify our services, and sickness grows with
them. Increased services have been demanded by increased
sickness; healthy people are few. We are working along the wrong
lines.
The State's efforts have kept sickness well in bounds and have
reduced the virulence of certain diseases by better attention to
housing and hygiene, but the question of the quality of the food we
eat has not yet been handled effectively and food does more to
decide our state than any other factor in life.
This misdirection of effort, if it may be so termed, is not to be
wondered at, for the chief contributory causes of wide-spread
sickness are hardly a century old. But for the spread of
malnutrition, the nation's splendid health services would have met
their due reward; as things are, they are fighting against
overwhelming odds. All the forces of exploitation of soil and food
are arrayed against them, yet we must confess that they have
placed great results to their credit within the space of a century.
Health Acts have redeemed England from cholera and typhus,
and when plague approaches, as it has done very often and does
still, the Medical Officer of the Port of London can keep it from
securing foothold on our shores.
The nineteenth century opened without a Health Act to its
credit (the stories of gaol fever are sufficient to light up the scene),
but in time the public conscience became pregnant and the first
health services were born. It was an age of merciless exploitation
by employers. Manufactured articles were in universal demand,
labour was overworked as well as underpaid, and the earliest
Factory Acts were belated and inevitable. Side by side with the
factories came the slums, but their menace was eventually
recognized, and towards the end of the century the pace of
improvement quickened. County Councils were born. Medical
Officers of Health were appointed, but we had to wait till after the
Great War for a Ministry of Health (1919). By this time great
improvements were to be noted in the supervision of public needs.
For example, the Metropolitan Water Board has bought up small
and less efficient undertakings on the road to its present
achievement of serving seven million people with water that is fit
to drink.
Slum clearance being recognized as a social necessity, ten
million houses have been built since the last war ended. Food and
drug legislation is functioning better than before; the abuse of the
people's food by those who traffic in it, recognized and penalized
by the law since the Middle Ages, is still practised in all directions.
Food supervision, as I see it, is the key to world recovery, but in
the report now being considered one may read that "much of the
food which is offered for sale in Great Britain is of poor nutritional
value ".
So far has unscrupulous commercial enterprise entered into the
business of feeding the people that the report has to complain of
the extravagant advertisements of foods which, if not actually
harmful, are worthless. Many well-known foods and beverages are
merely stimulants. It is a sad reflection upon our laissez faire
methods that it should be possible for stimulants or worthless
foodstuffs to be pressed upon an ignorant and gullible public while
the Government, to which in the last resort we must look for an A1
nation, deliberately overlooks action that threatens to reduce it to
the C3 class.
I am concerned with the question of the health of the people
and the production of sound crops from healthy soil, but I must
turn aside to note the statement in the report that £3,000,000 per
annum is the sum alleged to be spent in newspaper advertising of
patent medicines and 'health' foods. The British Medical
Association has published some valuable books on patent
medicines, setting out the claims made for them, an analysis of
their contents, and a statement of their cost. If these revelations
will not stir authority or rouse a credulous public to respect its
internal organs, surely nothing can.
The Select Committee on Patent Medicines reported twenty-
five ago:
"For all practical purposes British law is powerless to prevent any
person from procuring any drug and making any mixture whether potent
or without any therapeutical activity whatever (so long as it does not
contain a scheduled poison) and advertising it in any decent terms as a
cure for any disease or ailment, recommending it by bogus testimonials
and the invented opinions and facsimile signatures of fictitious
physicians and selling it under any name he chooses, on the payment of
a small stamp duty, for any price a credulous public will pay."
Surely the Government should protect the public from this
dreadful danger. If it will not interfere with the vendor of patent
medicines one can realize how hard it will be to make it recognize
the need of safeguarding the public health from dangers far greater
but, alas, far less obvious. The words 'any decent terms' would
appear of late years to have acquired a certain elasticity.
The truth is that our health services are not yet thoroughly
efficient or worthy of Great Britain. The evacuation of children in
the autumn of '39 proved this up to the hilt. From the greatest city
in the world came verminous children who had never eaten a meal
at a table or slept in a bed. Who can care whether the food they
eat—remember they are the citizens of the next generation—be
nourishing or denatured? The British Medical Association, within
the strict limits of its constitution, is primarily responsible for
school medical service, and is a body of which any nation might
well be proud, but it has still to teach the much-needed lesson that
natural food is, properly considered, the finest national health
insurance.
But so conscious is the working class that all is not well with
its health that the Hospitals' Contributory Scheme has over five
million subscribers paying between 2d. and 4d. a week. I contend
that if the people had natural food in adequate measure this would
be unnecessary. The report states that malnutrition is known to
increase the maternal mortality rate, particularly where women are
engaged in industry; it also tells us that a large proportion of
women are under-nourished during pregnancy. The facts are
known. In a joint circular the Board of Education and Ministry of
Health have pointed out that "it is grossly uneconomic to allow the
health and stamina of infants to deteriorate until they are five years
old and then to spend large sums of money in trying to cure them
between the ages of six and fifteen". How comes it that Govern-
ments continue even in normal times to ignore the criticism of two
of their own departments? Infant welfare centres have been
established. There are well over 3,000 in England and Wales, and
we have over 100 recognized nursery schools—an excellent effort
but inadequate. Moreover there is no guarantee that the food taken
by the children is really feeding them. The inspection of
elementary school children in England and Wales covers more
than 60 per cent of the total, but brings adequate nutrition no
nearer. If proof be needed that the national nutrition is at fault,
consider one simple fact—95 per cent of the children of
elementary schools have defective teeth. In 1934 nearly 97 per
cent of the recruits to the Navy needed dental treatment; in the
Army the figure was higher. In the R.A.F. an average of five
fillings per recruit was called for. So soon as men are admitted to
any of the Defence Services their health improves because the
food they eat comes much nearer to the desired health standard.
Inadequate or unsuitable diets often cause dental disease, says
the report. My long experience has taught me that people who live
healthy lives sustained by natural food do not have unhealthy
mouths. Take the case of the average farm-worker who grows a
great part of his own food in garden or on allotment. He seldom
troubles the dentist if his mouth was cared for at school; many
have this good fortune, still more go neglected.
The School Medical Service is described in the report as
inadequate and none will find the term too harsh. In 1937, only
two out of three elementary school-children were examined, and of
these only two out of three of those who needed it obtained
treatment.
In Scotland there is only one dentist for every 11,000 children
and, in 1937, only 25 per cent of the children were examined.
In 1929 the Wood Committee found mental deficiency on the
increase and associated it with slum conditions—which means, of
course, that among other things improper feeding was a factor.
Tuberculosis, a deficiency disease, cost the local authorities
between four and five million pounds a year. During the present
century the worst of all deficiency diseases, cancer, has doubled its
demands on life; as I write it is claiming 200 victims a day in
Great Britain. We have 12,000 cripples in our midst, whose state is
presumed to be due to malnutrition. Consider the efforts being
made, the money being spent, the lessons being mastered. Is it
possible to avoid the thought that something fundamental has been
overlooked? The finest motor-car may refuse to function if the tiny
jets of the carburettor are choked.
The Association of Political and Economic Planning set the
cost of medical benefit for the fifteen million dependants of the
present insured classes at nine million pounds a year, and thinks
that the State should provide the money or share the cost with the
contributor. How much of the need for this outlay would remain if
the insured as well as the uninsured classes could be supplied with
natural instead of denatured food it is hard to say, but in all
probability the change-over to correct feeding would produce its
startling effect in a very little while, because, as I do not tire of
repeating, we are what we eat.
Brilliant and searching light is thrown upon national health by
what is sometimes called the Peckham experiment. Peckham, as I
have seen it, is a rather depressing south-side suburb of London
from which every suggestion of the country has passed; it is given
over for the most part to the artisan class upon whose unending
and often monotonous labour so much of the national prosperity
depends. The Pioneer Health Centre there, with its library,
gymnasium, nursery, swimming-bath and other amenities has, in
addition, doctors' consulting rooms and laboratories. When a
family joins the Centre, all members accept an overhaul by the
doctors, who do not give treatment but are content to advise and,
in some measure, to supervise. Five hundred families, numbering
1,666 members, were examined when the record was made, and of
the 1,666 only 161 had no diagnosable disorder. Many of those
examined were under the impression that nothing was wrong with
their health, and the conclusion drawn by the Association is that if
the dwellers in Peckham are an average sample of the men and
women of London there must be an enormous number of people
apparently in perfect health who are suffering from disorders
which, if long neglected, will eventually lead to breakdown.
Turning to nutrition, the report remarks that satisfying appetite
is not enough. People may do this and still suffer from
malnutrition if they are eating the wrong food, i.e., that which
lacks important protective elements. It is a thousand pities that the
statement halts here, after coming so near to the goal. If it had
gone on to say that Nature supplies the right food so long as the
soil is not defiled and tampered with, and so long as the food is not
improperly handled between the fields and the table, the whole
problem would have been set out. Then the conscience as well as
the common sense of the community would have been helped to
function. The Association was in sight of the goal, but those who
speak for it forgot to observe that you cannot cure malnutrition
with denatured food.
The Association finds in malnutrition the most serious danger
to health at the present time—"ignorance results in certain foods of
low nutritive nature being consumed to excess. Nearly half the
population of Great Britain subsists on inadequate diets." I am
convinced, by hard, practical food-production work on my own
farms, that this half of the population could be fed on nourishing
food for less than it pays for what stands condemned.
The report comments adversely on those large-scale
advertisements in papers that direct the public to eat foods for
which the advertisers advance extravagant claims. They lay great
stress upon the value of milk as an aid to the undernourished, but I
would like to put this question to them. Is it not only possible, but
very likely, that the saving grace of milk will be lost, or at least
greatly reduced, on over-mineralized pastures? Can anybody deny
that there are far more sick cows than there used to be ? As I have
pointed out, replacement in New Zealand is over 30 per cent
annually, and such complaints as mastitis and tuberculosis are
greatly on the increase. To hear experts talk about cows and
tuberculin tests suggests that the trouble is far more serious than
the man in the street, or rather the woman in the house, has learned
to realize. I have been told on good authority that certain butchers
in the West of England were complaining more than a couple of
years ago that the offals of animals from highly mineralized
pastures would not keep. There is something terribly significant
about this. The food has been stimulated, the animals have thriven,
but, as Pfeiffer and others have shown, stock fed on denatured
food produces unhealthy offspring. The internal organs of the
parents suffer deterioration—as the butchers have discovered.
Perhaps the best comment upon the nation's health is to be
seen in the incidence of sickness-absence rates in industry. Taking
no count of absences of three days or less, the average annual
absence for men is ten days, and, for women, twelve. The country
is healthier than the town, but constructive measures to prevent the
spread of ill-health must be developed in both urban and rural
areas.
”The aspect of raising standards of nutrition and fitness should
be given much more prominence . . . the mere state of not being ill
must be recognized as an inacceptable substitute too often
tolerated or even regarded as normal . . . No one has intensively
studied and analysed health."
Here the report touches the keynote of the problem; touches,
but hardly sounds it. Surely health can only be founded upon the
broad bases of sunlight, fresh air, and natural food. Give these
three essentials from birth to any child born free from hereditary
taint and you get the perfect type of man or womanhood, so far as
physique is concerned. There are races still living in the world, like
the Hunzas in North-West India, to whom illness is unknown. The
Maoris might have been cited as another example of perfect
physical development until they left their original diet and began
to live on the denatured food of the European settler. Since then
they have gone downhill. Our townsfolk are accustomed to low
nutritional values and have acquired a certain resistance.
We are what we eat, and in the past half a hundred years we
have been beguiled into eating food grown on sick soil, and all
manner of preparations made not to nourish but to sell. The
survival has been high, but the good health rate has been very low.
Proper housing, recreation, reasonable hours and conditions of
work are the necessities of a civilized community, but by the side
of healthy food they cannot claim precedence. Nor can sickness
services rank with health services.
Now it is timely, I venture to think, to make a suggestion that
might well put all my contentions to the proof. A small centre
might well be established under the direction and supervision of
such an outstanding nutritional expert as Sir John Orr. Children
might be brought up on food raised from healthy soil, and the
controls might be placed under the same authority. Results might
be reported annually, and in a very few years the eyes of the public
would be wide open.
Experiments in nutrition carried on in the Sunfield Institute at
Clent, near Stourbridge in Worcestershire, might be studied with
advantage in this connection. It is all too clear that the relation of
soil to nutrition is not yet understood and is not being studied save
by a few enthusiasts. The tragedy of the present situation, as I see
it, is that all leaders of public opinion, all the dietetic and general
health practitioners, are dissatisfied, profoundly dissatisfied, with
the general health of the population; they have considered and
exhausted every superficial aspect of the crisis in turn, but,
unhappily, have ignored the fundamental one altogether. Now they
confess to failure and prepare to give more time, labour and money
to developing all the curative factors, while if they would take
their courage in both hands and grasp the problem by its roots they
might solve it.
After all, science is not a century old in its modern dress and
scope; the surgeon only parted company with the barber in 1745,
after nearly three centuries of association with the barbers in a
guild. The nineteenth century was dawning, or had dawned, when
a Royal College of Surgeons received its Charter and medicine
started to produce its high lights—Humphry Davy, Lister, Pasteur,
Koch, Ehrlich, and the rest. To-day we have a British Medical
Association with a membership of 40,000, but modern science,
medicine surgery and hygiene are infants-in-arms by the side of
husbandry. This was old when Aesculapius taught, and its work
was well and truly done down to the time when moderns began to
tamper with the soil and multiply disease in the human, animal,
and vegetable kingdoms.
If we have blundered, and there seems little reason to doubt it,
we can retrace our steps without insuperable difficulty and at no
enormous expense. Of course, a young and new science may well
make mistakes; the worst dangers can only prove fatal if it persists
in them and continues, without regard to the work of those who
have studied the question, to contaminate the soil through which
all life flows.
Happily the world is still rich enough to undertake long-term
research and compare the results to be obtained from natural and
contaminated soils on humans, animals and vegetables. Regarded
only as an insurance premium, the world can afford to spend the
money. Nothing is considered as too much to spend in pursuit of
death, but surely life has a greater claim. My greatest ambition is
to point the way to common ground, on which those who are
concerned with a sick world may meet to consider the fundamental
healing that is called for and may preach the gospel of moderation
in the place of greed.
Is it beyond the bounds of possibility to organize the present
generation in an effort to spare its children many of the pains and
anxieties that are the fruits of sickness, due to the revolt of the
earth against the indignities her children have heaped upon her?
The suppression of permitted poisoning by drugs and of
devitalizing or intoxicating people through the medium of evil
'remedies ' and worthless food must be left to the first government
with a conscience. As democratic countries elect their own
governors, nothing more is needed than a healthy public opinion
which, in its turn, education will create. In the spread of education
many of us see the greatest hope for the future, for when men and
women understand how they stand in relation to the Earth Mother
they will unite to protect her from violation.
The report, of which the greater part of this chapter is a
review, sums up the situation in seven words—"basically health is
a problem of education". With this contention I am heartily in
agreement.
I would like to see something shown to young and old of the
real nature of the world we live on. In every school that can boast a
stretch of playground-green however small, the lesson could be
enforced by actual demonstration of the growth forces to which
soil and air, wind and rain, contribute. Such teaching would have
more than what I would call a merely curriculum value. It would
inculcate at the most susceptible age a sense of respect and
reverence for the primal forces that enable us to live, and would
teach children to respect the way in which Nature performs her
unending task. In this way the future of the land itself would be
assured.
If the health of the people depends in the first place on the
health of the soil (and he would be a bold man who would deny
this), then a great step forward will have been taken when the
rising generation has been taught that it should guard its land as
carefully against home exploitation as it should against a foreign
foe. Again, I would suggest that the cost of our health services
would be greatly reduced in a few years if they included
experiments planned to test the difference between natural and
denatured foods, experiments that might be carried out all over the
country and recorded for the guidance of a Ministry of Health that
would find health entering more and more into its calculations and
taking the place at present occupied by disease.
A Commission to enquire into the living conditions of the
healthiest races on the globe, like the Hunza to whom I have
referred elsewhere, would place very valuable data within reach.
So soon as the nation's best brains were engaged in investigation
along these lines many alert intelligences would carry the work
through, and if Great Britain and her Empire were to set the pace
every progressive country would follow along the same lines to
produce the improvement in national health.
I cannot help believing that we are within easy reach of such a
consummation, if only the first steps can be taken by authority.
The individual or group is a voice crying in the wilderness—not
without being heard, as I can testify, but unable to be heard far and
wide as the needs of the present times demand.
And, finally, I would remind all those who are exploiting
either the land or the people, whether in the good faith that
business is business, or without the full realization of the inflexible
truth that the wages of sin is death, that the failure of the land or
the national health will involve them, too, in the common ruin.
"Even as a man sows he shall surely reap."
 Sow seed in a denatured soil, feed it with poison to make it
expand, and after a few years you and those you love most will
reap disease and premature death. There can be no other harvest.
CHAPTER III The Soil and the Cosmos
I THINK IT MUST BE apparent to all thinking men that their activities
are governed by laws, definite, pre-ordained, and immutable, and
that if they seek success they must follow all the laws they can
observe clearly, and strive to understand through intuition some, at
least, of the others. They may be well aware of the existence of
laws yet undeclared and beyond man's complete comprehension,
but if they seek at this stage of human development to know them,
they are wise, while if they pay no heed to them they are destined
to failure and disappointment. It is by the ordered pursuit of the
way of life, in this endeavour to break new ground, that we acquire
wisdom.
Naturally, human activities embrace in the very first instance
the tillage of the soil. This is the primal act upon which all
processes, physical and mental, depend, the cultivation of the
living earth lent to man to occupy and tend for the growth and
maintenance of the plant food by which he lives. To-day,
unhappily, the earth that this generation and its immediate
predecessor have had in charge is decreasing in fertility owing to
thoughtless misuse, it is becoming exhausted in many parts and
over large areas has reached a stage in which the largest crop is
preventable disease, manifesting itself in man, beast, bird, tree and
vegetable.
I feel sure that intelligent men of all classes, from the highest
to the lowest, must be concerned to detect and end the errors that
have brought about the results they can see so plainly. I suggest
that it is necessary to begin at the beginning and consider the state
of the soil, literally the seed-bed of all life, as the starting-point of
enquiry. We at once become aware that for the maintenance of
healthy existence on earth a living soil, such as man received in the
earliest years from his Maker, is the very first essential, without
which all our efforts are wasted. When we look for the living soil
it is no longer easily found in the great centres of civilization. Vast
areas of our earth are dead, and though they may not yet lie
beyond the scope of resurrection, there can be no recovery until a
term is put to their exploitation by man through the medium of
mineral 'fertilizers' that are foreign to the earth's real requirements,
and have no part at all in Nature's ordered plan of cultivation. The
laws governing the earth we dwell in, the soil on which we grow
our food plants, do not differ in purpose at least from the laws and
forces which govern the surrounding air, the air we humans
breathe about eighteen times in every minute of our lives as part of
the rhythm of the life cycle.
Consider this intake of breath and what it means to life. Surely
the meaning is that the child from birth draws into its body the
vital forces that envelop it, only some of which are visible. Not
only does he inhale the oxygen and other gases which make up the
atmosphere, but with them come the floating fragments from the
cosmos, some too small for our imagining, others large enough for
man to see—as he can do at any moment when the sun is shining,
by allowing a ray of bright sunlight to penetrate a dark room
through a crack in the door. Then we see a densely veiled, ever-
moving body of electric forces, and these are in truth the large
floating particles of the cosmos. The particles in the air around us
are living entities; they are life, carrying the negative and positive
poles of electricity.
Man in dealing with the soil may well learn from the inferior
or failing crops now rewarding his efforts that he has exploited the
land through his excessive demands upon it. He knows, too,
however well defined the limitations of his knowledge may be,
that he must replace in the soil the qualities it has lost in providing
him with his crops; he should know that he cannot substitute dead
forces for live ones.
I want to insist that the gradual depletion of the earth's fertility
is quite a new outrage, if we think in terms of the earth's age;
relatively as new as the bombing of undefended cities from the air,
and the destruction of merchant vessels by assassins travelling
under the sea. In the history of our world the destruction of the soil
and the destruction of civilization as constituted in our time are
both affairs of yesterday; even "villainous saltpetre'' is not old in
relation to the world it has injured. It was only a hundred years
ago—since 1840 to be precise - -that the chemist began his terrible
invasion of the soil. Whatever the colour, creed or nationality of
the agriculturist, he is well aware that down to a few years ago the
living fertility of the soil had been fostered and maintained by
Nature's own methods; residues of plant and animal life had gone
through such necessary process as Nature has ordained. Her
procedure, in the outward aspect visible to the simplest among us,
is plain enough—a revival of the living organism through
marvellous residues known to mankind as humus, but not yet
completely understood; it is the material to which the earth-worms
and micro-organisms lend the aid without which life could not
endure, the material through which mysterious symbiotic
development takes place. In a welcome article, "The World beyond
the Eye in Agriculture", Dr. W. J. Stein, reviewing certain works
(including Dr. Waksman's great volume on humus), emphasized
the author's contention that humus is a certain state of matter rather
than a mere affair of chemical constituents, and that the problem of
humus and soil belongs to the domain of biology. As I see it,
humus helps by the aid of soil micro-organisms to maintain a
certain harmony between man, animal and soil. It is a mystery, this
ever-active force that maintains fertility on the few inches of earth
from which humanity and the animal and vegetable creation draw
breath. We must approach it with reverence, and not think of it as
something that we can control by the aid of crude chemicals.
This disintegrated living matter is not limited in quantity; it
can be used by men for revivifying the soil, even for bringing dead
soil back to gradual life, thereby enabling it to absorb once again
the forces of growth in the vegetable kingdom and function for the
universal good. Matter that results from natural processes in the
procession of earth forces has in it this power of re-birth, but it is
clear that the proper preparation of the earth for natural growth is
only just the visible part of Nature's programme; it is the exoteric
side of the mystery of creation and maintenance. The other half
lies beyond our comprehension; we cannot estimate or fully
understand its significance or origin. Moreover, it goes without
saying that all control is far beyond us. The life force may be
associated with the floating particles visible in the sunbeam that
penetrates the darkened room; perhaps before it becomes active
light is needed. The earth lives and has its being in light, and the
penetration of the soil by the light is accomplished for the benefit
of all plants that grow therein. At the same time it is clear that this
symbiosis of certain factors of earth life and cosmic life can be
brought into activity only through the medium of living soil, and
that where the soil is injured or debilitated its power to function
normally is lost.
Man cannot command the rainfall, he cannot control or
regulate the supply of floating particles that reach us from the
cosmos, nor can he handle the forces engendered by the rain, the
snow, and the dew. They are potent and invisible. The rain factor,
to mention but one without which life would become extinct, is
only one of those that are bound up with animal and plant. In brief,
the earth and stratosphere hold forces which, although hardly
known to man, are vital to him and all other life forms on the
globe. It is not difficult to enjoy the beneficial influences of these
forces, and they can be cultivated just so long as man will treat the
soil in accordance with Nature's law.
Unhappily for a hundred years past man has tended more and
more to overlook the life factor in the earth he cultivates. He has
either ignored or been uninterested in the external, invisible
influences that affect soil life, and he has not been able to
understand that the sunlight, rain and all other elements and forces
at Nature's command are required to grow the blade of grass as
well as to maintain the thousand-year-old oak tree. It may be said
that the rank and file of those who are concerned with the land
have neither the time nor the training to grasp the full implications
of the forces at work; forces that in their combination may be
likened to the power-house of the world. None the less the leaders
of agriculture as well as the controllers of the State are called upon
to-day to make a real effort to lead the people to understanding,
and to impress upon every agriculturist the vital necessity of
basing his work on a living soil, with all the various forms of life
and force that were in and around it when he was first set in
charge.
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of closest
study, that the addition of man-made dead materials such as
chemical 'fertilizers' to the soil not only checks soil life but affects
adversely the life in the atmosphere around it which is essential to
the growth of the plant until its life is ended. Life and death are, so
to speak, in the cosmos; they are a part of the Great Law under
which we live, they are forces applying equally to man and to
every other living thing. The road to correct husbandry can be
followed only by those who use the revivifying material derived
from plant and animal residues and, above all, who succeed
through the medium of correct cultivation in harnessing the life-
giving influences contained in the cosmic dust. This is the dust that
carries your radio waves with electric particles moving at a
prodigious number of miles per second, the rate at which life itself
is brought to the earth.
Modern scientists have told us that 250,000,000 tons of
material fall upon the planet every minute when the sun is shining.
This matter, and the force that activates it, must be in the air we
take in, use, and expel eighteen times in a minute. Literally it is the
very breath of life and part of the cycle ordained for man on the
planet we call the earth. To-day we are communicating to our
fellow-men and to animals, through plants grown in artificially
prepared soils, the evil substances we give to our crops. This, I
submit, is why in all the kingdoms of life there is so great an
increase of disease.
If the husbandman of old time knew none of our problems it is
because he lived in touch with Nature, had inherited traditional
knowledge and worked intuitively in response to the call of the
land of which he knew himself a part. A like inner or traditional
knowledge is found among primitive peoples. If the cultivator will
prepare his soil as Nature demands rather than as his fancy directs,
then Nature will come in and play her part, and he will win the
results he expects from his labours. . If, on the other hand, he
expects to impose an entirely artificial system upon the earth he is
privileged to cultivate, he must wake sooner or later to the
understanding that he has not been working with Nature, but
against her, with results that can only be disastrous. The fatal error
of latter-day cultivation is the belief that man can handle the field
as though it were a factory, and the soil as though it were a known
chemical equation that would react in a set way to addition of his
own devising.
Man was designed to work in harmony with Nature; her
decrees are, so to speak, his marching orders. For nearly one
hundred years he has chosen discord instead of harmony, with
results that we are beginning to see all round us. He has
approached the problem of improving production in the vulgarest
possible manner, just as though Nature would respond to any
handling, however coarse, provided it yielded maximum returns.
In point of fact we are beginning to learn not from the
agriculturists, but from those scientists who are nowhere
concerned with forced production of food-stuffs for profit, that
many metals and minerals are needed by the soil, and that Nature
herself is able to supply them through the cosmos in quantities so
delicate that it would be quite impossible for man to apply them in
equally minute doses; as the quantity is increased so the effect is
lost.
These truths have come to me as a great part of the reward for
many years cultivation of the soil in close communion with Nature
and in unfailing obedience to her decrees, so far as they have been
revealed to me. No man can be more aware than I am that in
relation to the whole question of cultivation I have travelled no
farther than the first beginnings, but I feel that some of my
contemporaries have not travelled so far as that and consequently I
may be able to help them; I desire nothing better. My theories may
be enlarged, reduced, or strengthened, but if only they provide
material for thought and close consideration I shall be well
content. We stand on the threshold of a larger knowledge, a deeper
understanding, perhaps a more reverent attitude towards life. If I
were young I should feel all the joy of the explorer, even while I
remember that:
"Veil after veil will lift—but there must be
Veil upon veil behind."
There is nothing disquieting in this thought, for the whole
progress of civilization has been in effect a lifting of the veils.
CHAPTER IV The State of Man
A LEAGUE OF NATIONS REPORT
IT HAS BEEN URGED by critics of what might be called "new thought"
that certain theories with regard to the earth and its functions are
not in accordance with scientific knowledge. My reply is that all
knowledge is not and cannot be scientific. Science is very young
and knowledge very old, and because some of that knowledge is
derived from systems of life and beliefs that belong to a remote
past, scientists look askance at it. They cannot master such
knowledge through the medium of any of the teaching of the
schools, and consequently they have a natural reluctance to admit
its existence.
In the world of agriculture we may remember that there are
distinguished practitioners who actually get results along quite
unorthodox lines. They go so far as to declare that if we treated the
land in the right way the plant pathologist and the students of
countless diseases would find their occupations gone and their
laboratories shut up. It follows, then, that when science discovers
fields of knowledge it has not explored, it cannot always resist the
inclination to turn aside from them and incline to say that no good
can possibly come of the exploration.
But if we turn to consider the state of the health of the people
of the world to-day, the health of animals, the health of plants, we
realize at once that the condition is profoundly disquieting. Have
we not, in these circumstances, a right to look for further
knowledge, even if the search send us sailing into uncharted seas ?
Since when has knowledge become the exclusive realm of
scientists?
There is an old story of a man who was shut up in prison.
Through the gratings above his cell he could catch a glimpse of the
sunshine and hear the birds singing and his whole soul cried out
for liberty. Then one day, in despair, he turned the handle of the
door to the cell and found that the door was not locked; so he went
his way rejoicing into the freedom and the daylight. So I feel it is
with millions of us. We lack good health, we lack vigour and the
capacity to express ourselves to the fullest extent of our powers
and this is the prison that holds us. But all we have to do is to live
according to Nature, obedient to her laws and ready to follow her
instructions, and the health will come to us and mid the capacity to
express ourselves to the full.
The Mixed Committee of the League of Nations published
from Geneva in 1937 a remarkable report on the relation of
nutrition to healthy agriculture and economic policy, and I noticed
in reading this just what I had noticed in studying the still longer
report of the Group of Political and Economic Planning, of which I
have already written.
The League of Nations experts approached the subject of real
nutritional values and, at the same time, contrived to pass it by, but
in the passing they made some very valuable observations which
appear to strengthen my thesis:
" In countries of the most adverse economic structure and general
level of consumption appreciable sections of the population are failing to
secure food essential to health and efficiency. . . . Millions of people in
all parts of the globe are either suffering from inadequate physical
development or from disease due to malnutrition, or are living in a state
of sub-normal health. The nutrition problem must be recognized as of
primary national importance, and a further feature of a nutrition policy
should be the dissemination of nutritional information among public
authorities."
When I read these lines I remember reading, too, of the
unsaleable surplus of wheat in glut years, of maize used instead of
coal to fire the boilers of railway engines, of coffee burnt to keep
the price up, of bananas dumped in the sea, and even of fish caught
and returned dead to their home waters. Then I went on to read in
the report that proper feeding, especially in early life, remains the
first object and that the problem of malnutrition is the more urgent
since each generation begets its successors and passes on its
heritage of disease and structural malformation.
It is well to remember that less than a hundred and fifty years
ago the great majority of the people of the earth lived in close
touch with Nature. Manufacturing towns could not be said to exist,
and the great part of the world's labour was done in the fields, in
close touch with Nature, while the food men ate was the food men
grew, redeemed from all taint of adulteration and manufacture.
Now the malnutrition existing in all countries is at once a
challenge and an opportunity. But all manner of circumstances
arise to make men's efforts nugatory.
With a view to assuring purity of food, the League report
suggests the international unification of the technical analysis and
control of food-stuffs and the control of preparations sold
primarily for their vitamin content, the basis of the work being
conducted on the standardization of biological products. The idea
is, I think, that if people could be properly fed, the lack of
resistance to certain epidemics would tend to disappear. At present
we are told that deficiencies in diet and diseases of nutritional
origin are universal, and the need for calcium, phosphorus, iron,
and iodine in our food is stressed. It is one of the points I make in
relation to our own British agriculture that the use of chemical
fertilizers robs food of these precious and natural mineral contents,
which are certainly not derived in their entirety from the soil, and
are probably due in part to the action of those cosmic forces to
which Sir James Jeans has borne witness, doubtless to the
annoyance of some of his more orthodox brethren.
The report notes that many modern diets are deficient in
certain chemical substances and bring about ill-health in pregnant
women. In support of this statement they instance an enquiry in the
United States among 576 cases of pregnancy. 316 expectant
mothers complained of symptoms which were relieved in nearly
every case by additional calcium and the vitamin D. It is
interesting, in this connection, to recall certain results at the
Chicago Welfare Centre, where the proportion of deaths among
breast-fed children was .15 per cent, among partially breast-fed
children .7 per cent and among artificially fed children 8.4 per
cent. Says the report, “many cereals are poor in vitamins and
valuable mineral elements ".
I pause to ask myself and you who read this chapter what
artificial foods are likely to be worth when they are prepared
primarily to yield a profit to the producer after paying for specious
and fantastic advertisement. Side by side with errors in food
production and food preparation we have the constant urge to the
uninitiated to eat food that cannot by any means nourish them. The
report says that defective bone formation and much dental decay in
children would be avoided by protective foods, and that, in 1937,
7½ million school-children in the United States were under-
nourished. The economic laws of the present conditions cannot be
pointed out too often or too strongly.
Boys and girls entering employment at the age of fourteen and
fifteen suffer considerable deterioration three or four years later,
and this is generally due to insufficient or unsuitable food. At this
age they are specially liable to pulmonary tuberculosis, and if they
are overworked as well as under-nourished they are apt to develop
that trouble before they are twenty.
The League of Nations report says very circumspectly that " in
an army of a large European nation the proportion of men rejected
for physical unfitness rose between 1923 and 1932 from 45 to 68
per thousand, and that certain diseases which were thought to have
been stamped out or to have become very rare are once again
making their appearance. These diseases, pellagra, beri-beri, and
the evil rest, are due to wrong or inadequate food, and if they come
back to a world that has never been so productive as it is now, the
question of quantity is ruled out and the question of quality arises.
I may add in passing that this deterioration is common to animals
as well as mankind. Only lately, while I was writing this chapter, I
read a statement that Johne's disease in stock is spreading and is
still recognized as incurable. If animals are being badly nourished
the fault is in the grass they eat and in the milling offals and barley
meal and the rest that we prepare for them. If these are wrong it
can only be, in my modest submission, that something has
contaminated them, and I suggest that that something must be the
minerals that are used to fertilize the soil.
Unfortunately it is not enough that the seed of wheat should be
washed in poison to save it from bunt or smut, or that the soil in
which it has been sown should have been treated with sulphate of
ammonia or some other 'fertilizer' of equal potency. When the
wheat has grown, the commercial interests see to it that the best
part is removed for separate sale, and the least valuable is made
into white bread that is one of the most frequent causes of
malnutrition. The League report says, “when bread is made with
flour that has been excessively milled, much of the valuable
element of the grain fails to find its way into the bread."
At the same time it is fair to put the other side of the present
picture, and I quote from the same authority: "It is of interest to
observe that in the United States there is now, as a result of
education, a reverse tendency away from white bread and towards
whole-wheat bread. Moreover, the manufacturers of breakfast
cereals have in recent years been tending to add the embryo of the
grain to their products on account of its higher nutritive value."
Commerce may be saved by science if business men will approach
it in the right way.
Another point that the report raises is the value of skimmed
milk. Many people regard it as a very inferior production indeed,
but, as Sir John Orr has pointed out, skimmed milk contains all the
mineral and protein content which is not affected by the removal
of the butter fat. Pint for pint, skimmed milk contains more
calcium, more phosphorus, more sulphur, more iron and more
protein than full milk. I think I am right in saying that when Sir
John pressed upon the community the advisability of giving
skimmed milk freely to school-children and pointed out the results
of his own tests, he met with considerable opposition.
I seemed to get back to my own particular line of country
when I read in the report that the United States of America in ten
years raised its tractors from less than a quarter of a million to
upwards of 900,000 between 1920 and 1930, and that in the same
time the number of horses fell from 17 to 13 million. In 1918, 14
combine harvesters were at work in Kansas. (As most people
know, these are machines by which two men can harvest 50 acres
of wheat in a day.) Eleven years later there were 25,000 combine
harvesters in Kansas—and to-day Kansas is in the Dust Bowl.
Here we see the cause and the effect— if you can harvest fifty
acres in a day with two men, you do it over as wide an area as
possible, and if you can do it in one year, why not do it again in
the next? Then the cheapest way of dealing with the land is to run
the tractor-drawn ploughs over it and make a bare fallow. It all
sounds so easy until Nature intervenes and sends her dust storms to
blow your surface soil into the ocean, a thing no dust storm could
have done had you been practising mixed farming and followed
your corn with a green crop.
Science has its triumphs. A new breed of wheat, the Marquis,
ripens ten days earlier than others do and is said to have added
100,000,000 acres to the wheat belt of Canada. Sugar cane has
been crossed in Java with remarkably good results, so far as can be
seen.
But we may be sure that neither the new breed of wheat nor
the new type of sugar cane can thrive if either is pressed beyond
Nature's limits. I was interested to find, at the point in the League's
report where the chemical problem was reached, that for some
unknown and regrettable reason this vital point is passed over in a
couple of lines. Here they are:
 "Reference should perhaps also be made to the work of the chemist
and bacteriologist in maintaining and increasing soil fertility."
Perhaps the wise men who compiled the report paused to
recognize the difficulties that would be theirs if they attempted to
amplify their reference or to prove that the chemist does maintain
an increased soil fertility. In any event they passed on to some
more congenial subject.
That there is plenty of room for increased sane production in
this country is shown by the statement that if food consumption
were raised to the level that obtains among the top 10% of the
population, (presumably the most leisured and wealthy) the
following increases would be called for:
Fruit 124%, vegetables 87%, milk 80%, eggs 55%, butter 41%, and
meat 29%.
And the report goes on to say that mixed farming is admirably
adapted to the family structure of the farm so common in many
parts of the world. While dealing with food and its production, one
gathers that there is nothing to be had in the way of State direction
as to what is best to buy and what is best to avoid in the markets to
which people with limited resources must turn, and such advice
would probably be very valuable to the average, inexperienced
housewife. I missed, too, in this valuable report any reference to
the effect of the tin on the national health and the tendency of
housewives of the harassed class to get something from the village
shop and save cooking for the evening meal when the man comes
home. In the old days when the village shop held no tins, the food
would be simple and rough. The evening meal might be nothing
more than a fry of bread and potatoes, with perhaps some odds and
ends of pork and of stray vegetables, but it kept the family healthy,
while to-day the health of the family may be affected seriously by
the nature of the tins. I have heard of factories that at turn out
synthetic foodstuffs and do the work very profitably, though their
products are those in which nothing living plays any part.
It is very easy to see how, in the absence of general
knowledge, dietetic needs may be neglected because people will
naturally eat the foods that appeal to them most, without pausing
to enquire whether they are those that health is calling for. The
machine knows more or less what it needs, and far greater caution
is required to avoid advertised foods of little value. In this
connection I am reminded of a very interesting paper in a recent
issue of The Countryman (January, 1940), in which a Dr. S. B.
Whitehead reports an experiment in living on 5/- per head per
week for several weeks. A family of three spent 2/3 a week on
fruit; 2/6 per week on vegetables; 11¼d. on cereals; and 2/- on
wheat-meal bread. They had 7 pints of milk and 2lb. of tinned
milk; 1lb. of cheese and butter; 8 eggs; 1lb. fat; 1½lb. sugar; 2oz.
nuts; and 2l/2 lbs. of pulse (lentils, beans and peas). The cooking
was carefully done; the family had enough to eat and actually put
on weight. For details I refer readers to The Countryman, as it
would not be fair to quote the article further, but here we have a
very clear proof that if food is carefully selected (and Dr.
Whitehead is an authority on dietetics), it is possible to live and
thrive at very little cost. The trouble is, of course, that while he
knew what to buy the average housewife does not, and apparently
his household knew how to cook, which is another qualification
not very much in evidence among the rank and file of our fellow-
countrywomen.
The United States Bureau of Home Economics classified
under headings "A", "B" and "C" the diets of some 900 families
living at various levels of expenditure. In the lowest group 60 per
cent of the diets were found unsatisfactory and other dietary
records show that out of 900 families 29 per cent had grade “A"
diets, 45 per cent grade "B" and 26 per cent grade "C". Nearly half
the people to whom expense was no object had diets providing a
generous margin of safety in all nutritional essentials.
Investigation of thousands of children in the United States
between 1906 and 1924 showed that 22 per cent were suffering
from malnutrition; while Sir John Orr's investigations published in
Food, Health and Income (1936) showed that the average diet of
only 10 per cent of the population was adequate for perfect health
in all the constituents considered.
Is it matter for wonder if, in 1935, England, Scotland and
Wales registered 33,000 deaths from tuberculosis, or if 76 per cent
of the children examined showed carious teeth between the ages of
five and six ? There is a great movement towards nutrition to-day
because the state of the public health has alarmed both the people
and their rulers, all of whom can see that something is very wrong
indeed. But I must point out that a considerable part of our troubles
can probably be traced to denatured foods grown on soil that has
been robbed in part at least of its humus by the use of mineral
fertilizers.
There are National Nutrition Committees at work to-day
throughout a greater part of the world and they should provide all
the material for investigating the nature of the food we live on.
Unfortunately, as I read the reports which have been published by
the League of Nations, I become painfully aware that one of the
most important aspects of the nutritional problem is never faced.
Twenty-six countries are at work to improve, if they can, the
nutrition of the people. Some of them have adopted a very wide
agenda, but the question of the life that communicates itself to the
food we eat and brings about the health we hope to enjoy is
conspicuously absent. We do not readily understand, living as we
do under conditions of comparative comfort, how much disease is
still rampant throughout Europe. In Jugo-Slavia, for example,
tuberculosis is quite common; in Rumania the dreaded disease,
pellagra, is claiming many victims; in Hungary the diet of the
agricultural worker is stated to be quantitatively and qualitatively
far below the requirements of the work that must be done;
malnutrition has always been present in Poland and Czecho-
Slovakia, and must needs be worse to-day, while when we turn to
Asia we learn that out of 1,150,000,000 inhabitants 75 per cent
have a diet that is below the standards set by European science,
that millions lack the minimum requirements and that throughout
Asia 90 per cent of the income of the working classes goes on
food.
We have only to consider these ugly facts in order to see that a
great part of the world is under-nourished on account of poverty
and that in parts where poverty does not step in, the food
manipulator, whether he be chemist or manufacturer, is doing his
honest (?) best to reduce the standard of national health.
Now, the great food-producing countries of the world are, I
suppose, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and
South Africa, all of which have been selling their fertility to
Europe for very many years past, until some must find their
resources seriously depleted. It is then that the danger becomes
greatest, because if they endeavour to atone for diminishing
returns due to improvident farming by the use of mineral
'fertilizers', their last state must needs be worse than their first.
The work before the National Nutritional Committees comes
very near to what I regard as the first proper object of enquiry but
never succeeds in getting over the dividing line. For example,
Australia is considering the nature of evidence that people are
under-nourished, or that their food is improperly balanced or
improperly prepared. Belgium is endeavouring to discover the
main lines for National Nutrition policy studied from the point of
view of health. It will be remembered that Belgium is densely
populated, that her factory workers, more perhaps than those of
any other country, have access to allotments and gardens in which
they can, if wisely guided, grow plenty of green vegetables.
Canada is endeavouring to set up a nutritional standard and to
collect information on the nutritional value of foods. Egypt is
considering all questions relating to foodstuffs, so we have reason
to hope that the question of the soil will not be overlooked there.
Finland, before her trouble came, was studying nutrition and
suggesting improvements; she may be able to resume them now.
Hungary was studying physiological optimum menus at minimum
cost for different social and biological groups. In Latvia, where
conditions have been very difficult, an endeavour is being made to
arrange for a general improvement in national nutrition. Norway is
preparing like measures along her own lines. In the United States
there is no National Nutrition Committee, but there is a Technical
Committee of Food and Nutrition set up by President Roosevelt
after the passing of the Social Security Act. There is a sub-
committee including representatives of 21 Government Bureaux;
97 are from the Department of Agriculture. It is seeking to
discover nutritional requirements by means of biochemical,
physiological and psychological studies. I do not know how these
enquiries are to be related to agricultural progress, or how far the
lessons that monoculture has taught have been grasped by the
authorities, but there is no doubt that if the position is studied in
the United States progress will result, and it may be a progress that
will lead the world because, if the States can recover and retain
their fertility by the institution of sane agricultural methods and
strict obedience to natural laws, the wealth and influence of the
Republic will be greater than ever before.
It only remains to point out that the question of the food we eat
has been ignored too long and handled too carelessly, and the
careless handling has resulted in suffering that spares no country
and no class of the population. The point I wish to emphasize is
that without healthy soil and a sane method of agriculture the work
of Nutritional Committees must be in large part ineffective, since
millions of people in all parts of the globe are either suffering to-
day from inadequate physical development or from diseases due to
malnutrition, and are living in a state of sub-normal health. The
League of Nations report says that a feature of nutritional policy
should be the dissemination of nutritional information among
public authorities. I would go further; I would like to see such
information conveyed to every member of every household.
CHAPTER V Mineral Fertilizers and National Health
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO a remarkable little book was published in
London. It was written by H. W. Keens, with forewords by two
distinguished doctors—Dr. Burnett, Lecturer at the School of
Medicine, Royal College, Edinburgh, and Dr. Annis, who is
Director of the Cancer Research Department, R.I.P.H. Mr. Keens
starts his book with an explanatory chart showing what he regards
as food sophistication factors resulting from toxic soils. From his
table we learn that aluminium was rendered soluble for the first
time and made available for plant intake through chemical
fertilizer interactions with the soil's aluminium content in 1842.
Then the human deaths from cancer per million people living were
173. There has been a steady increase without set-back since then,
and the figures for 1936 had risen from 173 to 1,563.
In the meantime Mr. Keens says that, in 1872, 3,000,000
animals were lost as a result of foot-and-mouth disease contracted
from the soil, while in the following years 3,500,000 sheep died
from liver rot.
In the '80's of last century aluminium was first used for
cooking utensils. Following this, he found a great spread in
appendicitis and gastritis. With the increased use of mineral
fertilizers came dry-rot canker of vegetables, fungus diseases,
crown-gall tumours of vegetables. In 1917 he finds 50 per cent of
cattle suffering from bovine tuberculosis. Ten years later he notes
that nearly 1,000,000lb. of aluminium are used for the manufacture
of cooking utensils and that 2,000,000 tons of chemical fertilizers
have been produced. In 1932, he says that 3,000,000 acres of land
have been taken out of use as unfit for cultivation and 4,000,000lb.
of produce lost as a result of new diseases.
It is not my purpose to follow Mr. Keens through his paper,
which is written by a student of science for scientists, but it may be
said that he deals with the iron, potassium, calcium, sodium, and
sulphur in the human system, studies the change from normal to
abnormal and refers the increase of many diseases that beset
mankind to the use of aluminium, and many of the diseases that
beset plant life to the use of sulphate of ammonia which, he tells
us, robs the soil of iron oxide so that a deficiency of this element
would also obtain in plants grown on that soil. Animals that eat the
grass and mankind that eat the other produce of the soil suffer
from the same deficiency. In Mr. Keens' opinion—which is backed
by trained observers—we have here one cause of the degeneration
of national health.
In 1930-31 nearly 7,000,000 tons of sulphate of ammonia were
produced, and the average amount used, including grassland and
rough grazing, is approximately 14lb. per acre throughout Europe,
the United States, Japan, China, South Africa, Canada and Ireland.
Animals that have access to crops show an increase, he tells us, of
cancerous growths. Another point of great importance that Mr.
Keens records is that water is a notable factor in the spread of
cancer; town and drinking water are obtained from rain seeping
through the soil to find levels which form in the underground
wells; the rain percolates the top soils and gathers water-soluble
salts that are lying in the "pan" of cultivated land. The water-
soluble parts of chemical fertilizers and their derivatives that have
not been taken up by the plants thus become constituents of
drinking water. This means that much water percolates through
soils which have been treated through many years with sulphate of
ammonia and nitrate of soda.
Mr. Keens goes on to express the main point of my own thesis.
He writes: “Healthy soil provides disease-free foods for the
maintenance of health of the animal body and by analogy
unhealthy soil produces disease-carrying foods which introduce
diseased conditions into the same body; even as animal tissues can
be diseased without manifestation, so plants can be diseased
without displaying obvious signs." He quotes from bulletins issued
by the Ministry of Agriculture and other bodies.
The reader may be referred to the book itself, which is
published by the C. W. Daniel Co., in London, but some of these
extracts are so disquieting that they must be quoted. For example,
there is one from the Ministry of Agriculture's sectional Volume 3
which reads as follows : “Investigation has shown that 1cwt. of
sulphate of ammonia per acre applied to experimental plots has
increased the potato yield by 20cwt. per acre, but the application of
2cwt. per acre is quite common, though 3cwt. and even 4cwt. per
acre is sometimes applied when potato prices are high." The
Ministry of Health, in its Report. No. 78, says: "Alum salts are
gastric irritants and astringents. In fertile soils aluminium appears
to be almost wholly in insoluble form." There is a report in 1932
by Mr. Beale, who finds that vegetables cooked with carbonate of
soda in aluminium vessels take up 90 parts per million. The United
States Referee Board in 1908 found that “large doses of alum
baking powder caused, and the residues from baking powder
produced, extra-intestinal irritation with colic ".
In conclusion, the author proclaims that the purpose of his
treatise is to evaluate the effects of chemical reactions of an
injurious nature to organic tissue, which interactions may arise
through processes to which vegetation is subjected during
cultivation and preparation for animal consumption. If the author's
conclusions are well founded, then none can afford to disregard
them. At present it would appear to some of us that research into
disease is associated too much with old-fashioned and revolting
methods associated with vivisection and too little with careful
study in wider fields.
CHAPTER VI The Earth is Passing her Dividends
I AM GOING TO SUGGEST that all the arms of both the old world and the
new are needed to-day, not to fight and destroy mankind and its
accumulated treasure, but to attack the disruptive forces that
threaten the fabric of the world, that fabric being the shallow
covering of fertile living soil on which all production depends.
I shall deal elsewhere with the actual failure of vast territory
brought about by improper use and the exploitation of the soil, but
for the moment I would like to point out that this danger has been
at long last understood and that many countries are taking steps to
meet it.
For example, in the United States—where Raymond Gram
Swing has said that at the present rate of depletion the U.S.A. may
become the Sahara of the Western World in a hundred years—
there is a Federal Soils State Organization seeking to arrest the
process, and the fashion in which the trouble is being handled is
just what one would expect from the far-sighted, energetic men
who have taken charge.
In Canada we have a Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act, and long
steps are being taken to check soil drift. In South Africa General
Smuts has declared that the question of the soil is the greatest
problem before the country. In India steps are being taken to deal
with erosion largely due to deforestation, which in its turn is due to
an increase in population of about 3,000,000 per annum!
In North China and Peru, where action has been taken, it is
possible to see terraces that have been standing for very many
centuries and proclaim by their position the fact that this trouble
has been met before. In Australia we have the Ranson Mortlock
Laboratory studying Australian erosion from headquarters in
Adelaide. In New Zealand we have the Fields Division of the
Department of Agriculture and the Plant Research Bureau of the
Department of Scientific and Industrial Research handling the
problem as best it can.
In Central Italy they have a Forestry Militia. In Russia and
Hungary they have built Shelter Belts. In the past three years the
United States Congress has set up a Great Plains Forest and
Experimental Station. The U.S.S.R. has its Bureau of Deserts and
its Institute of Plant Industry, and one of the results of this work is
that it has been found possible in the Kara Kum desert to grow
melons, mulberries, and grapes.
The pine forests of the Landes of Bordeaux are an expression
of the French will to check erosion.
In Africa there has been an International Conference for the
Protection of Flora and Fauna; it was held in 1933. Two years later
there was an All-India Conference for the Preservation of Wild
Life; that was at Delhi in 1935.
In the past few years the National Resources Board, or Land
Planning Committee of the U.S.A., has issued its report, and
another striking paper, only two years old, issued by the U.S.A.
House of Representatives, deals with the future of the Great Plains.
It may appear at first that I am going a little beyond my brief,
but this is not so. The annual report of the Bureau of Animal
Population of the University of Oxford for the years 1936-37
says—and the words call for the closest attention : “There is no
human being who is not directly or indirectly influenced by animal
populations, although intricate chains of connection often obscure
the fact. Population problems are as much part of the fabric of
daily existence as is the weather. It is quite as interesting to know
about changes of population as about changes in the weather, and
equally important. What is different is that not only do animals
have this influence on man, but man has an increasing power over
the fate of the animal populations that still throng the world. There
is less of a moral problem about going out on a doubtful day
without an umbrella, than there is in ordering the destruction of a
species on the chance that it may be doing harm to human
interests."
The importance of this considered statement is that it warns us
against the assumption of knowledge that we do not really possess.
We are apt to class certain animals, insects, and plants as pests,
and to destroy them without pausing to consider what part they
play in balancing the life of our planet. It is this disregard for
equilibrium that is the cause of a great part of the troubles that
beset the world to-day.
In order that the relation between what threatens to be a
catastrophe of world-shaking magnitude and the suggestions I
have put forward may be established, I would like to point out that
erosion is threatening all corners of the earth. It is not limited to
one continent or to one hemisphere. It is assuming enormous
dimensions in some countries, while in others it is moving at a
pace so moderate that people are apt to overlook the significance
of the movement and consider that there is no occasion to worry in
their lifetime. But we know that North America, Mesopotamia,
Persia, Ceylon, China and Central America hold records of
civilizations that were destroyed by erosion. There are even those
who attribute the final downfall of the Roman Empire to the same
cause.
When a civilization dies the soil slowly recovers its lost
qualities, and when generations have passed it is ready for another
civilization to take the place of the old one. But we know by now
that the worst erosion is due to bad, ignorant, careless, or greedy
agricultural methods. These, I admit, are to be explained in part by
the claims of human necessity.
Some primitive people take all they can from any soil, but if
they take in excess the soil will withhold its dividend of food. It is
not too much to say that certain parts of the world, like the deserts
of Central Asia, the Sahara, the Australian desert, the deserts of
Turkestan, are examples of regional suicide. Even to-day the
Sahara is said to move a thousand yards in a year. The rabbits in
Australia, by destroying the undergrowth, are producing deserts
there; but in the United States, in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and
Colorado men have provided their own deserts, and in some of the
provinces of Canada they have done the same thing.
When we go deeply into the question we find that the trouble
is due to the illusion that men can own the earth. They cannot.
They can only have a short tenancy and, this being so, their acts of
husbandry, whether in highly cultivated and long established
countries or in a land that has just been opened up to settlement,
should be strictly controlled by the governments whose flag flies
over the newly acquired territory, in order that all land may be
cultivated with such regard to the preservation of surface
vegetation that erosion may be avoided.
As I look round the world (and apart from extensive travel I
receive reports from all the great agricultural centres), I realize that
many countries to-day are paying dividends out of capital. For
nearly a hundred years the world has been living on capital, and
erosion marks the point at which further dividends become
impossible. I have seen in the Near East in times gone by a
company of Bedouins settle on a stretch of land that, thanks to
some water-springs, has abundant herbage; they have waited to
leave it bare and have gone on their way to find another. So, on a
far larger scale, have all countries been depleting their own
resources.
In the New World, of course, there has been a disastrous
exchange between capital in cash and capital in soil. That is to say,
in order to purchase all or as many as possible of modern comforts,
settlers on virgin land have sacrificed their soil by means of what
might be called exploitative agriculture. Then again, we see the
reverse side of the civilizing process in Africa, particularly in
South Africa, where control of the tribes and the prevention of war
has led to such an increase of population that the natural fertility of
the land has not been adequate to maintain supplies.
Mr. G. V. Jacks, part-author of that remarkable book The Rape
of the Earth, has written: " The unprecedented economic
expansion during the nineteenth century has been followed by a
world-wide biological deterioration of the land. Probably more soil
was lost from the world between 1914 and 1934 than in all
previous human history." Mr. Jacks is deputy director of the
Imperial Bureau of Soil Science and he looks to economic
nationalism to reverse the progress of a system of internationalism
which enriched mankind while impoverishing the earth. He
believes, as so many of us do, that large-scale monoculture must
stop unless, of course, I might add, the necessary steps are taken to
enable the soil to recover its virility. Nature has a point at which
her patience becomes exhausted, and all over the world, in various
parts of the earth's kingdoms, we realize that the point has been
reached. The time may come when, unless conditions are altered,
the United States will cease to be a food-exporting country, and it
is not impossible that the same condition may arise in Australia.
The only way to prevent it is to preserve soil structure and to
remember that a spendthrift nation, like a spendthrift individual,
must reach the bankruptcy court in the end.
“Notwithstanding the huge individual yields that are
obtainable with improved varieties," says Mr. Jacks, “and
notwithstanding fertilizers and mechanization, average crops are
failing; notwithstanding all the drugs and medicines of modern
science the New World shows signs of growing prematurely
senile. The Old World has sucked the life-blood which the New
World has gladly given and, with equal willingness would give
still—if it could . . . cultivation of the soil has become a means to
wealth instead of a mode of life." He makes a further startling
comment, which should be digested by all whose system is strong
enough: "If peace among all nations had been assured, if the
League of Nations had fulfilled its purpose, soil erosion to-day
might have become an uncontrollable force driving the whole
world headlong towards starvation." This remarkable terminal
essay to a remarkable book is worth the closest consideration.
Some countries do really understand the nature of the soil
problem. Japan and Java, for example, have controlled erosion,
which may be defined as a contagious disease of the earth's
surface, but we are face to face with the fact that the average
output per unit area of land is falling everywhere.
It has been well said that England owes much to her landlords
for having had regard to the needs of the soil and for having
imposed strict rules of husbandry upon all tenants, but other
countries have done the same and, all things considered, Europe
has made the best of her opportunities. But since 1914 it is
reckoned that 40,000,000 acres in the United States, then under the
plough, are already sub-marginal land, with fertility exhausted and
owners ruined. Following exhaustion comes erosion, because
when the soil loses its productive quality it loses its capacity for
remaining in place; erosion follows and soil quality is lost by
destroying or changing the natural vegetation. A sound and healthy
soil can hold and retain water; a soil that has been robbed of its
fertility yields to water, and in countries of violent rainfall it is
carried away. The worst results of drought in the great countries of
erosion are due to the loss of the soil's absorptive capacity. Yet
there is every reason to believe, and indeed experiments in the last
few years may be said to give assurance, that erosion can be
overcome if men will cultivate according to Nature's laws, if they
will give back adequate vegetation to the soil and, having done so,
will be content to take what the land can yield without pressing it
to efforts lying beyond its power.
There are many countries that have lost fertility over wide
areas and yet have done nothing with chemical fertilizers to bring
the disaster about. In these cases, however, you find, on
examination, that the first cause of erosion has been bad or greedy
handling of the land. There have been successive white straw crops
followed by bare fallow, and where the land is stripped heavy rains
have washed away the surface soil upon which all life depends. If,
instead of treating the land in this fashion for the sake of
immediate advantage, cultivators had followed white straw with
legumes, there is no reason to doubt that they would have given
the soil a strength and consistency that would have enabled it not
only to yield better quality food but to stand up against the
torrential rains that have done so much to denude a great part of
the earth. Erosion control, if it is to be effective, must be
associated with constructive agriculture and must be controlled by
the State, because the individual is not to be trusted; the temptation
to place his personal needs before the claims of good citizenship is
too great. He does not pause to think that when the soil goes the
Empire follows.
I have said that this work of soil preservation is better
understood in Europe than elsewhere. Nowhere has it been better
handled than in parts of Italy, where Signor Mussolini has
instituted reclamation programmes of great extent and wide vision.
Perhaps it is his example that has led to improvements being
undertaken in Cyprus, Turkey and Palestine, Hungary, Rumania
and the Ukraine. Gradually we are finding that even on soils that
have suffered from erosion it is possible, by means of suitable
plants that hold the soil together, to bring about the desired change.
The other suicidal policy that has prevailed throughout all
virgin lands has been the destruction of timber, and the time is
coming when the world will have to decide between nature and the
lumber interests. South America is suffering badly from
deforestation. So, too, are some of the West Indian islands. In
Africa one of the great sources of erosion is the cutting down of
trees and shrubs, and a further trouble in the tropics is that tropical
forestation is not fully understood. Fortunately the South African
Government has instituted an effective Forestry Department, and
in Rhodesia there is a Soil Erosion Committee, appointed in 1932,
which has done good work.
In Kenya they say that erosion followed European settlement.
The whole problem of the country inhabited by native tribes in
Africa is more serious because it is too difficult to get any
concerted action, or to make people understand that the conditions
of their life have been varied considerably by the improvements
brought about in it.
Looking farther afield we find that in New Zealand 14,000,000
acres of trees have been felled and sown to grass; only 4,000,000
acres remain. Turn to the Far East and you find a report that only a
return to grass husbandry and cattle grazing can save the fertile
loess region in North-Western China from erosion. One of the
dangers arising from the present condition of things is that when
the area of production is restricted by such troubles as I have been
discussing the cultivator tries to get more produce from what is left
to him, and to do this he will use any means that are to hand. It
may be, it often is, that in this effort to restore a damaged position
he damages it still more, and gradually we are brought back to the
truth that we have been exploiting the earth for our own fancied
advantage for a century and that now we have to come back to
saner methods in order that we may conserve the soil and produce
healthy, life-giving food.
Having farmed in the tropics and studied conditions closely, I
know that erosion follows far more rapidly upon incorrect acts of
husbandry there than it does in temperate zones. There is, of
course, the golden rule of giving the land what it wants in the way
of natural fertilization and particularly the green growth that makes
for humus and bacterial action. But we must not pretend to
understand the nature of tropical forest soils because, with the
possible exception in the case of the Dutch East Indies, their secret
remains undiscovered, and there may be no greater mistake than to
think that the soil will produce crops just because man wants them.
It will only produce such crops as correspond to its own activities.
If nomads have contrived to live on tropical soil it is not
because of the superabundance of that soil's wealth so much as
because it has enjoyed long periods of rest. But we know there are
very few parts of the world where the land will not respond to
organic manure, mixed farming, and crop rotation far more
gratefully than it will to monoculture and artificial stimuli. To-day,
whether in the tropics or in the temperate zones where erosion has
struck hard, or on the lands of the west, where the soil has been
over-stimulated and its produce has lost the capacity to enable
mankind to resist disease, we have to retrace our steps, and that is
a tiresome, costly and exasperating business.
The problem in England is denatured soil; the problem in the
United States is soil conservation; and it is interesting to see what
the standard State Soil Conservation Districts Law, already
adopted by nearly thirty states of the U.S.A., says about its policy.
“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Legislature to provide
for the conservation of the soil and soil resources of this State and
for the control and prevention of soil erosion, and thereby to
preserve natural resources, control floods, prevent impairment of
dams and reservoirs, assist in maintaining the navigability of rivers
and harbours, preserve wild life, protect the tax base, protect
public lands and protect and promote the health, safety and welfare
of the people of this State." I would suggest that something on
these lines might help to preserve English soil from the ravages of
the chemist and consequently from the ravages of disease in men
and animals and pests in crops.
CHAPTER VII The Wasting of the World
“THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA," says a modern writer, Stuart Chase, in his
Rich Land, Poor Land (McGraw Hill, New York), "have been
sitting on their porches watching their continent go by." He goes
on to say that the continent of North America has been set upon by
footpads and most foully hurt and beaten. Now it has turned; many
tormented districts have slipped out of the grasp of their
tormentors.
The prairie plains, “the bread basket of the U.S.A." so called,
run west of the Mississippi from eastern Dakota to eastern Texas.
The soil is said to be twenty feet deep and nowhere rivalled in the
world, save by the black lands of Russia. Beyond, in the dry lands
of Nebraska, it may take a score of acres to fatten a bullock. The
gulf winds do much for the U.S.A. and, given natural conditions,
would save it from deserts, but even where Nature has withheld
these, man has made them. Few in the haste to 'get there',
remember that man lives in part, at least, by leave of the world's
great rivers and that if the laws of water are transgressed, drought
comes and food fails. We must nourish the land, preserve its
natural moisture by protecting forests, while preserving its soil by
proper systems of cultivation. The alternative is that Mother Earth
will follow the example of Saturn and devour her unworthy
children. They say that one inch of top soil may take a thousand
years to accumulate as Nature follows on the track of retreating
glaciers. Plants and animals have lived, died, and given their
remains to the earth through this period. A ‘get-rich-quick' farmer
can dissipate his share of such an inheritance in a decade.
“The North American continent," writes Mr. Chase, “was rich
with growing things, incredibly beautiful to look upon, and
perhaps the most beautifully endowed by Nature of all the world's
continents."
In three hundred years the desert and waste has risen from 50
to 100 million acres of dying forest. " The continental soil, the
centre of vitality, is visibly and rapidly declining, the skin of
America has been laid open." The humus is going; soils that have
been building for 20,000 years have lost in a century the benefits
of several thousand years of accumulation. Corn yields in the
richest agricultural districts of the United States have lost 50 per
cent in the lifetime of middle-aged men. Water erosion washes
many million tons of solid material from the fields every year, and
with it there go tons of phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen. The
Mississippi deposits 400 million tons of solid earth into the Gulf of
Mexico annually, much of it the richest soil of the States. Nine
million acres of good American land has been destroyed by wind
erosion, and it is said that in a single day 300 million tons of top
soil was lifted from the Great Plains. Ninety per cent of the old
virgin forest has gone. Floods and droughts succeed each other.
Refuse of city, mine, and factory pollutes streams, and the Pacific
salmon trade is just 10 per cent of what it was. Three-quarters of
the saw timber has gone, and fifty per cent of the rest.
It would be possible to continue this tale of woe and disaster to
the richest country in the world—possible, but happily
unnecessary. At the same time there are men who view the scene
with equanimity. They say that sufficient food for the population
could be produced intensely on 20 per cent of the agricultural
acreage of the U.S.A. A plant physiologist of the University of
California, Dr. Gericke, has grown huge tomato plants in a shallow
tank fed by minerals, and he claims to have grown 217 tons to the
acre. But can Dr. Gericke guarantee that this denatured food has
the vital nutritional elements that man needs? It is noticeable that
there is no record of his having done so. Here you find man
moving confidently to replace Nature, presuming in good faith that
he has the secrets of the Supreme in his grasp. Quem Deus vult
perdere prius dementat.
There will be no trouble for a long time to come in the
provision of synthetic and denatured imitations of the foodstuffs
that have Nature's free hand behind them, but for the results of this
feeding we shall not need to look further than the statistics of
national health. Dr. Alexis Carrel has written (Man, the Unknown;
Harper Bros., 1935): "Chemical fertilizers by increasing the
abundance of crops without replacing all the exhausted elements in
the soil have contributed indirectly to change the nutritive value of
cereal grain and vegetables." Here we read the outspoken thought
of a man who has grasped the truth that has eluded the majority of
mankind.
When I plead for “peace with the soil" it is not only the soil of
my motherland or that of the kindred friendly United States; it is
the soil of all lands washed by the Seven Seas. They have been
victimized, not out of ill-will or with wrong intent, but by reason
of an abysmal ignorance of Nature's laws. I plead for immediate
action along lines of moderation and agreement. If only the danger
can be realized I am satisfied that all men of good intent will come
together to preserve their common heritage and leave the earth
more fit than it is to-day for their children to inherit.
In Great Britain we attempt little or nothing on the vast trans-
Atlantic scale, but in the sacrifice of our countryside, the reckless
scale of much of our husbandry, the misuse of our soil, the
contamination of our rivers and streams, we are treading the same
road. We have another grave trouble in common with our cousins
overseas—the trouble that public opinion is uninformed. We are
prepared to die for our native land, but we are equally prepared to
allow our native land to die as a result of our ignorance and
neglect. Is it wrong to see in this neglect of our soil, this
abandonment of quiet, fruitful husbandry, this sacrifice of
humanity's capital, a greater danger than devastating war? We can
create a new generation in thirty years, but when Nature begins to
bring back fertility to wasted areas centuries may come and go
before the humus that is the foundation of life accumulates. What
we need is not a few voices crying in the wilderness about the
wilderness that mankind is preparing, but a sustained effort
covering every country in order to rouse mankind to defend its
only real inheritance. I want to emphasize the truth that this is a
new world danger. It is not yet a century old, but in that century
incalculable riches have been lost and we are only just becoming
aware of what we are losing.
If I have chosen to dwell on the American scene it is because
of my fear that these conditions or similar ones may be reached in
Great Britain and elsewhere in the Empire. Parts of Canada have
caught the infection that has come up from the south, and the
tragedy of the situation is that in the countries I have named, and
doubtless in all the others that have witnessed a like exploitation,
the worst offenders have looked upon themselves as pioneers, as
enterprising citizens who deserve well of their country. The worst,
I say, but in the end it may be the best, too, for if the fault is
recognized, the genius of destruction may well turn to become the
genius of reconstruction.
There are many causes of the trouble in the U.S.A., but
prominent among them is what is called "one-crop farming";
another is the reckless dis-afforestation; a third is the lack of
control of river-heads and water-courses. There are troubles
peculiar to the contours. A saving clause in the American situation
is that the tragedy of erosion is forcing the authorities to look from
effect to cause. This may save her. Intelligent people not only in
the New World are beginning to ask themselves a fundamental
question: Did not the Supreme Architect of the world send clean,
clear rivers for definite services to man and the soil, or were they
given for pollution and degradation by every conceivable form of
filth and refuse in order that man might pile up riches? Were
forests sent to clothe the hillsides that they might be pulped for
paper mills, or were they sent to collect moisture for dry lands and
to cultivate humus for the extension of natural growth?
When these questions are asked a further one becomes
inevitable. Is it not the duty of every ruler or body of rulers to
protect his or their portion of the world's surface from pollution
and pillage? If this is so and the duty has been so badly neglected
that natural assets are being wasted at an incredible and increasing
rate, is it not time that the collective conscience of the world
should charge its leaders to take immediate steps to save the
common heritage of all?
I can see in the mind's eye the coming of a League of Nations
in which every country will be represented and in which all men
will unite for the pursuit of a common cause; it is a consoling
vision of peace, prosperity and the righting of a great evil. In a
world whose riches are respected and used with discretion and
moderation there will still be sufficient for all the people of the
world; out of the present waste we can gather infinite wealth.
CHAPTER VIII The African Problem
THE POSITION OF AGRICULTURE in Africa is critical in so far as the old
methods no longer suffice, and if new methods are brought in on
commercial lines of soil exploitation, the result can only be
disastrous to vast communities. We are face to face with the fact
that British occupation of Africa has resulted in a check to tribal
warfare and the control of some at least of the diseases that killed
man and beast and kept the population in check. Peace and
progress have increased population and protected wild life. Side by
side with these advantages we have seen great deforestation and
the grasslands have been overgrazed. Erosion is one of the worst
results, and another problem that has arisen is that of maintenance,
because the old agricultural practices, sufficient when populations
were small and shifting, became inadequate when, as the
population grows and settles, the available areas of cultivation
tended to shrink. At the same time we have to remember that
native systems of farming throughout Africa are very sound, and
that they can neither be judged fairly by their appearance nor
superseded by European practices. Fortunately, for some years
past valuable studies of the position have been published and these
have culminated in the great work of Lord Hailey, whose An
African Survey is, of course, the most outstanding work of recent
years.
I may be charged with going outside my brief when I dare to
consider in a single chapter the vast question of British African
administration in the light of the Continent's agricultural needs, but
the title of my book is sufficient justification for the excursion. I
have already discussed agriculture in the United States and the
urgency of the crisis that faces Africa from the Mediterranean to
the Cape is further justification, if such be needed. It is the more
interesting for, from the agricultural viewpoint, Africa stands at the
parting of the ways.
The country has always fascinated me; I am old enough to
remember when, literally as well as figuratively, it was 'the Dark
Continent'. I have studied its eventful history from the time of
Mungo Park and David Livingstone down to Lord Hailey, the
gifted author of An African Survey, that great, comprehensive
volume in which he examines at very considerable length the
problems arising in Africa south of the Sahara. I may say in
passing that I find in Lord Hailey an advocate of sound agricultural
methods, a man who does not hesitate to state facts as he sees
them, and as in years to come they should be seen by all clear-
sighted people.
We all know that although Africa enjoys peace and a measure
of tranquillity to-day, vast administrative problems have to be
solved by men whose first need is to understand the native mind
and to guide rather than coerce it. We have to remember that the
machine age and commercial enterprise have taken certain parts of
Africa by storm and that all its vast resources are being exploited
systematically by Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal. I
do not use exploitation in a bad sense. The law that is called
progress is at work north and south of equatorial lands, and while
it is breaking up many treasured institutions and practices, it is
fighting disease in man, beast and crops, checking inter-tribal war,
and lengthening life. But progress does not necessarily mean plain
sailing over uncharted seas. Out of the benefits that civilization
confers upon the native there come vast problems that we must
help him to solve, and the first is one of nutrition. The health and
capacity of the native depend very largely upon his food supply
and it is up to us to regulate both the quantity and the quality of
that supply. I think what interests me most in this problem and
what has constrained me to devote space to it here is a statement I
read in one of the many reports that have occupied me, the
statement that the use of artificial fertilizers has been definitely
advocated by authority in dealing with certain plantations in
Nigeria—coffee and cacao, to be precise. Nay more, it is
compulsory. This is a tendency which, if it is developed, may
bring incredible suffering upon the continent and render nugatory
the hard work and patient endeavour of many thousands of
devoted civil servants. This is why I must make my protest and set
it on record.
Native African agriculture is well worth consideration, even
by those Western authorities who are quite convinced that they
have taken all knowledge to be their province and that they have
nothing more to learn. Qualified observers have noted persistently,
even amazedly, that native agricultural practice tends to conserve
soil values, and that while native pride in the possession of cattle
has led to great over-stocking and unnecessary destruction of
forests and vegetation, the larger destruction and consequent
erosion are mainly due to the incursion of the European and his
new practices. Some of these are eminently beneficial—as for
example when areas are cleared to ensure destruction of the tsetse
fly—but care has to be taken when an area is stripped to see that it
does not lose the fertility that the native cultivator has never
overlooked.
Few of us would care to say whence the 'untutored savage'
derives his knowledge of the conservation of the soil. I can't help
thinking that it may have filtered through from Egypt, a centre of
unparalleled civilization that was flourishing when the early Briton
dyed his skin with woad and hunted the fauna of his native woods.
The problems of Africa that may still be solved by encouraging
sane methods of native husbandry and refusing firmly to allow
commercial practices to be imported from our country are many
and serious. The restrictions of land; the stabilization of
population; the absence of males who must travel far and wide to
find work; the sale of crops and the destruction of forests are all
matters that cause grave anxiety to administrators, but we know
that the native cultivator has learned that the destruction of forests
increases phosphates, though he may not know what phosphates
are, and he has some idea of crop rotation, soil conservation,
organic fertilization and work to check erosion. His stock-holding,
one of the most serious problems before our administrators, is
social and religious rather than economic, and he has gained
important additions to his fields and stock in the past centuries
from those who have come to him from afar.
The oxen in which he takes so much pride reached him from
Asia; his banana and sugar-cane were brought as far as West
Africa by the Arabs. The Portuguese introduced ground nuts and
maise; cacao came from South America; so, too, in all probability
did cotton. All this was good, but it is not good that industries
should have redoubled the native effort to destroy forests, should
have encouraged monoculture and introduced the plough where its
implications are not fully understood. Then again, in the old days
the natives lived on the flesh of wild animals, and for years past
the fauna of Africa have been sacrificed to the fool behind the gun,
so that to-day the native depends very largely on maize and
pumpkin and cassava root with pepper and beans, and kola for
chewing-gum. His wheat is grown for marketing, so too are his
rice and his jute, but his sorghum or great millet is kept for home
consumption; so is the cassava which yields the tapioca and the
yams which may weigh over 50lb., and the ground nuts which
have a notable oil content, and the palm oil and kernels of which
nearly 400,000 tons are produced in Nigeria alone. It would appear
that the native is indebted to the foreigner for most of the food he
grows.
Yet we can see that Africa, for all her advantages and
disadvantages of climate, is not producing as much as she needs
and that she will be less able to do so in the future than in the past,
because of the increase in population brought about by the control
of tribal wars and the check upon epidemic diseases by the medical
side of administration. This, as I see it, is one of the reasons why
African agriculture demands the most careful consideration and
why it should be possible in every part, from north to south and
east to west, to put into practice throughout the British-controlled
areas the system of soil preservation that comes naturally and
without difficulty to native cultivators. I have no wish to minimize
the great work, administrative, medical and exploratory, that is
being carried out to-day. It is a work of which Englishmen have
every reason to be proud. African problems are considered by the
Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the museum of Natural History at
South Kensington, the Imperial Agricultural Bureaux at
Rothamsted, Oxford, Aberdeen, Cambridge, Aberystwith, East
Malling and St. Albans, at the London School of Tropical
Medicine, the Veterinary Research Station at Weybridge, the
Institute of Animal Genetics at Edinburgh and elsewhere, while
there are research stations in Africa in Tanganyika, Kenya, Uganda
and Nigeria.
France, Belgium and Portugal are all carrying out research
from many stations at home and in Africa. The research in African
territories is being controlled by the scientific institutes in Paris,
but the trouble I see is a lack of co-ordination. The problems of
agriculture in Africa are not affected by man-made boundaries and
vary chiefly according to their country's position in regard to the
sun. In other words, they are climatic, and consequently research
in each zone might well be co-ordinated.

FERTILIZER AND NATIVE PRACTICE

I was immensely interested, when reading Lord Hailey's book,
to study his view of fertilizers. He says that new methods of
fertilization must be adapted to the financial and labour resources
of the average farmer and that they should be based on Nature's
principles rather than on the use of chemicals. In defence of this
sane view he points out that native methods reveal a planned
effort. In other words, from time immemorial the husbandman has
been studying the land and has learned more about it than can be
gathered from work in any chemical laboratory. In all probability
mixed farming with green manuring, scientific rotation of crops,
and composting would go very far to enable Africa to support the
larger population that is being born of peaceful times and is so
likely to increase. There is in the native cultivator a deep-rooted
knowledge mat can be expanded and directed.
The trouble is, of course, that the demand for commercial
crops may lead to the neglect of food crops, as has already
happened on the Gold Coast and in Tanganyika. When
malnutrition results, resistance to disease and capacity to work are
gravely reduced. I think it was Sir John Orr who said that what is
often described as laziness in African native populations is really
lack of adequate food. Then again, Africans are not being trained
in sufficient numbers to become agricultural assistants and to carry
on veterinary work, and we find those serious beginnings of
trouble in decrees to which I have referred, such as the orders
already mentioned that the growers of coffee and tobacco in
Tanganyika must use chemicals,
Compulsory service, though it has never found official favour
in England, has been introduced into French and Belgian Africa
for the growth of commercial crops. The question arises whether
compulsory service imposed by Great Britain for the production of
suitable food for the people themselves would not be justified.
There is no reason why it should not be associated with proper
rates of pay and with a careful enquiry into nutritional needs and
the means that exist for supplying them in various parts of Africa.
Such a system might be preliminary to a great movement for the
betterment of native races and the soil they cultivate. There is a
vast gulf between compulsory labour demanded by a limited
company intent upon dividends and compulsory cultivation for the
community under a system by which men, women and children
concerned would have the first claim upon the food they produced.
What I fear more than anything is that, if the African
administration, taken as a whole, does not consider this food
problem while it has natural soil and a great tradition of
composting at its service, the time may come when the growing
requirements of the people may bring about the practice of forcing
the soil by means of mineral fertilizers. Once this evil work starts,
only a few years will be required to throw the whole of the food
production system of Africa into confusion and to undermine still
further the health of the indigenes.
The African problem has been well set out by Messrs.
Faulkner & Mackie in West African Agriculture (Cambridge
University Press) which I have read with interest and appreciation.
The authors have reached the root of the matter. They point out
that agricultural departments must study local farming and local
conditions, and that it is a grave mistake to press plants from other
countries upon the native in order to increase export trade. The
duty of the Government is to regard as its first and foremost object
the moral and material advancement of the natives of the country,
not merely to stimulate production for export. There is, they note,
a strength of resistance in the native, and sooner or later he rejects
methods forced upon him; the failure of American cotton in South
Nigeria is quoted as an instance. The authors point out that save in
a few well-defined areas land is plentiful and every adult native
has right to a piece of it, so that he is not bound entirely by
questions of profit and loss and if he cultivates his land he can live.
In other words, we are up against an entirely new set of conditions
in countries where wealth is represented by cattle and the money
we worship is despised.
Nothing expected happens in Africa. For example, all West
African soils are deficient in organic matter as well as calcium and
phosphates, but in spite of this they are extremely productive.
There is clearly much in the relation between soil and climate in
tropical countries that we still have to master.
It is interesting to learn that while tropical soils respond to the
smallest dressing of nitrogen and organic manures, their response
to phosphatic manures is very poor. Of course, we have to
remember that in Africa the native farmer seldom uses all his land;
he exhausts a part and allows it to revert to bush so that it may
recover fertility, and this facile method is due to the fact that
landless or unemployed people are unknown. On the other hand
there is danger to be apprehended from the advance of commercial
farming. Many cacao farmers on the Gold Coast do not grow their
own food any more. It is suggested in West African Agriculture
that in Nigeria at least it could only be a question of time before
shortage of land is felt, and meanwhile all the high forest tends to
disappear before the unending demand for grazing. Shifting
cultivation, as it is called, is the easy way of agriculture, but it can
hardly endure and some method of fertilizing is called for. Happily
down to the present, experiments with artificials in Nigeria have
not succeeded, and the authors say it is clear that they can offer no
general solution for the problem of permanent cultivation.
 Experiments in green manuring have been carried out in
Nigeria and the general result has not been very satisfactory,
because it only succeeds when another crop as well as the green
manure one can be grown in the same season. So far as we can see
no attempt at composting has been made, though it is not
unreasonable to suggest that such a system should have a marked
effect upon agricultural production.
It is quite clear that mixed farming can go far to avoid the risk
of forced production, because where farmers cultivate three acres
on the shifting system they can, in Nigeria for example, by keeping
a pair of bullocks and a plough cultivate ten or twelve acres and
obtain sufficient manure from their stock to obtain better yields by
manuring than they obtained by shifting from ground to ground.
Wooden ploughs can be made locally for thirty shillings.
One of the great difficulties has been to persuade the native
farmer to keep his cattle under cover for the sake of manure, but
to-day kraaling under cover, as it is called, is becoming popular. It
will have a marked effect upon composting.
Another matter that awaits scientific investigation is that 10
per cent of the manurial dressing normally used on English farms
is sufficient to maintain fertility in such a country as Nigeria. Not
only that, but the residual effects of such a small dressing are
experienced in the second year. Here we see again that the law of
Europe is not the law of Africa so far as soils are concerned.
At present in Nigeria the level of milk production is 80 to 100
gallons per lactation, but it is believed that selective breeding and
adequate feeding could raise the milk yield to 300 gallons per
lactation and increase the rate of breeding so that even good
milkers might produce a calf every year. Under the nomadic
conditions that prevail over such large territories good milkers
produce a calf about once in two years, simply because the animal
cannot endure the strain of milk production and reproduction under
the conditions that obtain. We know, too, that the worst diseases of
stock, such as the rinderpest, can be kept away by inoculation, so it
is quite clear that the intelligent guidance of the European can be
of enormous advantage to farmers throughout tropical and semi-
tropical Africa. If our administrators will avoid the short cuts that
chemistry offers there is no reason why agricultural conditions
should not respond to the needs sufficiently to meet the claims of a
population that is no longer reduced by preventable epidemic
diseases and constant war.
The more one reads about Africa the more material for
comment is to be found, but I feel that the main points that concern
my theories have been set out and that it is not necessary to
examine more closely the conditions in the Mediterranean
provinces of Africa, along the Nile valley or in the south—parts I
have not dealt with. It is sufficient for my purpose to point out the
enormous development that is going on throughout Africa and the
supreme necessity of regulating it, not only in the interests of the
natives but also of their rulers.
 So far as I am able to learn we are approaching the season of
direct conflict between the old and the new, between peasant
production that goes back to time immemorial and the commercial
methods that have wrought ruin in the New World. There seems
no reason why a plan of production should not be drawn up by
agreement between the Powers with African interests to
standardize methods of production with a view, in the first
instance, to maintaining native health and native increase. It should
not be impossible to establish the principle that throughout every
agricultural area the first call upon the land should be for crops
that will maintain the inhabitants in health and allow for the rapid
increase of population that is bound to come. At the same time if
the enquiry into the qualitative as well as the quantitative effect of
artificial fertilizers can be carried out and the results are what so
many of us expect, then there will be ample time to save Africa
from the development of malnutrition, which is perhaps already
the greatest native danger. Without underrating the efforts to
improve the health of man and beast and to raise the standard of
living in all directions I must insist once again that without a sane
method of food production all this vast outlay of goodwill, time,
and money must prove comparatively ineffective.
CHAPTER IX Health and Deficiency Diseases
THAT THE THINKING SECTION of the community is deeply concerned
with the spread of deficiency diseases is a fact that needs no
insistence.
The record that can be built up from the publishers' lists shows
that all manner of explanations are being put forward to explain a
state of things that must cause alarm in any country, and more
particularly in Great Britain, which bears so large a burden of
responsibility throughout the world.
It is significant that only two years ago Mr. Duff Cooper, who
was then First Lord of the Admiralty, said that if it were possible
to take all the young men who volunteer for the Services there
would be no recruiting problem, but “more than 50 per cent have
to be turned away because they are physically unfit".
Another point to notice is that during the last twelve years the
drug bill of the National Insurance funds had almost doubled. In an
extremely able study—Health of the Nation and Deficiency
Diseases (Ballière, Tindall & Cox)—Dr. John Maberly remarks
that the typical Englishman is no longer represented by the John
Bull of Punch, but much more correctly by the Little Man with
spectacles, spats and umbrella of Strube. It would be hard to find a
sentence that sets out a national crisis in words so few and so
pointed, and if you would seek to find if they are exaggerated or
not, go in turn to the termini that bring factory workers from the
suburbs to the manufacturing centres.
Dr. Maberly makes a spirited effort to lay responsibility for the
present state of things at the doors of millers who, he says, have
discovered a method of mutilating wheat by which they can sell
one portion containing essential vitamins and some of the
important minerals and proteins as patent poultry foods and supply
the residue to human beings for the purpose of making bread; he
refers to “powerful financial groups that have now obtained an
almost complete stranglehold on the processes of milling or, more
correctly speaking, the mutilation of wheat". He refers to the
“deadly white bread" of to-day.
There is much to be said for his contention. Those who have
been through a modern flour mill and watched the grain broken up
and separated until the central portion, or endosperm, is all that is
left for the man in the street to eat will realize what the nation must
suffer in loss of nutriment. Since it is agreed that wheat is an
almost complete food in a concentrated form, if bread were
honestly made it should suffice with butter, milk and cheese to
keep men, women and children in perfect health.
We may read that at the siege of Kut in 1916, British troops
fed on white flour, biscuits and fresh horseflesh developed beri-
beri, while the Indian troops, who ate barley and preparations of
whole-wheat grain, remained healthy.
In Germany, in spite of greater difficulties in solving the food
problem, the milling of white flour is supervised by the
Government and the content regulated; the national health may not
suffer that the pockets of millers may be replenished.
It is clear at least that, as a contributory cause to deficiency
diseases, our milling methods have much to answer for, because
the greatest increase in health troubles dates from the time when
the fashion of producing stone-ground flour passed and roller mills
came into common use.
Dr. Maberly claimed to find cases of beri-beri in England and
attributes heart trouble in elderly patients to a deficiency of
vitamin B. He even attributes the use of rouge and lipsticks to the
outward and visible signs of anaemia, and says that women would
not use so much if they had more copper and iron in their white
bread. Later, he says, "the millers sow the seeds and the surgeons
reap the crop ". These be bitter words; can they be denied?
The one point on which I must join issue with Dr. Maberly,
while admitting the great interest in his statement and the value of
his critical comments on the fashion in which the State allows the
public to be wronged and cheated in the interests of business, is a
vital one. I cannot agree that wholemeal bread from denatured soil
would cure the evils that he describes, even though I am quite
prepared to admit that treatment of the wheat kernel by the miller
is a considerable contributory factor to universal illness and can
undoubtedly account in part for the high percentage of rejections
for the Services. Like so many commentators on present evils he
has gone no more than part of the way.
But, on page 54 of his book, Dr. Maberly makes a very serious
admission. He says: “the millers rob our cereals of some of their
most precious and essential elements, the germ and the cortical
layers, and give them to the cattle and poultry ". Now, if the whole
wheat were of the quality that Dr. Maberly suggests, the cattle and
poultry would at least get the benefit of this selective milling
while, in point of fact, we know the diseases in the poultry-yard
and pasture were never so many or so serious as they are to-day.
This, I suggest, gives the necessary support to the theory I have
advanced that food grown on denatured soil cannot support any
population, whether man, beast or bird, in proper health.
In the first place, we must have a healthy soil. Given that we
can have a healthy grain and then it might indeed be well to see
that the human beings who do not happen to be millers are allowed
to benefit by it. Their claims are at least as great as those of pigs
and poultry.
CHAPTER X The World Crisis
A VIEWPOINT
WE ARE APT TO RESTRAIN our thoughts, to canalize them, so to speak,
so that they may not stray to the right or to the left, lest they enter
the country of the unfamiliar and unexpected. This is the easy and
familiar way of life. We use our brains if we must. But I think that
when times are quite abnormal, when life has far less than its
normal measures of security and strange forces of evil are abroad
in the world, we should look all round us for explanations, since
every effect must have a cause and we should not grudge the
mental effort.
At the beginning of the present century signs of progress were
everywhere evident. The conscience of the world could be
profoundly stirred by the troubles of ‘the underdog '. The
massacres of Armenians by the Kurdish hordes of Abdul Hamid II
had not only shocked the conscience of Europe, but both Great
Britain and France had sought to limit them, and with some
success. There was a force of public opinion to which Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman's government responded when it went so far
as to make amends for the South African War and give back
freedom to a conquered country. The need for social services had
been recognized; Old Age Pensions came to the help of the
helpless; our penal code was administered with growing humanity;
in all directions freedom was enlarging her boundaries. But side by
side with efforts to bring the Christian ideal into the life and
service of the State, men were working against Nature, even
though they knew it not. Slowly but surely they were altering
conditions of life in the soil. Foods lacking essential nutritive
elements were being produced in bulk by the aid of artificial
fertilizers, now coming into their stride; wheat was being stripped
of the greater part of its food value by an elaborately devised
milling process which produced a comparatively worthless
bleached loaf for the rank and file of the people, while the germ
and the mineral values were extracted for sale at special prices,
sometimes under fancy names and by the aid of large
advertisement, as though food might be rightly divorced from
nourishment. While the quality of the soil deteriorated under the
influence of inorganic fertilizers, the strength of the dose was
increased, and, in spite of this, yields tended to decline. In some
parts of the world contempt for the proper rules of husbandry led
to exploiting the fertility reserves in the soil. Then came dust
storms, erosion, and the passing of un-calculated millions of tons
of fertile earth into the depth of the sea. It was in a way a foretaste
of the plagues of Egypt, but man in his haste and ignorance
continued to squander his inheritance.
If you wish to consider the result compare, if only in the
mind's eye, the sturdy, eupeptic, upstanding, hearty farmer and
farm-worker on a mixed farm with his opposite number in a city
factory. Now, my contention is that if you lower the stamina of
men and women who in any circumstances are called upon to work
for long hours in unfavourable conditions for a scanty wage, you
reduce their capacity to think for themselves, you take away their
interest in their surroundings. They lose the power of independent
thought and react violently to propaganda. They are at the mercy
of the skilled dictator, the unscrupulous demagogue, the man who
is bent on the pursuit of power. Sane, well-nourished, tranquil
people can leave him to his ravings, but the overworked and
under-nourished are looking for a way out, and if they can find
one, even in a fairy story, they will believe it. The dictator can
always direct their grievances along the lines that will serve his
plans. So evil spreads and wars come, and the prospects of
humanity are blighted for a generation or more.
It may be that the whole root of the trouble is not so much
original sin as ignorance of, or indifference to, Nature's laws. The
penalty is, perhaps, far in excess of the crime, but while this we
may think so, it is not for us to say it. If man has laid violent hands
on the Universe, altering the system that has been devised for it by
a Power we cannot attempt to estimate or to understand, how do
we know how far or how gravely we offend? Or what form the
penalty will take ?
Everybody knows that Mother Earth is sick, that her children
are in revolt, that she is wasting her material wealth at a prodigious
pace. Is it unreasonable to believe that earth sickness may assail
the minds as well as the bodies of men ? We are and have been
deliberately misusing the soil of which we are no more than
tenants for life; we have shown pride instead of humility, and we
have taken up the attitude that chemistry, in its fullest aspect, holds
all the keys of creation and can open all the doors of the mysteries
on this side of death. The mysteries of life and death, health and
sickness are supposed to be in the keeping of men of science.
Hence, if we apply a formula to drug the earth, we feel assured that
it must be a safe and reasonable thing to do, even though we know
that stimulating drugs applied to man in order to force him out of
his stride are nothing less than deadly. People forget that all life is
one life, varying only in manifestation; they ignore the possibility
that there may be laws of universal application and that their
violation may react violently upon the physical world.
I know that my suggestion of an explanation of the world
crisis may seem a little fantastic to some, but that does not
invalidate it. All the world is turning to examine its own strange
disorders of mind and body, looking in all directions to find a clue.
I put forward the definite suggestion that the clue may be found in
the food we all eat, in the widespread poisoning of our supplies by
poisonous minerals, whether in the raw state or as washes and
sprays, whether scattered over the land or worked by mechanical
devices on fruit-trees and garden crops, whether caught up in our
food or carried by the rain from the poisoned earth to the waters of
our springs.
 I go so far as to claim that this charge—for which I have been
collecting evidence for years past—should be examined by
agricultural experts, and that they should make a report which will
confirm or deny, or lead to the old Scottish verdict of 'not proven'.
Nobody would rejoice more than I if expert examination
would prove me wrong, for I would far rather be wrong than right;
the menace of a terrible danger would have been removed and we
could go about our lawful occasions with a greater peace of mind
and ease of body. If the nations of the world and the livestock of
the world, large and small, together with the fruit and vegetables,
are not living healthily, what can limit the consequences? Who can
say what may happen to nations that are fed on food from which
the nutritive elements have been extracted.
In the Laws of the Manu we may read: "When there is too
much evil-doing on the earth, the aura of the earth is poisoned and
reacts in floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, explosions and
extremes of heat and cold." Terribly old-fashioned, this warning,
written long before the Christian era, but in spite of this not
altogether lacking in significance as the twentieth century
approaches its half-way house.
I cannot help feeling that a lack of humility, a lack of response
to the authority that rules our lives, is responsible for all our
troubles. We have ignored everything that cannot make direct
appeal to our senses. Is it not possible that if we will make peace
with the soil we may be able to make a start in the work of setting
civilization's house in order? Is not the attempt worth while?
CHAPTER XI The Ancient Wisdom and the Modern Need
THERE IS IN ENGLAND an ancient wisdom. It is not a home product, nor
is it limited to the British Isles. I have met the like in the Middle
and Far East, and it has impressed upon me the truth of Dr.
Steiner's famous statement that there was a time when the stars
talked with men. I do not wish to deal with foreign lands in a book
written for my fellow-countrymen, even though they have taken so
many realms to be their province; it seems better to refer to matters
that all may discover for themselves in the real rural England. I
mean, of course, those parts into which urban industries have not
strayed and where the countrymen have lived, often generation
after generation, in the same cottage for three or four hundred
years, serving the same fields, following the same practices and in
touch with beliefs we have forgotten or foregone. The fact that
these practices and beliefs have been followed down the years is
the best possible testimony to their worth.
Let me name just three counties of the kind I have in mind—
Suffolk, Wiltshire, and Dorset. Here, if you can gain the
confidence of the country-folk, you will find that they rely upon
the teachings of the old-time herbalists whom they do not even
know by name—Gerarde, Culpeper, and the rest. These men
believed and taught that certain plants were responsive to planetary
influences and even derived their healing powers from them, and
the old housewives made their ointments, their possets, their
electuaries (with honey as the sweetening ingredient) with as much
confidence as the French village housewife makes her herb tea.
Even our own doctors use an astronomical sign on their
prescriptions to this day—an unregarded piece of evidence of the
strength of the old beliefs.
The old countryman of centuries ago gardened by the moon;
his descendants do so to-day, though they are reluctant in an age of
scepticism to speak freely of their practices. The only difference
between those times and ours is that of old everybody took the
facts for granted and to-day nobody refers to them, because of the
unwholesome fear of being thought superstitious.
Madame Kolisko who, until recently, was working in an
experimental laboratory at Bray, near Maidenhead, has
demonstrated the effect of moon planting, and shown by means of
a series of photographs how the best moment for planting the
vegetables that ripen above the ground is just before the time when
the moon is at the full. She has even demonstrated this in public
halls with lantern slides, but the countryman needed no
demonstration; he knew. His father taught him, and the teaching
went back through the years. It has taken many forms. We have
met a farm-worker (of the days when the cottager was allowed to
keep a pig in his garden), who would not kill his pig when the
moon was waning, being convinced that if he did so the carcass
would not keep well. Incidentally, you may find old and
experienced woodmen who look not only to the season of the year
but to the quarter of the moon for the right moment for felling
timber; they will not cut on a rising moon, but only when the sap
declines with the waning period.
“Superstition," says the modern who believes, in the innocence
of his heart, that all true knowledge is to be found in up-to-date
text-books and that anything not to be found in them is not
knowledge at all. The old countryman had no information about
humus and bacteria, but he understood how to keep up the rotation
of crops on the patch of land he cultivated and, so far as I have
been able to discover, he always raised fine vegetables and good
bush fruit; perhaps the stress of competition at the annual village
show may have provided a healthy stimulus. His standard fruit
trees were often poor; he could not tend them with an equal
facility, but whatever their outward appearance and whatever
blemishes on the fruit itself, the crop was generally a heavy one
and served his home needs.
In 1938, the year when the apple crop failed in the commercial
orchards that receive half a dozen poisonous dressings or even
more annually, I noted that the trees in cottage gardens (not judged
to be worth poisoning!) were producing more fruit than the rest.
One cannot, perhaps, acquit Nature of a charge of disrespect for
chemists, but the fact remains. There was a marked superiority, so
far as yield went, in the cottage garden, though that, too, had
suffered badly from the May frosts of the year.
The farm-worker has handled artificials; he has helped to steep
the wheat in poison before it is put in the drill; but how often will
you hear of him speak of all these mixtures with a suspicion of
hostility that is not mere prejudice? How often will he tell of
record crops raised on the same land before the chemist had
learned to stray from his proper boundaries? How often will he
remark that even artificials are “not what they were" ?
If you and those who came before you have been tending the
fields from the old days of strip farming, is there not an
unexpressed inherent knowledge that guides the steady hand, the
slow-working brain? Is it not possible that this quite modern
method of stimulating the soil may be a dangerous experiment that
must in the end be abandoned? I am content if I can carry my
readers to that point of 'honest doubt' which has been proclaimed
superior to half the creeds. I am not overlooking the enormous
advantages that have accrued to agriculture from the work of the
industrious geneticist; my contention is that we have gone too far
and too fast, that we have applied the commercial method to land
that was doing its appointed work thousands of years before water
had been resolved into its elements, or the importance of nitrogen
as a fertilizer had been discovered.
My complaint is that we have lost our respect for life, life in
the soil, life in the cereal and vegetable, life on the poultry farm,
pig farm, cow-yard and feeding-pens; we don't bother about life
except to extract the last ounce of profit from it; we are behaving
to the land and the life forces it produces and nourishes as the mill
owners behaved to the children who worked in the mills a hundred
years ago. Factory Acts were the result of this disastrous
inhumanity; I say we want a Field Act, a series of Field Acts, as
powerful to protect other forms of life as our Factory Acts are to-
day. I can well believe that when protection for children and others
was first proposed it roused a certain opposition. Men and women,
it was said, had a right to do what they liked with their own, and
that right must not be taken away at the bidding of busybodies.
Such an idea was part of the times. So now a Field Act, if someone
will have the courage to introduce it, would raise indignant
protests, to say nothing of the laughter that has been compared
with the “crackling of thorns under a pot ". But only, I venture to
think, for a little while if the case were presented with due
emphasis and understanding, as an honest effort to protect
universal property. Following indignation or amusement would
come reflection, and when that stage was reached the success of
the endeavour would be assured. A great world need would be
recognized and people would begin to ask why nobody had
thought of it before. Then the new idea would slowly towards
acceptance, while men of science, aided by practical farmers,
decided the point at which the first Field Act should become
operative.
I want to see the ancient wisdom of the husbandman
examined, revised if you please, in the light of modern knowledge,
and then, cleared of accretions, brought back into common use for
the common weal.
Even to-day there are herbalists who, relying on teachings
many centuries old, are using plants not mentioned in the British
Pharmacopoeia, though they are known to homeopathists who are
effecting notable cures with them. I am not suggesting for a
moment that herbalists are better informed than doctors; all I
suggest is that they have a certain body of knowledge and that it
should be examined and sifted to discover its association with
astrology and how far it is true that the powers of certain plants
vary with the sun's movements.
Does it follow that because these questions are not studied by
scientists to-day that such a field of knowledge would not be worth
exploration ? Is it not possible that, if we can establish the
influence of planetary or cosmic forces upon plant life, we should
learn more about nutritional values, and through that knowledge
acquire some useful indications of the natural laws that maintain
fertility in the soil and life in man ? Who, save those prepared to
deny that we have any more to learn, can oppose this simple
contention?
Just now we need a few men with the authority of Sir Oliver
Lodge, Sir William Crookes and Sir William Barrett to come
forward and steer the good ship Scientific Discovery into
uncharted seas. I may not be here to see it sail, but that it will set
out I am well assured, and that it will come back with a rich cargo
I cannot doubt.
 Finally, I would like to stress the point, if stress be called for,
that my suggestion for a Field Act is not in any way a political
proposition. Healthy food production has nothing to do with
politics; it is a national and international policy that appeals to men
and women of every shade of political colour from deepest blue to
most violent crimson. One and all need pure food from natural soil
if they are to carry on. The millennium they desire to bring about
will be worth nothing at all to them or to their children if their
energies are to be sapped in an unending struggle against the
deficiency diseases that are the price we pay for the misuse of the
soil and consequent deterioration of its products, both animal and
vegetable.
It is a thousand pities that we do not stop sometimes to
remember that we, too, are a product of the soil so far as our
physical body is concerned and that the insidious chemicals that
rob animal and vegetable of their stamina do the same to us when
we eat our bread and our meat, our fruit and our vegetables. I
repeat—all life is one life, varying only in manifestation, and to-
day all those manifestations are crying for first aid.
CHAPTER XII A Personal Belief
THIS CHAPTER IS VERY DIFFICULT to write because I, a plain common-
sense citizen who has kept his feet on the ground all the years of
his life—and they are many—have to appeal to my fellow-citizens
to open their eyes more widely than they have done before and to
consider possibilities that hitherto have found no place in their
outlook.
Let me begin by summing-up the general situation even at the
risk of recapitulation. We have the finest health services which
science can devise or money provide. They are not so widespread
as they might be, or will be, but they do cover an immense amount
of ground with an efficiency which would be hard to over-praise.
By night and day men of science are working to trace diseases to
their source, and if some of us resent the methods employed and
believe that vivisection cannot be condoned in any circumstances,
there is still no room to doubt that those who conduct experiments
are inspired by the high purpose of freeing humanity from the
horrible sufferings that still beset it.
So far as one can tell, the efforts to control disease have their
definite effect in checking a tide that cannot be altogether
controlled. We have removed certain diseases from our midst, or if
we have not entirely removed them they have been so treated as to
be almost innocuous. Typhus, smallpox, scarlet fever are of
comparatively rare occurrence. We are learning to understand
more about lung diseases and are holding tuberculosis in check,
largely by the aid of nutritive food, but, as I have said before, a
great part of the people of this world are sick and a still greater
part is not in perfect health. In fact, the man who can say: “I have
never known a day's illness" is not only rare, but is becoming rarer,
while the number of people who have had to turn to the aid of
surgery is really enormous.
Now, it is an acknowledged fact that good health should be the
heritage of mankind and that some of the least civilized nations of
the world enjoy it to an extent unknown to us. I have quoted in
earlier works the case of the Hunza people who live in the high
Himalayas near Afghanistan. Here we find people who do not
know the meaning of disease, who have gone from generation to
generation without sickness, and when we come to enquire into the
cause we find that they live open-air lives and eat natural food that
cannot be contaminated, because it is raised on soil that stands far
beyond the reach of mineral fertilizers or manufacturers; their
physique is splendid and their limited life, limited in the sense of
mental development, is a perfectly happy one.
Down to a generation or two ago the Maoris of New Zealand
enjoyed similar good fortune. They lived on simple, natural food
and were remarkable for their physique and their health. The
Hunzas, by the way, live entirely on whole cereals, vegetables and
fruit, with soured milk, butter, sun-dried fruit and occasional goats'
meat. The Maoris had a very similar diet in the good old days, but
since they have taken to the food of the Europeans their health and
their physique alike have declined.
Now if we contrast the health of what we are pleased to call
savage people, living on a natural diet, with the health of highly
civilized populations living on food produced in the first instance
on over-stimulated soil and, after that, passed through processes
designed, in part at least, to remove some of the nutriment, we do
get an indication of where the trouble lies, but it is by no means a
complete indication. We must follow it up.
What we have to consider is how far we can go to discover the
source of trouble; the indications, though they can be found, are
not to be detected easily. Gradually scientists, though they are not
engaged in solving this particular problem, have helped to point
out the cause of the trouble, and when we get any indication we
begin to see that it is related in some fashion or another to
knowledge that has been lost and recovered. It was lost because it
belonged to civilized nations that have left no trace; it has been
recovered because men retrace the steps their forefathers trod.
For example, if we turn to the question of humus, we find that
its properties were known, however vaguely, for two or three
centuries before the dawn of Christianity, and if we turn to the
seasons of planting we can rediscover for ourselves beliefs that
were first stated by astrologers, those early men of science whose
knowledge we have learned to laugh at and deride, though with
what justification it would be hard to state. Happily, in the pursuit
of their researches, the great scientists of to-day do not stop to
consider prejudice. Sir James Jeans, one of our leading physicists,
has told us much of immense moment about the cosmic dust that
fills our atmosphere and how the rain brings with it in infinitesimal
quantities elements essential to plant life, while the sun, the hail,
and even the dew contribute their mineral quota. Modern
scientists, being men above suspicion and motive, only concerned
with what they can prove, tell us that the cosmic dust which
encompasses the earth is absorbed by all that lives. They are
beginning to admit the existence of forces radiating from the
planetary system, but I cannot find any disposition to take the
larger view that this knowledge can be turned to real and
permanent value for us. What we need is a recognition that life and
growth are the product of certain forces working in harmony, and
that if we interfere with these forces we cannot know what we are
doing, and we are likely to throw that life and growth into a state
of discord. This is what has been happening for the past half
century at least, while the people of the earth have been busy
exploiting its resources and using up capital instead of interest.
If I am right, and in all modesty I must confess to a complete
conviction, the ill-health we suffer from in this country is due less
to insufficient supplies than to vitiated food. It is well known that a
man can live on comparatively short rations if the food be of the
best, while if the material that serves his table has been de-
vitalized, no amount of it will keep him in health. What I feel we
need is an appeal to cosmologists to bring home in terms that
cannot be misunderstood the essential importance of the forces that
keep this planet in working order, and the extreme danger of
interfering with the natural processes of Mother Earth. When we
eat strange foods that we cannot digest we suffer from immediate
ailments. How can we suppose that we can feed Mother Earth with
indigestible mineral fertilizers and expect her to yield her fruits, or,
even if she does yield them under pressure, that they will have a
normal nourishment content? I think if the cosmologists would
make these facts clear to the general public we should have
travelled no small way on the road to a better understanding of the
problems of nutrition.
In the past year those who are seeking for a saner national
outlook on food production problems will have been encouraged
by the decision of the late Minister of Agriculture to advocate the
use of lime and basic slag. He has not suggested that farmers
should indulge in the crude chemicals that are in my opinion the
source and origin of so many of our troubles, and for this we must
needs be grateful to him. At the same time there is more to be
done, and no man is in a better position to do it than he. The new
Minister can and probably will consider the possibilities of
supplying the farmers with organic fertilizers in place of the
inorganics.
I cannot help thinking it is good that the war has made some
familiar poisons scarce and dear, but it is bad that our farmers
should not have an alternative choice unless they can produce the
right compost in the right quantities, or unless we can make
available the natural deposits of organic materials, such as
Seychelles and North African phosphates, together with animal
waste and refuse considered apart from manure. The farmers will
find extreme difficulty in carrying on, and it seems to me that there
is no task of greater importance before those who direct food
production within the Empire than that of guiding them along a
safe road. I feel that every step should be taken to increase
available compost and an endeavour should be made to place
whatever may be available within the reach of the farmer. At the
same time he cannot be reminded too often that all creation is
working for him, that the influences that we call cosmic will
always turn to the best account so much of the land as has not been
poisoned by artificial fertilizers. All through the day and all
through the night, and all through the months and all through the
years, cosmic influences are stimulating natural soil and enabling
myriads of invisible workers —the soil bacteria—to labour in the
making of humus on man's behalf. It follows then that the problem
before the farmer is to face the difficult transition period in which
he must move from unsound to sound methods of production. He
cannot do this unaided, and it would be well if those who have
studied cosmology would set out in terms within the grasp of
simple men the forces that emanate from the cosmos and are
concerned with enabling our few inches of cultivable soil to
produce healthy food for man and beast. I feel that the farmer has
but to know in order to act, for, after all, self-preservation is the
first law of all our lives. "All that man hath will he give for his
life", and a farmer's land is his life.
Going further, I would like a definite enquiry into the truths of
astrology so far as they affect plant growth. In the jargon of the old
astrologers, we were told time and again that certain plants were
under the influence of certain planets. Modern scientific workers
like Dr. Steiner did not hesitate to say that the effect of treatment
of the soil depended in part on the position of the sun, and he
would even go so far as to name the sign of the Zodiac in which
certain operations might be carried on with the greatest advantage.
Call this spiritual science, or ancient wisdom, or any other
name you please, but do at least believe that there may be
something very considerable in it that it is well to learn, to ponder
and, if possible, to understand. The simpler truths can be put to the
test. For example, you can try planting in accordance with the
moon's phases; you can feed the emasculated white flour that
serves the great majority of our people to-day and test its effect
upon the weight and health of animals. Over a term you could feed
one set of people on food from land that has never been contam-
inated and another set on food bought at random from the butcher,
the baker, and the grocer, and you could compare the results in the
matter of their health. You might be able to enquire into the
statistics of animal diseases on land that is dressed with minerals
and on land that is dressed with farm manure and compost. All
these things would take time, but it would be time well spent
because it would very reasonably encourage people to consider
this question of lost knowledge and to decide for themselves
whether it would be well to take steps for its rediscovery. No one
of us can read the statistics of devastating disease or mark the
complete inability of science to deal with some of the latter-day
deficiency diseases without realizing that the cause of this trouble
must lie in some direction that has hitherto escaped notice.
I am no scientist, I am no botanist, but I have been watching
the varied manifestations of life attentively and with reverence for
very many years, and I have noted the variety of plant growth in
many parts of the world. Underneath all the manifestations of
growth I seem to see a certain law at work.
As we know, there are plants that thrive in air very far
removed from soil. Some grow in ponds and streams, and there are
weed herbs that appear in natural, untreated soil. I believe that
these three classes depend for life, growth and maintenance on the
cosmic forces that surround the earth and on the cosmic dust that
brings them certain sustaining material which we cannot see. If I
am right their life history is quite distinct from that of the food
plants whose roots grow in cultivated and fertilized soil. Soil has
no part to play in the life of the first three classes. Their substances
and forces are derived from the atmosphere and are borne on the
life-giving air that is the common gift to man and plant.
 So soon as we grasp this simple truth we come into touch with
some of Nature's laws we have not yet fathomed, and we begin to
glimpse the profound, vital, symbiotic association between soil,
plant, and cosmos. Where the plants growing in the soil are
concerned they demand a living soil, full of humus with the correct
living organic manures that are in truth the natural residues of
animals and plants once living and now contributing to life other
than their own. The student may become aware of the curious
procession of life and death that is the expression of a divine law.
As an agriculturist you are not called upon for any special action to
aid Nature's work; all you have to do is to refrain from hindering
the accomplishment of its own great purpose. In other words,
because the earth is a living substance you must feed it only with
organic fertilizers. Much of what you employ has been living and
is now engaged in making fresh life, because the pulse or rhythm
of Nature may be expressed as leading from life to death and death
to life. Just as air and water plants receive the force they need
without the help of earth, so other plants take their proportion of
life from the earth so long as it is treated according to Nature's
way. We have to remember that the plant, the earth, and the
cosmos are of divine and not of human origin, and that man has no
power to create or control laws for them. It follows that the only
way in which food can be raised to human advantage is in strict
accordance with Nature's laws. It has been ascertained that where
those pasture and crop plants are concerned which have their
anchorage in the soil and absorb such food as is contained in the
residues of animal and plant substances that have completed their
life cycle, the proportion of mineral matter does not exceed 6 per
cent.
It is obvious that if we take the living fertility from the soil for
the sake of our farming operations we must return that fertility in
organic manurial substances in order that farming operations may
be continued. The substances must be organic so that they may
respond to plant needs and not merely to chemical formulae,
because no such formulae can possibly be complete.
Now, of agricultural scientists we have enough and to spare
while they continue along their present narrow lines of
investigation, but there is an enormous piece of work before them
if they will only expand their outlook and undertake to meet the
need of the hour. I would like to set out the task I regard as vital:

1. They should do something to understand and to explain to

simple farm folk the parts played in food production by the earth
and the cosmos, the difference between forces and substances and
the effect of both upon plant life and growth. At present most of us
know much or little about substances, and little or nothing about
forces.
2. They should enquire into the ascertained effect of
administering plant stimulants in the form of artificial manures and
the possible or probable results of continuing along this dangerous
road.
3. They should study the best method of agriculture and the
best use of organic substances to replace dead synthetic manures,
restore lost fertility to the soil and enable the farmer to produce
natural healthy food plants for man and beast at a reasonable profit
to himself. They should enquire into the value of composts and the
extent to which these can be made available.
4. They should enquire into the value or lack of value of all
advertised plant stimulants and advise the public. They must reach
the simple farmer and tell him, in a fashion he can understand,
something of the danger of the methods that have been practised of
late years. I suggest that the only way in which the work to be
done can be followed out is along the lines of abandoning the
materialistic aspect, recognizing the land as something that is
living its own life, fulfilling its own part in a divinely ordained
programme, and insisting in its own silent fashion upon the
observance of many laws of which at the present stage of our
evolution we know little. I want them to take as their goal the
development of national health through the production of healthy
food. It is for them to bring the cosmos home to the farmer and
their task will be lightened if they will undertake it with real
determination, guided by the fact that there is a traditional
husbandry that has never been lost. When the world was young
farmers were in touch with Nature and they can recover the lost
touch if they are set upon the right lines.

I would like our scientists to consider these propositions:

(a) Husbandry in all its activities is the medium through

which creation works to renew and maintain life. There is life in
the soil, life in the plant, life in the animals, and that life is
constantly rising to full expression, declining, and renewing itself.
(b) We can only reap what we sow. We create our own
success or failure in accordance with our action in obeying or
resisting Nature. She will do all that we require if we will play our
part, but if we bring clumsy hands to interfere with her delicate
mechanism in the vain idea that we can improve it by so doing,
then we must prepare to face disaster. In fact, we have committed
the offence and we are paying the penalty to-day, as can be seen
by the enormous increase in the world's infertile soil and the grave
spread of deficiency diseases. We of the British Empire have a
vast responsibility in this regard, because we control so much of
the world's surface and direct the lives of so many of the world's
backward peoples. The only way we can fulfil our duties is by
developing a new approach to the land which maintains us all.
(c) We have to realize that it will not suffice to obey a part of
Nature's ordinances and to neglect what does not appeal to us. We
must do all that is required before we can hope for the maximum
of health-giving food upon which human progress depends. In
other words, the soil must have its full quota of living organisms
before cosmic influences can operate to the full, and if we fail in
this regard we are inviting a spread of the ill-health that is already
baffling so many trained minds in all civilized countries. I would
go even further than this. I would suggest, and I invite all thinking
men to consider the possibility, that the present chaotic condition
of the world at large is a reflection of the chaotic condition of the
soil that supports us. It is not by dismissing these suggestions as
fantastic that they can be disposed of. The influence of food upon
those who eat it is not a theory but a fact.

While the experiences of Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William

Crookes, and Sir William Barrett, all distinguished members of the
Royal Society, so soon as they ventured to travel outside the realm
of established thought and custom may have been unpleasant, they
were by no means new. Sir Joseph Lister, who introduced
antiseptic surgery at a time when the great hospitals were death-
traps, was denounced by all the orthodox practitioners. So, too,
was his master, Pasteur, who had to face unending persecution
through long years. Those who are established in the high places
of science guard the approaches with a devotion and even savagery
that the three-headed Cerberus might have envied. There is much
encouragement in this. When the leaders of agricultural thought,
many of them men of high scientific attainment, refuse careful
consideration to the theories of Rudolf Steiner, theories that some
of us have proved in actual practice, we can console ourselves with
the thought of the great fight that leading surgeons made to
preserve gangrene in the surgical wards after Lister had shown
them how to remove it. They did not lack regard for their fellow-
men, but they hated innovation; they resented new ideas; they were
firmly wedded to tradition. The idea of a Scottish practitioner
teaching London, Paris, and New York their business was
intolerable to leading surgeons. It is not even necessary to go back
so far as I have gone, because so recently as twenty years ago
physicians could be found who scoffed at the vitamin theory and
regarded it as fantastic. As it has been in the past so it will be in
the future, but in the long run truth prevails, because the Universe
is founded on truth and false ideas cannot prevail for long so soon
as even one man of great intelligence has discovered their falsity.
I repeat—for repetition is justifiable here—there can be no
occasion to take the scepticism of authority too seriously. We may
remember that when anaesthetics were first used as an aid to
women in labour, pious people objected to their use because the
Bible says "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children". When
Pasteur repudiated the idea of spontaneous generation he was
denounced by the leaders of science; when he was conducting his
inoculation for rabies he aroused the bitterest opposition. It is
common knowledge that leading men of science said the telephone
was a toy with very limited range. I believe it was Professor J. B.
Haldane who revealed the fact that a few years before 1914 our
War Office held that the aeroplane had no war potential. Lord
Bledisloe has set on record that since the war great doctors assured
him that there was nothing in the vitamin theory and even such a
simple gift as water-finding has been denounced as imposition. In
view of these facts, and they might be multiplied, have we any
occasion to be disturbed by the denunciation of the supporters of
chemical fertilizers ? Is not history repeating herself ? Will not
new ideas or even the turning back to old and sound ones always
be unpopular?
I have set out my beliefs; I do not apologize for them, nor have
they stood in the way of successful farming on practical lines.
 SECTION II
THE HEALTH OF THE LAND
CHAPTER I Cosmic Rays and Food Production
FROM THE OUTER UNIVERSE, whose constituents have been in part
revealed to us during the present century, a stream of invisible
forces pours down upon the earth. In a way these are tangible, but
they do not manifest themselves to our limited senses.
We are not isolated in space as we were taught to believe. The
stars, the planets, and the sun live in a certain relation to us and the
discovery of the relationship, which is associated with growth
forces and is of recent date, has developed by leaps and bounds in
the past four decades. For me this fact has a special interest,
because it confirms my intuitional belief that we farmers in the
pursuit of our task of feeding our fellow-creatures are sustained by
forces as much as by substances, and that in the work of food
production on which the world depends they are ceaselessly active
and demand our most respectful consideration. I am merely
attempting in this chapter to give a very brief and shadowy outline
of a story of which only the first chapters have been written, and I
know that even these may be heavily revised and that I must set
down facts without grasping their full implications. Another
generation will enjoy a clearer view and a larger knowledge, but
enough can be seen already to show us that we are on the eve of
seeing far more than those who preceded us and left records within
our reach. I am not so presumptuous as to overlook the possibility
that the world has won and lost knowledge. Who to-day could set
the pyramids in the Egyptian desert as the Pharaohs did? Who
taught the lost secret of making bronze malleable ?
The cosmic rays have been recognized for about forty years.
The name was given to them by American scientists, the English
calling them 'penetrating' rays and the Germans ‘ultra' rays, but it
is agreed now that they are of cosmic origin. Mr. C. T. R. Wilson,
one of the pioneers of this investigation, thought that electrical
conductivity might be due to radiation from outside the earth. Lord
Rutherford and Mr. Cooke followed.
In 1903 they wrote of certain experiments: “these results show
that about 30 per cent of the ionization inside a closed vessel is due
to external radiation of great penetrative powers" Messrs.
McLennan and Burton wrote at the same time that "it is evident
that the ordinary air of a room is traversed by an exceedingly
penetrative radiation". Two other investigators, Compton and
Dauvillier, came to the conclusion that the sun is the source of
these rays.
The existence of very penetrating radiators in the air was
demonstrated by measuring the electrical conductivity of air
caused by them, but the radiation was presumed to derive from
proximate sources. There is at least reason to believe that these
rays have a very definite action upon growth, that they bear with
them in the finest imaginable state of dispersion many valuable
chemicals that plant life cannot receive in grosser form.
Following the pioneers, the meteorologists were at work, and
their outlook was, of course, unlimited in scope since they
interpreted phenomena through agents from afar.
In 1906, W. O. Richardson suggested that ionizing radiations
come from the air. Sir James Jeans says that cosmic radiation has
its origin in outer spaces and falls on the earth in large quantities.
1909 witnessed the balloon ascents of Gockel and learned of
the sensitive ionization chamber of Wieff.
Thus Wieff, Kolhoerster, Birkeland, and Millikan were
pursuing their investigations before the Great War, when work was
suspended. In 1922 the free balloons of Millikan showed that the
intensity of these mysterious rays increased with the light. In 1923
Kolhoerster, after further experiments, wrote that “one inclines
more and more to the view that the penetrating rays are a
phenomenon originating in the cosmos".
Then the question was studied by physicists in North America,
Germany, Russia, and Bolivia and, later on, a voyage from Peru to
Los Angeles. It was ascertained that the rays come to the earth
with an equal intensity in all directions. The universe appeared to
the investigators to be uniformly lighted with cosmic rays from
which both beams and shadows were absent. Millikan came to the
conclusion that the rays play a part in atom building. Professor
Regiac, who built an apparatus for measuring cosmic rays near the
bottom of Lake Constance, was another great research worker in
the new field; he worked in the heights as well as in the depths.
Russian investigators (Myssowsky and Tawin) concluded,
after their work in Leningrad, that rays come from the celestial
globe in all directions. A machine devised by Geiger upset the
idea, held since 1900, that the rays were waves.
In 1927 it was possible to photograph the track of a particle
connected with cosmic rays. All the physicists were now deeply
interested and experiments multiplied. They are going on as I write
and will be continuing while you read.
Johnson and Heisenberg emphasized the relation between
increased ionization and cosmic rays, and then the intensity of
these rays was examined in every part of the earth's surface.
Intensities were studied in Alaska, California, Colorado, Chicago,
Spitzbergen, Indore, Switzerland, Java, Ceylon, Tibet and
elsewhere, and the results were regarded in some quarters as a
conclusive proof that cosmic rays are electrons and that the sun
may be their source. A curious discovery in connection with
research was that there are a thousand thunderstorms in progress at
any given moment on the earth's surface. Mr. C. T. R. Wilson, who
made this statement, is said to have created what has been called
“the most astonishing instrumental invasion recorded in the history
of science". It is thought that cosmic rays disintegrate atoms and
that they provide a powerful tool for investigating their structure.
We are still in the preliminary stages of investigation, but they are
being enthusiastically followed up.
For example, a Russian scientist has climbed to the top of a
mountain in the Caucasus, and has been in a submarine fifty
metres deep; he has even experimented with electrometers inside
the barrels of big naval guns.
“Something is known to-day," writes J. G. Crowther, author of
the A.B.C. of Chemistry, “concerning the material constituents of
the outer universe". Sir James Jeans has done much to bring some
general knowledge of the nature of cosmic rays to the national
service and he is a man who never publishes results until all the
preliminary investigations concerned with his subject have been
mastered. He says that cosmic radiation is powerful enough to
break up, every second, twenty atoms in every cubic inch of our
atmosphere, and that the transformation of matter into radiation
proceeds vigorously throughout the universe. The sun, he tells us,
pours away mass in the form of radiation at the rate of 250 million
tons a minute and has been doing so for millions of years. Such a
statement staggers us; we know that our finite minds cannot
fathom it. But we can at least understand that this outflowing of
force and energy from the sun is a factor in our life on earth. The
theories of Sir James Jeans in the matter of cosmic rays are set out
in the brilliant little book The Mysterious Universe, and have
confirmed my intuitive belief that cosmic influences are a potent
force in the work of bringing about the productivity of the great
Earth Mother. We cannot grasp the extent of the forces that
envelop and sustain the world, but there is every reason to believe
that the rays have a significant action upon normal growth and that
this action is at least likely to be impeded where the earth has been
saturated with mineral fertilizers.
My reason for the faith that is in me is that of the simple
layman. If Nature has maintained fertility throughout the ages by
means of an effort so stupendous that we can hardly grasp it, and if
by this medium who has produced healthy, life-giving food, why
should we suppose that the chemist can be either necessary,
advisable, or even permissible?
Why should we tamper with a structure too vast for us to
understand ? If the earth is a living thing with balanced
constituents that proceed from life to death and death to life, why
should we venture to alter its practice for the sake of increased
production? It seems to me that as man grows in mental stature, as
the doors that have been closed open and the veils that obscured
his vision thin and pass away, he realizes more and more the need
to substitute reverence for haste, to suspend judgment and to admit
his own limitations. We have but to think of the giant forces that
permeate this planet at every moment of the day and night to
realize that we live in the breath of these manifestations and that
the delicate, subtle, unseen mechanism of life is not for us to
tamper with. We lack the necessary understanding to do this with
safety, but we have at least the necessary sense to teach us that
Mother Earth is a self-supplier and selects her own materials.
I would like the reader who has studied the rather hard and
apparently disconnected facts on a preceding page to disregard the
details (which, at best, can have but a limited acceptance from
laymen) and merely to think of this varied investigation as
evidence of the endeavour that men of science in all lands are
making to understand the nature of recently revealed phenomena.
They are the real explorers; they are travelling into an uncharted
world. They must be prepared—indeed, they are anxious—to
come upon new facts that may have a definite influence upon
human development. The men who have travelled to the North and
South Poles over countless miles of inhospitable ice are no greater
or more genuine explorers than these scientists who are examining
forces so hard to isolate, examine, estimate, or control. The
importance, as I see it, is that these forces are known to exercise
influence upon growth, the growth of the food that feeds the world,
the food without which all our vaunted enterprises lose their
purpose. Somewhere hidden behind cosmic rays are new truths.
New discoveries, destined to stand side by side with those of
Madame Curie and Professor Einstein, may be on their way and
we shall accept them because they have the sanction of science.
I would like to see an attitude of equal generosity shown to the
work of those who have explored another field—not the field of
the physical, but of spiritual science. I want to see forces elevated
to the rank of substances and studied with an equal ardour. I am
very much afraid of the tendency to pander to physical science—I
mean, believing theories that trained observers advance, and
damning those they do not understand or do not care about.
I find this tendency in evidence in the world that interests me
most, the world of green things growing. There is a small band of
earnest workers, some of them no longer with us, who have
protested against modern materialism on the farm, who have
deplored the ruthless, reckless methods of forced production
playing havoc with the life forces upon which we depend. When
their voices have been raised they have been shouted down until at
last the terrible fruit of unheeded warnings is to be met on the
farm, in the byre, in the orchard, among the flocks and herds and
poultry stocks.
After nearly a century of misguided action, in which the
fertility assets of the world have suffered drastic reduction, we
catch a glimpse of at least one mysterious force influencing the life
of the soil, helping the humus to do its appointed work with the aid
of the humble earthworm which fools despise and wise men
cultivate. Who is prepared to suggest that the cosmic rays are the
only available force at man's service? Who will dare to say that
discovery has reached its term? Our men of science have
discovered external forces, but so did men of an older generation.
We laugh and sneer at the astrologers; whatever they knew about
stellar influences is now ignored. But some, at least, of their
teaching is coming back in a new form and with fresh credentials.
A Gerarde and a Culpeper may be found to hold in their quaint
pages a number of forgotten truths. Their belief in stellar
influences is naked and unashamed. When I hear men sneer at
astrology and astrologers I recall lines written by Charles Dickens,
that novelist who could combine a love of all the good things of
life with a vision that soared far above them. He wrote in Edwin
Drood (Chapter XVII): “His gaze wandered from the windows to
the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was
hidden from him. Many of us would if we could, but none of us so
much as know our letters in the stars yet—and few languages can
be read until their alphabets are mastered."
Yes, I believe that great surprises are in store for us and that if
new discoveries are wisely handled and freely shared, agriculture
will enter upon a new phase.
CHAPTER II The Case for Artificials
THE CASE FOR MINERAL FERTILIZERS can be put in a nutshell. We are told
that there is not enough organic manure to go round the farms.
This being said, no further case remains.
I would like to approach this problem by suggesting that it is
possible for a remedy to be worse than the disease; it is also
readily possible for the remedy to be ineffective for more than a
very little while and to leave the patient worse than it found him.
Now, so far as artificials are concerned, we know that plants
fed with them tend to become weak and inert, whatever their
outward appearance may be. They may grow as a pig does in its
sty when fattening time begins, but that pig, for all the fat that is
the owner's promise and prize, becomes inert and unable to
reproduce its species; so does the plant. According to recent
investigations the marked increase in crops throughout the world
that started in 1850 continued till 1914. Then the yield began to
decline. To-day, on the Continent, so far as can be ascertained, the
milk yield is back at the 1886 level, but the amount of mineral
fertilizer given on the farms is nearly double.1 Is the law of
diminishing returns at work? Is the stimulus failing and
consequently demanding this increase? Are we on the wrong track
in our procedure, forgetting that the plant's will to live will often
enable it to draw from invisible elements and forces the material
for its special needs? Plants can gather a great part of their needs in
fashions unknown to us. Is the effect of mineral fertilizers harmful
to those who eat the food grown by their aid? Pfeiffer has told us
that if an animal has potassium salts in its food there is quick
growth and there are unhealthy offspring. Thrombosis and
gangrene will occur. Thrombosis occurs and varies in humans in
accordance with the amount of potassium salts used in agriculture.
Modern fruit culture has resulted in an increase of troubles due
to poisoning by lead, arsenic, and copper, all of which are used in
sprays. A study of Californian apples made a few years ago
showed that the lead arsenate in them was very many times as
much as the highest quantity that can be safely taken in food.
Public warnings were issued. There is a very vicious circle here.
Poison sprays are used because insect pests are on the increase,
and we get the insect pests because they are Nature's challenge to
the man who, in search of larger and heavier crops, throws her
balances out of gear. Doubtless many who have not investigated
this question will cry “Nonsense "; informed people will not. This
reaction to artificial stimulants seems strange, even unreasonable,
until we grasp a fact that has been established by Dr. Steiner and
confirmed by his followers, that if we change the life of a plant by
over-stimulation, the whole of the life-force is spent on greater
production and there comes side by side with this a certain
weakening of the powers of healthy reproduction and of resistance
to insect pests. A healthy plant in a healthy environment grows
1
Pfeiffer—New Methods in Agriculture, 1939.
away from disease and is powerful to resist insect attack; a weak
plant falls a victim, and then come the poison sprays, in ever-
increasing quantity, to kill the insects and perhaps to poison the
produce. Certainly there is grave reason to believe that the
nutritional value of the plant is upset.
There are other causes of failure in orchards, but mineral
sprays and fertilizers have a lot to answer for. The whole trouble
has its roots in the rank materialism of our outlook. We cannot
reconcile ourselves to the outstanding truth that there are formative
forces at work on the etheric plane that inter-penetrate the
physical, and that if we will seek to understand them, the
cultivation of crops of all kinds will become simpler and more
certain. We may not be able to grasp the truth about these
formative forces, but by simple experiment we can gather the
results.1
The most important result of an understanding of the nature
and limitation of production is that the farmer becomes a real
partner with Nature instead of remaining a mere exploiter. To-day
there are thousands, literally thousands, of farmers and gardeners
who have adopted new methods of cultivation and have learned
that a healthy soil gives no encouragement to disease in animals or
plants and does not bring forth insect pests. It is not too much to
say that if we would study the health and well-being of the soil all
the work on animal and plant disease would become unnecessary,
for the diseases would not be there. At the same time, men, women
and children, nourished on healthy food, would face their problems
in health and vigour. This is not a matter of mere conjecture.
Healthy ground and healthy crops can be seen at home and abroad,
and so soon as the problem of denatured soil and food is
recognized by the agricultural authorities—and, through them, by
the State—the present bad conditions of food production will be
changed by common consent.
What I would like to see is action by a group of Members of
Parliament interested in the national health. I would like them to
inspect for themselves some of the farms and gardens where the
creation and maintenance of a healthy and uncontaminated soil are
the first consideration, and examine the fruit and vegetables grown
in open air or under glass, fed by natural methods and giving
healthy, unblemished food. Seeing is believing, and belief must
precede the strong action that becomes so increasingly urgent.
The patient reader may say, “I am still waking for a
justification of this chapter's title." Well, we are forced to admit
that the only possible case for artificials is the absence of the
genuine article in sufficient quantity. This lack could be met, if the
country were so resolved, by taking every step to make compost,
by saving all the vegetable waste, roadside clearings, hedge
trimmings, and waste products of every kind, allowing nothing to
be lost, experimenting on the largest possible scale with the Bio-

1
The Etheric Formative Forces in Cosmos, Earth and Man.—Dr. G. Wachsmuth.
dynamic, Indore, and other systems, and making every garden,
allotment, small-holding and farm a composting centre, with the
fixed intent of reducing, and ultimately abolishing, dependence on
the chemist for the food we eat. The price that the chemist asks is
more than humanity can afford.
CHAPTER III The Steiner Method
IT MAY BE SAID AT ONCE that Dr. Rudolf Steiner's approach of the
regeneration of the soil was along the lines of what he called
Spiritual Science. He regarded our planet as a body influenced by
the moon and other planets, and by contacting forces that guided it
along a predestined path. Because he took plain men a little off
their feet, and they were disposed to resent the experience, many
have dismissed the theories on the ground that they are associated
with psychism and other superphysical experience.
At the same time I would urge all sceptics to put his theories to
the proof. It is not necessary to believe in order to test. If the
Steiner methods are faithfully observed they will provide their own
proofs and make their own followers. I say "will", but I can go
further, for today thousands of men and women on farm and in
garden are following Dr. Steiner and he is earning an increasing
measure of posthumous fame. In this chapter I am not concerned
to defend the great teacher, but to give a brief outline of the
methods he introduced. When they are mastered and practised it
will be quite unnecessary to add anything in their defence.
Many of us do things useful and wise without knowing why,
and when we learn that we are following long-forgotten teachings
are apt to be more surprised than pleased. I expect that Dr. Steiner
would have been quick to acknowledge that the fertilizing methods
he advocated were a revival. Let us remember that the agricultural
question, closely though it may concern us who write and you who
read, was no more than one of the many matters that his restless
and comprehensive genius surveyed. He turned to agriculture late
in life. His first recorded statements upon it were made in 1910; he
returned to 1 the subject in 1919, and gave his first lectures in
1924.
A hundred years ago in England, when the very earliest
experiments of the chemists were being tried out, composting was
the general practice. A very distinguished agriculturist has pointed
out that in Morton's Cyclopaedia of Agriculture, published in
1856, full instructions for composting are given. Farmyard manure
was the basis, and since labour was very plentiful and wretchedly
underpaid it was quite possible to detail men to collect leaves,
hedge-trimmings, ditch scourings, weeds, outside leaves of
vegetables and root crops and the rest, to mix the collection with a
little lime, add farmyard manure, and build up such heaps as are
coming back to our impoverished, over-stimulated soils to-day.
What Dr. Steiner did was to explain the significance of compost
and to show how it could be stimulated by the use of certain
homoeopathic preparations of plants—valerian, camomile, nettle,
field horsetail, dandelion. In all probability the introduction of the
homoeopathic principle and the insistence upon cosmic influences
hampered the spread of Dr. Steiner's principles. He could convince
those who came into touch with him or attended his lectures, but in
the nature of things these could only be a minority; there were
many who, knowing nothing of homoeopathy, suspected it.
It is not difficult to understand why composting went out in
England. Wages of farm workers rose and the labour bill began to
assume importance; unrestricted imports reduced profits to zero.
Then, of course, ‘artificials ' had their chance and took it, to the
great confusion of the land. With machines that will distribute the
chemical fertilizer quickly and neatly, who is going to send men to
the roads and ditches to collect food for the fields? Why sustain
the earth on bread and cheese, so to speak, when you can give it a
stiff dose of intoxicant? There will, of course, be a morning after
the night before, but when the morning dawns you will not be
there to see or suffer, so why trouble about posterity? “Posterity
has done nothing for me," said a cynic.
It follows that when we apply the Rudolf Steiner methods to
our fields and gardens we are returning in practice to an older and
saner England, the England in which disease was not so
widespread or virulent among humans, animals, or plants. The
fashion in which epidemics and epizootics have spread since the
chemist came to the farm testifies above all else to lowered powers
of resistance, and all the indications point to the need for a return
to natural methods of cultivation, and to recognition of the truth
that mineral fertilizers must be used, if at all, on a very moderate
scale and then only for so long a time as it takes to spread the
better system over the length and breadth of the land.
The reform should make rapid progress, for any intelligent
system of compost leaves its immediate mark on the land and may
reasonably be expected to make its mark on the national health.
There is no possibility of denying the truth that the older
generation enjoyed better health, even though they did not always
take the best care of it.
The one point to be emphasized at the outset is that those who
select the Steiner method must follow it faithfully if they wish to
be able to judge it fairly. It has just as much relation to rough-and-
ready fashions as the fly-fisher's craft has to the ‘chuck-it-and-
chance-it' methods of those who angle for coarse fish.
The Steiner compost heap must be in shelter or covered, and
can be added to at will. It should have a shallow base three or four
inches deep with a clay foundation if possible. All organic
substances from field, yard, garden, or kitchen should be collected
fresh and mixed. where material will not rot, as in the case of
prunings and hedge-trimmings, burn it and add ashes to your heap.
Only log-fire ashes should be used. Put seeding weeds in the
centre of any compost heap and not at the sides. At 1½ to 2 feet
add a little unslaked lime and cover with earth. (Unslaked lime is
best.) Then carry on with layers to a height of five or six feet, and
by sloping you get a roof shape. Finally, cover with one or two
inches of soil which can be got by digging a shallow trench round
the heap. Peat moss is recommended after treating with the
'preparations'. Bracken may serve if this is not available. A shallow
trench should be made on top of the heap, and water, or water
mixed with cow manure, applied. Manure water should be treated
with one of the ‘preparations'. The compost heap should be
watered at regular intervals rather than at irregular times.
Apart from general compost there is a special kind prepared
without lime. It is of cow manure and compost, is in alternate
layers and is for fruit trees. You should note that no quick-lime is
called for with manure composts. For treatment with the
preparations, add each to a compost heap in a separate hole; a
thick, pointed stick will serve to make one. In the case of
preparation 507, dissolve in half a gallon of rain water, stir for
fifteen minutes, pour half into the hole, and spray the rest. Cover
and turn heaps after six months and they will be ready to use
within a year and in a state of complete activity.

Now for the 'mysterious’ preparations :

No. 500 is a cow manure preparation.
No. 501 is a quartz preparation.
No. 502 is Yarrow.
No. 503 is Camomile.
No. 504 is Stinging nettle.
No. 505 is Oak bark.
No. 506 is Dandelion.
No. 507 is Valerian.
No. 508 is a field horsetail dried. For preparing this two
handfuls of the herb are boiled in a gallon of rain water for
twenty minutes. Then strain and spread with a syringe to
strengthen the plant to resist insect infection. Use
fortnightly in glass-houses.
No. 509 (seed of picea excela) is effective against slugs.
No. 510 This is a preparation of lead, and is said to check
mildew in roses and to keep fruit from dropping off its
branches.

The old-time reticence in connection with all these remedies is

no longer maintained.
This is in effect a development of an old technique based upon
a deep recognition of forces that were not understood when first
they were invoked. We have to consider the possibility of entirely
new ideas, for so many have forced themselves upon the
agriculturist's attention. When a man of genius turns his attention
to old-time practices, he illumines them. Dr. Steiner had genius; he
was one of the outstanding figures of his generation, and like so
many others was never fully esteemed and understood until his
teaching was all that remained. It was in a way the immortal part
of him, and now the cultivator in many lands hails him among the
great figures of all time, without knowing that agriculture was only
one of his many activities.
This is a statement that startles me as I set it down, but I know
in my heart that it is true. One of his pregnant sentences has been a
spur to me at times when the work I have undertaken seemed
beyond my powers: "The time may still come when the world will
starve in the midst of plenty." Who, recalling that warning, could
keep silent or remain idle? It was not an easy matter to accept the
activating agencies hidden behind numbers, and to accept the
various methods of preparation, but the unwisdom of concealment
is at last recognized. We know what the homoeopathic
preparations stood for and, having confidence in the teacher, we
accept the teaching. Then, leaving past experience to the proof of
our practice, we win the assurance from Mother Earth that one of
the most distinguished of her sons had penetrated her secrets,
working along the lines of a Spiritual Science that we cannot
understand without careful and devoted study.
The trouble about these ‘secret remedies' was the secrecy
imposed upon them. It was, I venture to think, unnecessary though
quite explicable, because these homoeopathic preparations of
camomile, dandelion, equisetum and the rest demand great care in
the preparation and take a long time to mature. It follows that the
amateur cannot make them for himself, and does well to buy them
from the Anthropsophical Agricultural Foundation in the same
way as we should buy a medicine from a chemist's shop and not
endeavour to make it for ourselves just because we have the
prescription.
The 'secret remedies', secret no longer, are not being exploited.
After all, we are buying the brain of Dr. Steiner when we spend a
very few shillings on doses that are said to quicken the activities of
the compost heap. It is a very simple matter to test their worth.
Treat one compost heap with them and leave another without
them, and then compare the results and abide by that comparison.
What I find most refreshing about the Steiner theories is that they
are easy to follow and to prove.
An outstanding difference between Steiner and Howard
methods is that the former used homoeopathic activation and
rejected human waste as an ingredient of compost, while Sir Albert
Howard accepts all waste and does not employ activation. You can
select the method you prefer, while admitting that each is a matter
for individual choice.
CHAPTER IV Peace with the Soil
IN 1939 I PUBLISHED FOR free distribution a book called Peace with the
Soil, setting out the principles that have guided my work for many
years past. In this chapter I wish to condense the contents of that
book in order to emphasize the principles that appear to me of the
utmost importance to the world at large. I do not expect or claim
acceptance of the faith that is in me, but I do ask for close
consideration, because what I have to say concerns every reader
and all his friends and relations at home and abroad. The matter is
indeed one of universal concern.
We must establish peace with the soil, because without it there
can be no health in man, beast or plant. The stamina and health of
the people bear a definite relation to the acreage of living organic
fertile soil they cultivate. At present there is reason to believe that
certain links in the living chain of Nature are missing or are not
functioning; consequently man has been deprived of his birthright
and the beast of the fields and the plants of the earth are no longer
able to function as Nature intended them to do. We have seen,
down to the outbreak of war, an immense collection in the world's
granaries stored up against hours of need, but it is to be feared that
much of this foodstuff is denatured and consequently of little
worth. One of the results of reliance upon such foods is a bad state
of national health which keeps the rulers and the ruled from facing
their crises sanely at a time when sanity is essential.
Certain questions of vast importance present themselves. The
first is how far the full interplay of the forces, substances, and
living organisms that combine to promote natural growth has been
affected by the modern methods of forced food production ? Have
we grasped the significance of the interplay between soil life and
plant life, and are we doing anything to check it? Thirdly, can we
produce plants with the proper amount of vitamin content if the
soil in which they are grown has been deprived of its correct
number and correct species of living organisms? To answer these
questions I urged in my book the need for the following
information:

(1) an analysis to indicate the nutritional value of whole green

plants and tubers. This value should include vitamins in
the uncooked and cooked states;
(2) an analysis of the micro-organic life in the soil, including
a statement of the balance of different species. The
significance of the living mycorrhizal association and
examination into the question of which of these factors
operate in the following three classes of soil:

(a) fertile, living organic soil without chemical fertilizers,

(b) soil dressed with chemical fertilizers alone,
(c) soil partially or wholly depleted of its necessary quota of
micro-organisms.
 I pleaded as well for recognition of two basic principles in
connection with agriculture. The first that it must be fully
developed and yield a profit to the competent, hard-worked
cultivator; the second is that food production, whether for man or
animal, must be natural and health-producing. I urged that a strict
scientific and bacterial analysis should be made of all areas prior to
planting, and I pointed out that, having regard to the amount of
money we are prepared to spend on promoting death, we should
not shrink from the necessary expenditure required to produce
healthy life, since the vitality and efficiency of us all in regard to
body and mind alike depend on agricultural produce.
I proclaimed my belief that Nature is the best chemist and that
she contains in herself the cure for all diseases that beset life;
disease is merely discord, and this discord can be resolved. At
present our trouble is that we are concerned with cure and not with
prevention, and the road to prevention can be reached only by way
of sound food produced from a living soil.
I have urged that governments should set up competent
committees of investigation to enquire into:

(a) the decline of human health,

(b) the decline of animal health,
(c) the diseases of fruit and vegetables,

and that this enquiry should consider whether there is not a

common cause operating to bring about the troubles that beset us.
The earth is our banking account, and if we wish to draw out
we must pay in. For the past hundred years, since the chemist first
started to treat the soil in 1840, we have been drawing on our earth
account, and in order to replenish the credit side we have been
handing in cheques that are at last coming back dishonoured. We
must remember that civilization wages constant strife with war,
famine and disease, the three forces that were for so long the only
solution to the population question. If we desire peace in the
world, the maintenance of our increase and sound health among all
the varied forms of life on this planet, we must ascertain Nature's
way and follow it. If there is to he any stimulus it must be provided
according to Nature's own laws.
Modern knowledge relates the production of healthy crops to
various substances, living things and forces that are all too often
overlooked. The cosmic forces, for example, which have been
studied by some of our leading physicists, particularly by Sir
James Jeans, are clearly concerned to a very large extent with the
food production. They are not properly regarded by the man-in-
the-street because they are not visible, but Sir James tells us that
every minute the sun shines 250,000,000 tons of matter fall on the
earth with the speed of light, and other scientists tell us that mixed
with our light-waves there is a universal flow of cosmic dust from
which plants receive their meed of mineral salts, even when such
salts are not to be found in the earth in which they grow, or the
water that is applied to them. Then we have humus to which the
earth-worms make a priceless contribution, and the bacteria that
react on the humus and make it effective. Very dimly we are
learning to see that these forces, some of them invisible, are the
real growth forces ordained by Nature to do the work of food
production, and that it is not possible that we should enjoy healthy
life if we substitute for them the crude minerals from the factories.
The most significant support for this statement lies in the fact that
where you use crude mineral fertilizers you kill the earth-worms
and you know that they are a vital link in the chain of what we
may call fertility production.
It follows, I pointed out, that a very necessary enquiry should
be directed to discover whether the diseases of humans, animals
and plants have or have not increased steadily since artificial
replaced organic manures, and what can best be done to restore
natural biological and nutritive values to the soil. We must
remember that Nature's scheme nowhere embraces inorganic
fertilizers or the stimulation of the living by the dead, save in the
established order of growth and decay. In the state of Nature this
growth and decay have an equal value because the one proceeds
from the other. In Peace with the Soil I stated: "the complete cycle
of the existence of a rhythm of plant life must be studied in all
detail and quickly determined, or we can hope for no improvement
in our present conditions of ill-health and disease ". I went on to
suggest that “we should call in cosmologists and astrologers as
well as physicists, because there is every reason to believe that the
phases of the moon and the position of the sun in various signs of
the Zodiac are of far more importance to the farmer than he is
aware, and to get the best out of life in the sanest and most
reasonable ways we must have all the experts work in the interests
of mankind, and when they have yielded whatever they have to
offer, the information must be collated and made available to the
man-in-the-street and the farmer-in-the-field ". It is in this
connection that the discoveries of Sir James Jeans have so great a
value, because his position in the world of science cannot be
challenged. Equally important, in my opinion at least, are the
discoveries and teachings of Dr. Rudolf Steiner; but as he was not
an Englishman and we are all inclined to be insular, it followed
inevitably that his teaching should make slow progress. In the
body of this book I deal with it at length, in the previous one which
I am now examining I had something to say of its value.
At present we are suffering because we had rather remain
ignorant than risk the charge of being too credulous. We look to
our men of science to tell us what is reputable in the way of
knowledge, and that which is unorthodox. We have been rejecting
new thought through a failing that is not far removed from fear—
the fear of lending ourselves to ridicule. I suggest that the time has
come when we should take larger and more courageous views and
enquire seriously into the beliefs that we find running through the
life of farmland.
 For instance, let us take this belief in the moon's phases in
relation to growth. Not only will the East Anglian or West of
England farmer and his workers be found growing by the moon,
but also I have seen in other parts of the world that primitive
nations do their tree-cutting in accordance with the moon's phase,
and are satisfied that if they choose the right time their timber will
last, and if they choose the wrong time it will rot. It should be
possible to carry out investigations into this question, because by
their aid we should get a clue perhaps to those external forces that
effect growth, and it is on these external forces that those who are
opposed to the forcing of Nature by the chemist must depend.
I believe that we require living organic substances that will
attract cosmic forces and entities needed for the complete building-
up of natural soil and plants, and that in order to make the new and
very necessary approach to soil research we must see life as a
whole and recognize that it varies only in its manifestation.
Nature's method of production is to supply her soils with the
decayed residues of vegetable covering, its living humus, for plant
food; without the proper measure of organic matter in the soil
cosmic influences are not able to be effective, for both earth-worm
and bacteria will suffer.
I have come to the conclusion, through long practical
experience, that all the forces that go to promote growth are
attracted by organic fertilizers, and repelled by crude chemical
manures, and I hold that this matter is of so vast an importance that
it is worth an examination extending over many years, since it is
obviously impossible to obtain results in any short period. The fact
is that ignorance makes sceptics of us all, and the fear of ridicule
keeps us moving along well-trodden paths without a thought for
what may be to our right or left. I am convinced by actual field
observation extending over very many years that Nature employs
very many means for the complete development of the healthy,
life-giving and nourishing plant, that we have mastered the more
obvious ones and left very many unexamined because their
examination would be tantamount to an admission that super-
physical forces, recognized by only a very few scientists of the
calibre of Lodge, Crookes and Barrett, are involved. I have heard
belief in the super-physical denounced as unscientific. Yet science
has been well defined as ‘systematized', co-ordinated knowledge
based upon the accurate observation of facts and the relation of
these to general principles or laws. There are unexplored fields, or
fields that were explored in the dawn of our present civilization
which is in itself no more than a successor to others forgotten.
Why should scientists avoid them as though they were minefields?
Why should some of them be ready to condemn forces and facts
merely because orthodox scientists have not studied them?
Everything unfamiliar is suspect, there are people to be met to-day
who will tell you that water-finding by means of twigs or spring is
impossible.
 I can't help thinking that we need more world-patriotism, if
that is the right word; our scientists should, I venture to think, take
a wider view of their duties. The world's need is their supreme
opportunity. If a doctor has a sick patient whom normal treatment
cannot aid, and if he realizes that the sick man is moving downhill,
will he refuse an unorthodox remedy that is of old standing
because it has been superseded or forgotten? The earth is the sick
patient and the scientists have done their best with it for the
century since Liebig's theory gained acceptance. What have they
made of the patient ? Is the position not desperate, has not the
orthodox treatment by crude chemicals failed lamentably? Is it not
obvious that some fresh start is called for? I think that the state of
the health of all the life kingdoms points one way, and that is to
some basic deficiency, and that such deficiency can only be
fundamental. If man were healthy and animals were sick, if stock
were sound but vegetables were suffering, the cause of trouble
would not necessarily be universal. But since there is neither sound
health nor effective resistance to disease in man, beast or plant,
and they have only one common meeting-ground which is diet,
and the general deterioration has come about in spite of great
advances in medical and veterinary science and the study of plant
pathology, is there room for doubt? It seems to me that the facts
are shouting, and that we are deaf because we do not wish to hear,
lest old beliefs suffer.
This timidity is symptomatic. It extends to agriculture from the
realm of economics and sociology, where mankind is so reluctant
to understand the implications of transport and machinery. The
difference is that we can, if we choose, take our time about
recognizing social and political and economic changes, but if we
do not recognize the change that has come to the land, life cannot
long survive. To live we must have sufficient natural food from
healthy soil. You can argue about most propositions, but this one
will not suffer argument. Reorganization must be very much in the
air after the war, it will seek to touch every side of life. Only if it is
associated with agricultural organization directed to the betterment
of the public health will it succeed. A people of whom a large
proportion are under the line of healthy activity, a nation whose
stamina is definitely undermined by denatured food from
contaminated soil cannot hope to attain happiness or success. This
is not a controversial question. The advocates of chemically
treated soil as well as those who want clean land and healthy, good
earth are at one here.
Who can tell us the effect of minerals upon the bacteria in the
soil that collect nitrogen ? We ought to know what is the relation
between what we call 'forces' and substances, i.e., between the
immaterial and the material. Can we hope to avoid mistakes if we
concentrate on substance and ignore forces? Cosmic forces have
been operating since creation, we are told; is it not time to study
their effect? A new technique of investigation is demanded.
 How far is disease due to man's strained relationship with the
soil? Do we not need restrictions upon all tampering with
foodstuffs in factories? Should not the State guarantee the purity of
the food we eat? If healthy food is regarded as a matter of prime
concern by our authorities, must they not do something and do that
something soon, to improve the state of our rivers? Three hundred
years ago salmon came up the Thames as far as London Bridge, to-
day while they only come up, if at all, in tins, they have even
retired hurt from many of our Welsh and Scottish rivers. The
effluents from factories and drains have spoilt the coarse fishing of
many an inland waterway in England. We do not preserve our
fishing grounds round these islands as we shall when we decide to
deal sternly with pollution in all its forms, and to recognize the
part fish play in building up the human body and maintaining it in
health. Other nations have not suffered pollution to ruin home
waters for the service of commercial ends; why should we? At
least one country whose claims to an equal standard of civilization
we should contest can give us a lesson in this respect. The
importance of Fish as a factor in human nutrition cannot be
overlooked, nor can the value of fish offal as a manure be over-
estimated. What proportion of the material substances in the soil is
taken by plants? We do not know, and we ought to find out. Is it
not true that plants grown in the open will gather mineral salts
from the atmosphere? Have the discoveries of Sir James Jeans not
thrown a light on this? Do they not suggest that atmospheric forces
still half understood are contributing to the maintenance of plant
life? Must we not concentrate on the study of these questions to
get a 'better view of the growth forces that surge round us without
cease?
A most important point to remember is that just as unhealthy
parents cannot hope to procreate healthy children, so an unhealthy
plant cannot grow healthy seeds. Deterioration can come to plants
as readily as it comes to humans, and far more rapidly, for we do
not know much about plant pathology. It follows, I think, that in
altering the old-time treatment of foodstuffs, and in substituting
dead fertilizers for living ones, we are taking chances that might
well appal any thoughtful person who considers the question
dispassionately. The untaught amateur in a power-house is the
only comparison that comes to me. The trouble is that our once
healthy, fertile fields are the only powerhouse on which humanity
can depend, and if the amateur disarranges the mechanism the
interference is likely to prove fatal not only to the amateur himself,
but to his children who will find that the power that sustains them
has been diminished to a point at which it can no longer do its
predestined work. I say with intense conviction that the work of
the world is done for us and that we cannot short-circuit Nature
without experiencing fatal shocks.
The need is to establish the relation between what a plant takes
from the soil and what it receives from forces that cannot be
expressed in terms of material substances. Only the larger vision of
life can enable us to grasp the truth that all manner of forces
measurable and immeasurable are concerned with the natural
produce of sound food from healthy soil. Atmosphere supplies
acid, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, silica, iron, sulphur, and
many another element.
1 do not wish to appear dogmatic, and in my introduction to
Peace with the Soil I suggested that there should be trials with
mixed inorganic and living organic materials, so that it should be
the easier to discover the truth, but of course in this connection the
unstinted labours of the State agricultural departments would be
required. I pointed out too that the whole of the labour is to save
humanity from dependence on pernicious foods from dead and
unfertile soils, and to that end we must not allow our prejudices to
shut out any man or woman who has expert knowledge, even
though it be unorthodox, to contribute. I stated then, and I repeat
now, that this is not a question that is affected by race, creed,
colour or religion. It is something that affects every human being
who draws the breath of life, and I am convinced that a world-wide
survey would show that all classes of all communities in which
sane production has been sacrificed to haste or greed are not only
in a bad state, but in one that must go from bad to worse. Only a
select committee comprising the best brains available from every
source can be the proper body to deal with the question of this
magnitude.
Another point I have to submit is that every fact that
constitutes scientific finding should be within reach of the tiller of
the soil, because he is more important to the world than the
statesman, the artist, the musician or the man of letters, and every
influence that may affect the earth should be studied most
carefully, ascertained as far as possible and given its proper place
in the body of common knowledge. The foundation of this claim
may be taken from modern discoveries which teach us that
minerals comprised in the minute specks of cosmic dust which
supply all life on earth are being continuously absorbed by all that
lives. That rain, dew and snow hold forces not yet investigated,
though their existence is recognized by leading physicists who
know that vital forces from sun and moon and planets rain their
influence on the earth by day and night. One of my main
objections to the present haphazard way of filling the land with
dead, inorganic matter to produce the life that is to feed us all is
that the forces we are just beginning to discover operate in an
infinitely delicate fashion like the intricate mechanism of a vast
machine, while the chemist's methods are absolutely crude. We
have only to think for a moment of what allopathic doses of
medicine were like, and the crude and nauseous substances that
were given to us to create what might be called interior upheaval.
Ahnemann came, and although he was derided and flouted or
ignored, he brought about a drastic change of dosage, and the
modern doctor does not think of dealing with his patients as his
father or grandfather did. So it is, I think, with the earth. The
practitioner of to-morrow will not imitate the coarse methods that
are practised to-day, but before we can improve them we must first
improve our agricultural findings in relation to content of soil and
growth forces. We must learn more about the soil and its living
micro-organisms, we must learn to distinguish between the
substances and forces that affect all life on all planes, and we must
study the effects of mineral, plant and animal foods on the
organism of man and the animals. The selection of the right food is
not merely a matter of vitamin content, it is a matter of origins, and
for the protection of the nations services should be set up charged
with the testing of everything that is offered for food to man or
beast. These may seem very simple matters, but if you come to
examine the question as carefully as I have done for years past you
will see that they have all been deliberately set aside as matters
that cannot compete with the general question of profit-making. If
we can combine natural soil and natural plant growth the result
will be natural health, and if we can understand the interplay of
Nature's manifold agencies and respect it, the latter-day
deteriorations may yet be cured. But I do not think we have a great
deal of time to spare, because we have already outrun Nature's
patience and are beginning acutely to experience the weight of her
penalties.
At present there is ample evidence that deterioration is at work
in all the kingdoms, human, animal and vegetable, and there is
reason to suspect that without a living, organic, fertile soil both
animal and plant must grow in an unnatural fashion, with the result
that they will not do for mankind as Nature purposes. We do not
understand at present the mystery of rain, dew, snow and hail, but
we have reason to believe that they are all media for the conduct of
cosmic energy, and that they must have their full effect and that
the soil they replenish must be free from contamination.
Apparently the rain brings atmospheric elements of most diverse
nature into a living soil—phosphoric acid, nitric acid, silicon, iron,
sulphur and the rest in the minute and finely disintegrated form in
which they can be readily absorbed. It will be seen that we must
endeavour diligently to find out beyond all question how Nature
builds and renews her fertile soil, and what effect upon these
processes the violent interposition of chemical fertilizers has
brought about.
Another matter on which we need enlightenment is the nature
of plants in relation to the texture and fertility of the soil they are
planted in, and we have to understand better than we do to-day the
precise nature and value of the work of the micro-organisms of the
soil. Then we must find out what effect is wrought upon these
bacteria by organic and inorganic plant foods. Experiment is
needed; it must be carried out with the greatest care and over a
long time until we have filled up many gaps in our understanding.
At present we are in the position of only knowing how much we
need to know, and the work is too great for an individual or for any
private body of research workers. 1 repeat that it must be
undertaken and carried out by the governments 1 of the world.
Further enquiry into the nature and work of the humus is needed,
and we have to recognize not only the unity of all life, but that any
agricultural method threatening the life of the soil is the most
complete and devastating form of murder that can be devised.
Above all, we must learn to differentiate between substances and
forces, and we must learn quickly, because the world is already
seriously impoverished.
The first task is, of course, to establish natural, living fertility
in the soil; with that will come food production with the full
nutritive and biological content. Through these foodstuffs normal
health will return to man and beast, and finally the cultivator of the
soil will be protected from conditions in which he is only bound to
farm at a loss, and produce crops that arc of small value to
mankind. Let me put it in a sentence. We have to recognize our
partnership with Mother Earth, to make amends for our misuse,
and to enable her to function for the benefit of all forms of life that
are sustained through her few inches of fertile soil. I have shown in
the body of this book it is possible to do this work in course of
time through the medium of composting in conjunction with
proper acts of husbandry, of which one of the most important is
crop rotation and the enlivening of the soil, if this term be
permissible, by adding to the compost certain herbal preparations
(outlined in this book, p. 86) which attract the cosmic influences.
By this method we return to the land what we have taken from her.
In this connection it is well to remember the conference of
Colonial Directors of Agriculture held in 1938. They agreed that
the colonial nutrition problem can only be handled by chemical,
agricultural, veterinary and educational departments in close co-
operation. They agreed that poverty in Africa would become more
intense if the soil is allowed to deteriorate further. Sir John Orr, in
pointing out that more than forty countries had committees dealing
with nutrition, said that while many native African races are
charged with laziness, this laziness may well be due to malnu-
trition.
I have summed up here as briefly as possible my arguments set
out in Peace with the Soil.1 Many of them are elaborated fully in
these pages. I have not included in this survey any mention of my
own acts of husbandry, and I have not referred to the chapter on
vitamins, nor have I thought it necessary to include various tables
relating to food values.

1
Those who are interested can still obtain a copy of Peace with the Soil, at the cost
of its postage, from Robert MacLehose fit Co. Ltd., University Press, Glasgow, W.3.
CHAPTER V Current Opinion
ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING publications dealing with the land is
Agriculture in the 20th Century, published by the Oxford
University Press. It is a series of essays written for presentation to
Sir Daniel Hall on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, and it
deals with the relations between agriculture and the State,
agricultural policies, education, practical husbandry, soil science,
grassland, plant breeding, fruit growing, national health and
cognate matters.
It is useful to study a book of this kind because the authors
write at their ease, not as heads of colleges and institutions, but
rather in the friendly fashion of men gathered round the fire on a
winter evening. Some matters of the greatest concern to those who
think as I do come up for reference in the course of dealing with
other questions.
It is clear to the reader who considers the papers carefully that
several of the writers are aware of the new thought that is touching
the problems of growth and soil fertility and that, though they are
bound by the traditions of their own upbringing, most of them are
facing the questions with an open mind. For example, in his
valuable essay on soil science, Sir John Russell, who is so largely
responsible for the large place that the Rothamsted Institute takes
on the agricultural map, refers to "the mid-nineteenth century
controversy—not forgotten though its echoes still persisted in
1910—about the relative merits of farmyard manure and
artificials". He remarks: "We fully recognized the advantages of
farmyard manure, even though we could not entirely explain them,
nor, for that matter, can we do so now." The last words of this
sentence must, I think, be regarded as of great importance, because
what Sir John Russell cannot explain must be something lying a
little outside the domain of normal scientific investigation.
He goes on to say that one of the most serious problems of
modern times is the destruction of soil fertility, and even of the soil
itself, which has occurred in recent years and is still going on. “It
is not due to the exhaustion of plant food ... a far more important
cause of destruction of soil fertility is the loss of calcium ions from
the clay and humus. If these are removed by leaching, by acid
fertilizers, or manures, or in any other way, all the properties of the
residual clay and humus change." ..."The first effect is that the
reaction of the soil becomes acid."
Later he says that the surface layers of the soil lose calcium,
magnesium, iron, and somewhat smaller quantities of alumina and
silica. These are results I have discussed already, but they are seen
from a fresh angle, the angle of the acute and greatly gifted
scientist.
Sir John also talks of soil erosion. “It is no exaggeration to
say," he tells us, “that soil erosion with what devastation it
involves has been the first result of the impact of western
civilization on the new regions occupied in the last hundred years
in East Africa, especially in Kenya, there has been much erosion in
the last twenty years. The settlers' methods and the consequences
thereof have been very conducive to soil losses. . . ." Later he
points to our responsibility for conserving the soils of our Empire
and declares that a survey of its soil resources is urgently needed.
I do not presume to suggest for a moment that Sir John Russell
shares my beliefs, but I can say that what he does believe supports
them.
On the other hand, Professor Scott Watson, Professor of Rural
Economy and successor to that great grass farmer, Sir William
Somerville, is definitely hostile. "There are some who believe," he
writes, "that artificial fertilizers are a snare and delusion, doing no
more than conceal for the time being the disastrous depletion of
the essential goodness of the soil. But my flesh refuses to creep.
No doubt we are discovering, as we keep making good the grosser
deficiencies of our soils, that the minor elements can assume more
and more importance in plant nutrition. No doubt an interesting
and conceivably important field of enquiry has been opened up
with the discovery of organic growth-permitting substances—but
we have now so large a body of scientific knowledge about
chemistry of soil fertility that the farmer in, his efforts to produce
better crops can and does rely very largely upon the chemist."
Compare this with Sir John Russell's statement: "The relations
between the soil and growing plants are so close that it is
impossible to get far in any soil problem without coming up
against the plant. In some form or another soil fertility is always
obtruding." It seems to me that Professor Scott Watson closed a
door with a bang, but he had to open it before he could close it,
and his "conceivably important field of enquiry" is one in which he
might have lingered a little longer.
Nobody will deny that the farmer has been relying very largely
upon the chemist. What I suggest is that this reliance is a very
costly and dangerous business and that, in the long run, it will have
a disastrous effect upon the humus, as well as on the earth-worms
and micro-organisms that activate it.
Sir George Stapledon, in his essay on grassland, quotes Henri
Bergson, who wrote: "All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its
essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow
into flexible channels changeable in shape, at the end of which it
will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work." That is, I think, a
wonderful expression of considered opinion. Certainly it responds
to my own beliefs; my fear is lest our modern methods tend to
choke some of these flexible channels and to waste that
accumulated energy.
I am interested to see that Sir George takes note both of the
Indore method of Sir Albert Howard and the bio-dynamic method
of Dr. Steiner, and says that in grass-farming the ultimate aim is to
make and spread with the least possible trouble and expense a
highly efficient compost all over the field upon which we have
decided to operate. “Compost," he tells us, “no matter the precise
methods of making it, always depends upon mixing together earth,
lime, and animal and vegetable residues, and compost will be
efficient according as everything is nicely rotted down—will be
efficient, that is to say, in direct proportion to the extent of the re-
association and re-marriage of atoms and molecules."
It goes without saying that Sir John Boyd Orr has valuable
comments to make on nutrition. In the course of his essay he
mentions that twenty-one countries have set up National Nutrition
Committees but, oddly enough, he does not enter into the question
of the quality of the food and takes it for granted that milk, eggs,
butter and fresh vegetables will always have a beneficial effect.
There is no reason to doubt this, but the only question that remains
is whether that beneficial effect can be maintained. If we turn to
the state of health of our cows there is ample reason to fear that the
health standard is deteriorating and that diseases like tuberculosis
and mastitis are on the increase. So far as eggs are concerned, we
know that the mortality on the poultry farms is greater to-day than
it has ever been in the history of the industry, and we know, too,
that in the vegetable garden disease is far more varied and
widespread than it was.
Doubtless Sir John's work on diet has absorbed even his vast
energies, but it would be a good thing for this country if he would
consider this question of quality, because we do know that if he
came to any strong conclusion about it no consideration for those
in authority would keep him from speaking his mind and telling us
the truth as he sees it.
I think that these brief notes from a book of outstanding value
are sufficient to show that new problems are not being ignored,
and if one cannot find much support for the ideas associated with
them we have to remember that the leaders of agricultural science
to-day are men who have served their apprenticeship along
orthodox lines and have practised from the basis of their teachings
for many years. We cannot expect them to take a very tolerant
attitude towards views that stray outside professional boundaries
any more than we can expect that the British Medical Association
will adopt a sympathetic attitude towards homoeopathy and
osteopathy. We know that homoeopathy makes steady progress in
this country and far greater progress elsewhere, as in the United
States for example. We know that osteopaths have a greater
success in private practice; we even hear stories of orthodox
practitioners calling upon them for treatment, under the rose so to
speak. But it is part of our attitude to look upon the unfamiliar and
unexpected with suspicion, particularly in the fields we have made
our own. I cannot help thinking that this attitude is really all to the
good. The hatred of new ideas, the clinging to the old and familiar
beliefs, compels these new ideas to fight for their life, meet
hostility, stand up against criticism, recant their own errors and
push forward, fighting all the time. The essence of progress is
struggle.
 In other words, new ideas must and should endure a certain
measure of persecution; nothing could be better for them. We do at
least know that if and when our scientists can be convinced they
will not hesitate to support what they now condemn.
It is well that men of science have not ignored Sir Albert
Howard's Indore methods and have even taken note of the Steiner
teachings, though not without reluctance in the case of the latter,
because of attitude towards homoeopathy, astrology, theosophy,
and anthroposophy —all matters lying outside the beaten tracks of
thought. I have always honoured scholarship and scientific
attainments and my only appeal to the men who lead thought along
the orthodox road is that they should consider whether their
researches cover the whole field and whether in matters of farming
they are quite right in supporting current belief that the chemists
have been taken into the confidence the Creator and have mastered
the last of His secrets.
“I beseech you, gentlemen, for the love of God, believe that
you may possibly be mistaken." Centuries have passed since that
practical idealist, Oliver Cromwell, used these words on the floor
of the House of Commons, but they linger and perhaps justify
quotation. While every year reveals fresh secrets to the trained
observer, while every decade changes some belief hitherto
profoundly respected, are not an open mind and a receptive
intelligence more necessary than ever before ? Can we hope to
keep pace with progress without them? And if we are all working
for the common good, according to our lights, whether those lights
be stars or candles, is it not reasonable that we should extend
tolerance and even enquiry to the widest limits?
When you are studying the opinion of experts on general
questions you may not find any that relate directly to what
concerns you, but you may come across passing remarks of infinite
significance. To give an example, Dr. R. G. Hatton, the great fruit
expert, director of the East Mailing Research Station at Maid
stone, in his paper entitled Landmarks in the Development of
Scientific Fruit Growing, speaks of certain volumes summarizing
the advances made by the entomologist, mycologist, bacteriologist
and virologist towards “a more complete knowledge of an ever-
lengthening list of pests and diseases" and a choice of methods for
their control.
It is worth while to ponder these words “an ever-lengthening
list of pests and diseases", and if you study the paper further you
will find that petroleum oils and tar oils are among the cures noted
and approved.
There is, apparently, a “Modern Spray Calendar ". For a sound
apple crop a minimum of from five to seven applications are
needed, to which may be added a number of subsidiary sprayings
to counteract special epidemics.
"Hardly less thorough schedules," remarks Dr. Hatton, "are
recommended for other fruit; even the strawberry and the
blackberry being no longer excluded.". In other words, our fruit-
trees and bushes must be subjected to the influence of poisons
through a great part of the year in order that when they yield their
fruit the man in the street can eat it.
It is on record that a few years ago a number of French recruits
were taken suddenly ill. I think, if memory serves me right, there
were some casualties. The authorities made every effort to find out
the cause of this sudden outbreak and it was traced to the wine
supplied to these recruits, which came from certain vineyards
overdosed with copper sulphate to check phylloxera.
Poisoning from apples has also been reported, and in this case,
too, poison sprays were the cause of trouble. I would not dream of
eating a commercially grown apple until I had at least pared it.
In his chapter on plant protection the director of the Plant
Pathological Laboratory at Harpenden, Mr. J. C. F. Fryer, speaks
of the destruction of the greenhouse white fly, which can be dealt
with by hydrogen cyanide or tetra-chlorethane. Naphthalene is
used as a fumigant, and nicotine spraying and spraying with
mineral oil are other methods of plant protection of which due note
is made.
Now, I wonder if any of the gentlemen who are so concerned
with the protection of plants and fruit-trees have ever been to see
the gardens at the Old Mill House, Bray, near Maidenhead, where
Mrs. Pease, who demonstrates the Steiner method there, can show
fruit and vegetables growing under ordinary conditions, perfectly
healthy, continuously free from the worst forms of diseases that
worry growers, and entirely free from contamination by any form
of mineral poison. There is a lesson here waiting for all the learned
gentlemen who write at such length about the diseases of plants
and the limitations of fruit-trees. I don't like to think they are too
proud to learn it.
The soil has been cared for and kept in health, and the result is
that the various growths may be said, so to speak, to run away
from the diseases that threaten their weakly brethren. The writer
has seen in the tomato houses some of the finest fruit it has been
his privilege to handle, and has been assured that these houses and
the fruit in them have never been subjected to any form of mineral
spraying.
The various pests and troubles to which Dr. Hatton makes
passing but significant reference are, I do not hesitate to suggest,
the fruits of a neglected and denatured soil. Perhaps neglect is not
the right word, because they have received too much attention, but
it has all been the wrong sort of attention; instead of reducing
troubles professional growers are steadily magnifying them.
Finally, there comes a question that was put to me by a
gentleman with whom I was discussing this matter—perhaps the
most important piece of social reform for which the world is
waiting. “Can any country," he asked me, "afford to spend the
money that such an examination as you propose would cost?"
Well, the answer to that is a simple one, but it involves a few
figures.
 In 1921, under the Corn Production Act, the British
Government gave £18,000,000 to the growers of wheat and oats. It
has spent £15,000,000 on small holdings and invested £8,000,000
in tree planting, a solitary outlay that may well prove
remunerative. In thirteen years it has spent £58,000,000 in
subsidizing sugar beet. On the beet subsidy £16,000,000 were
spent by the Government in the four years between 1934 and 1938.
It has given the farmer £60,000,000 in the cumulative annual
benefits derived from grants, remissions, and artificially aug-
mented prices. It is spending £2,500,000 a year on agricultural
education generally and the annual outlay in agricultural subsidies
cannot be less than £16,000,000.
Is it too much to say that 1 per cent of this sum spent in an
enquiry into denatured foods, exhausted soil, and the application
of proper remedies, would not only give all agriculture a line to
follow, but would settle once and for all the vast question of how
far the quality of our present food supplies accounts for the many
diseases that affect all forms of life? I think we should make this
problem a part of agricultural research, to say nothing of national
education.
I plead with the authorities to ask the vital question and give it
an answer and not to hesitate to summon to a commission of
enquiry men and women of outstanding merit, whose life-work,
though of admitted excellence and worth, has taken them along
lines that are not followed by orthodox practitioners.
In other words, do not refuse the services of the man and
woman who have worked to increase the sum of human
knowledge just because they have recognized forces that have
passed you by.
CHAPTER V Proved by Poultry
IT HAS BEEN MY SUSTAINED COMPLAINT that over-production for the sake
of quick profits lies at the root of the terrible troubles to which I
am endeavouring to call public attention. When I look round for
evidence to support the faith and fear that are in me I never need to
travel very far.
Consider, for example, the report of the Poultry Technical
Commission of Great Britain, dated 1938. Most of us know that
poultry farmers have passed through a terrible time, that disease
has been spreading through the flocks in a more spectacular
fashion than it spreads through the herds and across the land. In
1930, when the International Poultry Congress was held at the
Crystal Palace, everybody said that the industry was on the eve of
great prosperity. In that year the percentage of mortality in four
large egg-laying trials varied from 7 per cent in the National
Laying Test to 9 per cent in the Scottish laying trials, 10 per cent
in the Harper-Adams trials and up to 12 per cent in the Lancashire
Utility Poultry Society's trials. In the last year recorded, 1936-
1937, these figures of 7, 8, 10 and 12 became 17, 19, 21 and 21.
Some of the details given by the Commissioners when they
went to investigate conditions are very striking. A commercial egg
producer in the Midlands is quoted as having carried on a
prosperous business with a mortality rate of 2½ per cent. In 1937 it
was up to 35 per cent. In Lancashire, fowl paralysis reduced a
flock from 2,000 to 400. In the Midlands a poultry farmer was
found who had lost 300 out of 500 birds. In the south-west 1,500
pullets had been reduced to 200. In the eastern counties 1,200 birds
had been reduced to 350. In Scotland one farmer had lost 700 out
of 1,000 day-old chicks. Such cases can be multiplied by any
investigator who has credentials.
Naturally, the committee looked round for explanations and
found some, but I cannot help thinking that several possible causes
were overlooked. At the same time, what has been said is
sufficiently devastating. “The policy of some hatcheries," they
report, " was governed solely by the desire to obtain quick profits
and had no regard to the future welfare of the industry" They refer
to battery brooders (which I regard as an abominable invention),
and go on to say in another connection: "In some cases price alone
has ruled the supply of eggs to hatcheries concerned with profits."
They go on to add that in certain places, after birds had reacted to
the B.W.D. test, they were sent to market. It goes without saying
that they should have been instantly destroyed. The committee
speaks of overcrowding on poultry farms as one source of trouble
and emphasizes very strongly that unscrupulous advertisements are
another. Remember in this connection that Government
committees never call a spade a spade, they prefer to speak of it as
an agricultural implement, and if they meet a damned rogue they
call him something that will not hurt the feelings he does not
possess.
 The heaviest mortality losses, the committee add, are due to a
group of ailments, the cause of which is unknown and for which
no curative or control measures can be advised, and in the end they
make suggestions for a cure of the existing evils, or perhaps it is
more correct to say, an intelligent effort to control them at a cost of
£10,000 a year. This large sum is justified by a statement that the
poultry industry represents a business with turnover of about
£30,000,000 annually.
The misuse of advertisement is one of the tragedies of our
time. Worthless food and dangerous medicines are imposed upon
the credulous people who are prepared to believe anything they sec
in print provided it is set before them in sufficiently attractive
fashion.
I chanced while in England during the summer of last year to
talk to a corn merchant who supplies very many poultry keepers.
“Poultry farms nowadays," he said, “don't want anything that
hasn't some spice in it. You see, they must stimulate the birds if
they want to get plenty of eggs." Now we know, if we trouble to
study the agricultural press and the special papers for poultry
keepers, that the industry has gone through a terrible time, that it is
still in a quite unhealthy condition; and I asked myself whether the
various ailments for which the poultry experts can find no
explanations and the Government committee can suggest no cure
are not due to the same cause that is spoiling farmlands and farm
stocks and market gardens and, in short, the vital productive
industry of the earth. Many of the poultry run over land that has
suffered mineral fertilizers. Many have been turned into egg-laying
machines through the misplaced ingenuity of men who do not
realize that life is not and cannot be their plaything. Their industry
was the size of a frog and it was healthy; they wanted to make it
the size of a bull. You remember the famous Aesop fable of the
frog that wanted to be as large as a bull and blew itself out with
immense effort until suddenly it burst. The same thing has
happened to the poultry industry. It was of reasonable size and
health, and then the 'get-rich-quick' methods were applied
unscrupulously. There was no consideration either for the birds or
for the simple folk who thought to make a quick fortune out of
poultry keeping.
It has only taken a matter of ten years or less to bring the
industry so low that Government aid and Government supervision
are called for to put it back into its proper place. If we will only
take this lesson and apply it to the larger industries of food
production, we shall see that the poultry keeper, the fruit farmer,
the dairy and pig farmers, and the arable farmer are all in the same
boat. They are all engaged in the task of pressing Nature beyond
her proper limits, and Nature's reply to this impudent attack, based
upon greed and ignorance, is erosion of the soil, all the
catastrophes of floods, diminishing yields, and increasing diseases.
The poultry industry can be separated from the others and
made to stand out as an example of a universal tendency which, if
persisted in, must bring the world to ruin. We cannot pile
armaments up against Nature; there is only one way of reducing
her to submission, and that is by strict obedience to her decrees.
Do what she wants and you may live. Defy her wishes and you die.
For a long time after you start your defiance she utters her
warnings. Only if you are foolish enough, or obstinate enough, or
conceited enough to disregard them, does she strike. She has
brought vast kingdoms to ruin and is prepared to do so again, if
any of the kingdoms of the world to-day persist in defying her
laws.
CHAPTER VII Ergot in Rye-Grass
IT IS NECESSARY, WHEN DEALING with questions of fact that are
suspected rather than well-established, to proceed with very great
care lest in our haste or enthusiasm we deal unjustly either with
individuals or with established industries. I have borne this truth
constantly in mind in all that I have written. I do not wish to do
injustice to anybody and do not feel that even a crusader is
justified in harming his fellow-men if he can possibly avoid it. I
have the feeling that they will not strive to carry on work that is
found to be harmful to others when once they are certain that the
harm is definite and avoidable. All they need is an appeal to their
best instincts.
I have reason to believe that in some parts of the world, where
the use of artificial fertilizers is of comparatively recent
occurrence, great damage has been done to that important crop,
rye-grass (Lolium perenne), and through rye-grass to animals and
to humans. I would hesitate to say that artificials are the only cause
or even the original cause. I am content to suggest on very sound
evidence that they are a considerable contributory factor, hitherto
overlooked. According to information which, I think, is quite
reliable, the transfer of sick animals from mineralized pastures to
those that the chemist has not contaminated is followed by
complete recovery from the eczema and other troubles that result
from eating the ergot on the grass.
I say again that at the present time the case against fertilizers
in relation to ergot poisoning is, as Scottish lawyers would say, not
proven, but the matter is of such vast importance to farmers and
stock-breeders, and particularly to sheep-farmers, that a very
simple test is called for. We know that wherever rye-grass is
plentiful in pastures that have been heavily dosed with mineral
fertilizers, ergot appears in very large quantities and with
disastrous results. I have heard of stations on which the flock
losses have been counted by the thousand. Now, I suggest that the
best way of testing this matter out would be to run two flocks of
sheep, one on mineralized pastures in which rye-grass
predominates, and the other on uncontaminated grassland, the
areas to be well apart. If the eczema, which is one of the
outstanding features of this ergot poisoning, declares itself on the
mineralized pastures and not on the other, let the flocks change
places. Then, if the sheep that have hitherto been immune suffer
from the poisoning, while the sheep that have been troubled
recover, a sufficient case will have been made out for the
consideration of the authorities and we shall know of yet another
charge that the soil chemist is called upon to meet. A further
valuable experiment could be made by growing rye-grass on two
pieces of ground, one clean and untouched by mineral fertilizers,
and one cultivated by their alleged aid. The extent to which ergot
developed under the different conditions would be a guide to
farmers.
 The problem of ergot has been studied at home and abroad.
Professor John Hammond is one English authority and Professor
Barger, F.R.S., of Edinburgh, is another. Lectures delivered by the
latter to the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have been
reprinted in a book called Ergot and Ergotism, published in
London, Edinburgh and the United States. In addition to these
outstanding authorities there have been contributions by a great
many journalists who deal with agriculture in the American press.
I repeat that the authorities, great and small, the scientists and
those who report their work and put forward evidence, must be
forced to conclude that not only stock but people are being
affected by the troubles in evidence when ergot is dominant in rye-
grass eaten by cattle and sheep. It has even been suggested that
ergotized pastures affect the quality of milk and cheese.
It is, of course, perfectly reasonable that those who are
responsible for the export of food should look askance at
suggestions which, if proved, might even damage national
industries. But if these suggestions are well founded they must be
examined in the interests not only of those who receive the food,
but of those who send it out. Should disease spread one of two
things is bound to happen : either supervision must be relaxed,
with dangerous results, or flock-masters will be faced by very
heavy losses, of which one has already heard disquieting rumours.
It seems to me that no useful purpose can be served by leaving a
festering sore untreated; prompt treatment is called for so that the
trouble may not pass beyond control. Here I am content to declare
that ergot poisoning from infected rye-grass is a real menace; that
there is evidence to suggest, if not to prove, that it develops at a
great pace where the plant is grown on heavily mineralized soil,
while, where soil is natural and uncontaminated, affected animals
recover quickly. I am well aware that this contention has been
disputed; I have reason to believe that unfavourable reports have
been suppressed in quarters where they might prove harmful to
industry. I urge upon one and all the necessity of a wiser and more
impersonal approach to what may be a serious problem. Truth will
out.
It is well, of course, to remember that it is not rye-grass that
has suffered in the past from ergot so much as rye itself. Rye came
into Europe more than two thousand years ago and was grown
extensively by the Teutonic invaders. It spread to England during
the Middle Ages and became the food of the poor. Abroad it is
eaten far and wide; even to-day it is far more in evidence in
Germany and Poland, for example, than wheat. Germany raises
two and a half times as much rye as she does wheat, and Poland
four times as much, while in Russia rye and wheat are fairly
evenly divided, though in England the proportions are less than
100 to 1. Ryes appear to attract ergot, and this dangerous fungus
has been known for centuries, the first known illustration
appearing in a book three hundred years old. Ergot has been
responsible for widespread illness throughout Europe; gangrene
and convulsions have been among the diseases attributed to it, and
in the early eighteenth century we hear of poultry dying, pregnant
sows aborting and horses and cattle becoming ill through eating
rye in which the ergot had developed. In Germany, in 1879, there
was a bad epidemic due to the ergot in the flour, with a mortality
of something like 5 per cent. Some plant pathologists associate the
ergot in rye with the bunt in wheat, and among the curious diseases
resulting from it is what is called St. Anthony's fire, a trouble to
which Charles Dickens refers lightly in Nicholas Nickleby. At the
same time ergot has medicinal value, and before the war the price
was twenty times as much as that of the rye that is its host. Fodder
grasses are easily infected, and ergotized rye-grass is a definite
source of danger. A Shropshire breeder is said to have lost £1,200
in three years from ergotized rye-grass not very long ago, and
more recently in New Zealand, in 1912 to be precise, rye-grass
seed was found to contain up to 30 per cent of ergot and led to
ergotism in cattle. The same trouble has been found in the United
States in Iowa and Kansas. The United States Department of
Agriculture has dealt with gangrenous ergotism in a bulletin
entitled Special Report on Diseases of Cattle.
It seems clear from these facts that the ergot fungus, though it
may have originated in rye, is communicated readily to rye-grass,
and the point we have to consider is whether the stimulation of
rye-grass by the use of artificial fertilizers is or is not responsible
for the grave damage reported in recent years from many districts.
In its time ergot has done great injury to the human race, and
although it has certain uses in medicine, many of these are looked
upon to-day with a certain measure of suspicion. We know that
ergot can produce alarming conditions and intense suffering in
men, women and children, and we know, too, that when flocks or
herds graze on heavily ergotized rye the results are disastrous.
As I have insisted so often, all life is one life. What is
poisonous to man may well be poisonous to beast; if by unwise
stimulation of the soil we make rye-grass a still more suitable
vehicle for the ergot fungus we shall undoubtedly endanger the
farmers' best interests.
The peculiar poison of ergot, known as histamine, has varied
effects. It has been stated on good authority that cows fed on
ergotized pastures may produce milk that is not safe to drink, and
that ordinary rye-grass may become ergotized in a couple of years.
Messrs. Cownell and Hadfield tell us that cattle feeding on
infected pastures become thin and that sores often form on teats
and mouth. I think it is a fact that ergot poisoning has sometimes
been mistaken for foot-and-mouth disease by reason of these
symptoms.
Professor John Sheldon of the Royal Agricultural College,
Cirencester, has said that rye-grass is notably subject to the
ravages of ergot. Mr. F. I. Fomin says that the milk of nursing
mothers receiving ergot had particular effect on the newly born,
shown by drowsiness, loss of weight, and vomiting. Professor
Tansley, F.R.S., editor of the Journal of Ecology, says that rye-
grass at present stands alone in being known to have a fungus
constantly present at the stem apex. He says, too, and this is a
statement to which I attach great importance, that rusts seem to
thrive best on plants “which are in full vigour; a plentiful supply of
nitrogenous food increases susceptibility and plants of rapid
growth suffer most ".
The question at once arises; if we stimulate this rapid growth
by means of mineral fertilizers, do we not increase the production
of ergot? In England, where the ergot problem is not so severe as it
is in other countries, the fungus does not appear until the grasses
are in flower, and consequently does not affect sheep in the spring.
But there are countries where leaves may be found covered with
spores before flowering has started. Even in England the
authorities will suggest rough grazing in cases where scouring
occurs. It is a curious and significant fact that on farms of low soil
fertility where there is no rye there is immunity from the facial
eczema which is symptomatic of ergot poisoning, whereas where
pastures are highly fertilized and perennial rye-grass is one of the
dominant species the incidence of facial eczema has been found to
be very high.
I suggest that all the facts before us at present confirm my
belief that on land that has been artificially stimulated rye-grass
tends to develop abnormally and ergot spreads in a fashion highly
dangerous to cows and lambs. This is a statement of calculated
moderation, but I am prepared to travel further. If our tendency to
increased disease can be traced to the use of 'artificials', I am
prepared to suggest that we should look for others. If the outward
aspects of foot-and-mouth disease are seen as the result of ergot
poisoning, is that necessarily the limit? Is it not possible that
tendencies towards foot-and-mouth disease itself may be
encouraged by mineralized pastures ? At present we are reduced to
theories of an air-borne virus. May not the trouble lie nearer
home? Should we not regard the matter as urgent?
It is interesting to note that nearly three hundred plants have
been discovered that will act as host to ergot which, I am told, has
three colouring matters in it as well as a form of sugar and a
certain measure of fatty oil. Ergot has medicinal value and has
been known to fetch as much as five shillings per lb. when it is of
the best kind and has been gathered a few weeks before harvest.
The principal sources of supply are Russia and Poland, and very
many species of ergot are already known, so that we are advised
that the conditions applying to one country will not necessarily
apply to another. For example, Europe has eight species and
America twelve, and underlying the uses to which ergot has been
put there would appear to be a danger of gangrene; indeed many
cases have been recorded in obstetrical practice. As recently as
twelve years ago Manchester had a small epidemic of ergotism
among immigrants who had been living on rye bread, and various
countries have had to take steps to protect the consumer against
more than a very small percentage of ergot in the loaf. We learn
that 3 per cent will give bread a violet tinge and a characteristic
odour, and that less than .25 per cent is considered the reasonable
limit. In some countries flour that holds more than the regulated
quantity is proscribed, and those who sell it are liable to
prosecution.
In the endeavour to find a use for ergot and to discover its
various qualities there has been an enormous amount of
experiment on living animals, just as worthless in its results as
such experiments usually are and must be. To-day we may be
confident of one fact, and it is that ergot has more danger than
value. If it will act as badly as it is known to do on humans it is
quite natural to find that it should act badly on animals. The chief
difference is that we do not feed animals on rye bread but on rye
grass, and the ergot that develops with this grass is clearly as
dangerous in its way as the ergot that comes on the rye from which
the bread of the poorest of the population is made in Central and
Eastern Europe. We safeguard humans so far as we can by dint of
legislation which every country that produces rye bread among its
foodstuffs is prepared to enforce strictly. It may be—and indeed
there is every suggestion that it will be—necessary to protect
animals against the spread of ergot, and to do this we must
certainly endeavour to find out how far this spread is due to the
unnatural conditions of crop stimulation that multiply rye-grass
and in so doing multiply the dangerous fungus that is its constant
and inevitable companion.
Surely only a fool or an optimist to whom wishful thinking is
second nature can imagine that it is possible to stimulate the
growth of rye-grass without stimulating the fungus associated with
it. And if you stimulate a fungus, the damage it will do does not
proceed on even terms with the growth of the grass. Every disease,
whether of man, beast or plant growth, is a destructive force and
manifests itself in a degree out of proportion to its size. You have
only to look in any orchard or glasshouse or market garden to see
this if your eyes are trained, or to hear the truth from those who are
better able to see. Some of the worst diseases that trouble the
world arise from an ultra-microscopic virus. If, as I hold, the
addition of mineral fertilizers to the soil decreases plant resistance
to disease, is it not inevitable that ergot should spread through
mineralized pastures and that animals feeding on them, as well as
humans eating the food products, should suffer in their turn ? Does
not this theory of plant contamination afford a plausible
explanation and a prima facie case for enquiry ?
I urge all my farming friends to consider this theory, advanced
with due modesty but with a deep conviction founded upon close
observation. I urge them to demand an enquiry by well-qualified
experts into the effect of 'artificials' upon rye-grass. They will be
performing a public service.
CHAPTER VIII From a Farmer to Farmers
I HAVE PLOUGHED A WIDE FIELD both in tropical Malaya and in New
Zealand. My harvesting is over; I have gathered in my sheaves and
now, while I look toward the sunset, I remember how I saw sunrise
on the beginning of my labour. In these quiet evening hours I turn
to consider the lessons that I have learned in the heat of the day
and to see what I can do to lighten the burdens of those who will
come after me, conscious that we all "have but little time to stay
and once departed shall return no more".
Naturally enough my thoughts turn first of all to my brother
farmers, for I have shared their troubles, faced their problems and
enjoyed a life similar to their own. I am deeply concerned about
their welfare and for the best possible reason, namely, that they are
the real salt of the earth and that without their well-directed efforts
that salt must lose its savour.
The problem is not only one of raising food and selling it at a
fair profit in order to live; there is something far larger than that at
stake. The farmer's supreme duty is to hand over his share of
Mother Earth to his successor at least as healthy and productive as
he found it. By the side of this nothing that he can achieve is of
any real moment. We have a certain area of cultivated soil,
nowhere very deep; it must feed one and all and there is not on the
earth the man, woman, or child who can draw the breath of life
without its aid.
Now the question I want to consider with friends known and
unknown is the fashion in which the farmer's heritage can be
passed on unimpaired. The task is one of the most difficult I have
ever undertaken, because I have to enter new territory, unfamiliar
even to me until I was advanced in years and experience. I am not
a man of science; I am merely a farmer of long experience who has
kept as near as possible to Nature as he knows it. But in the course
of my work I have talked with many farmers who felt, as I do, that
our acts of husbandry leave us with many unanswered questions
and that before we can hope to find the answers we must in the
first place realize that all life is one life, and that successful
production of the fruits of the earth depends on a number of factors
that are not within the compass of the eye.
Thousands of years ago, in what are called pagan times,
thinking men realized that the planet is, so to speak, in the care of
the sun, that influences come to the land through invisible as well
as visible rays. When these truths first came to me I began to
understand that the farmer's responsibilities are the most important
in the world. It is up to him so to cultivate the thin layers of the
earth's surface that mankind may live and thrive in the good health
that is the rightful heritage of all.
I was led thereafter to study the nature and incidence of the
diseases that rob man of his birthright, and I came to the
conclusion that the most of them are what is called deficiency
diseases. That is to say, the health not only of man but of animals
too and even of plants, has been adversely affected by events in
recent years. In spite of all the advances in medical science and in
the development of hygiene, the world remains sick, and during
the past few years that sickness has been spreading in a frankly
alarming manner.
Now it does not take long to see from the reports of Medical
Officers the country through that malnutrition is the source of the
great bulk of the human ailments. The spread of disease among
livestock and the spread of troubles in vegetable garden and
orchard are likewise notorious. No scientific institutions—and we
are rich in them—have been able to control these endless
outbreaks. When I first grasped the significance of these growing
evils, with which neither the medical profession, the veterinary
experts, nor the field and garden experts can cope, I began to ask
myself what changes had come over food production and the
treatment of Mother Earth in my own lifetime. The answer was not
far to seek.
Since I was a boy the old temperate pace of agricultural
production had been speeded up violently. Leisure has passed from
the land; the rules of husbandry that experience amply justified has
been abandoned. A wise production is based on a rotation of crops
with a change-over to allow land exhausted by a white straw crop
to enjoy a rest and restore lost nitrogen. This was the rule, and the
result was that humus —storehouse of all fertility—was present in
a proper quantity for the service of the earth-worms and the micro-
organisms that release their latent store of essential fertilizers to
nourish corn, roots, and all market garden crops.
The food then produced came from Nature's workshop, a
healthy soil, and those who ate it in sufficient quantities and with
due regard to proper proportions enjoyed good health. The cow,
the bullock, the sheep and the pig were equally fortunate, and all
manner of insect pests did not attack plants because those plants
were strong enough to resist attack. It looked as though of late a
few factors, widespread but not properly recognized, were working
against life.
Let me repeat my profound conviction that all life is one life, a
spark of the Divine, differing in essence according to whether it is
in the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, or the human. Let me go
further and claim that this universal life has its rules that we dare
not disregard, and that there are processes in Nature with which we
are still too ignorant or too clumsy to tamper, save at our own
imminent peril.
With this conviction I looked round me and saw that what I
take to be the ordinances of Mother Earth were being disregarded
or defied.
In some parts white straw planted in successive years had
robbed the land of humus and all life had gone from the soil. In
others forests had been cut down and drought had followed;
elsewhere neglect of rivers had produced floods.
 Then, as though these evil fruits of carelessness and
indifference had not been enough, men had taken to intoxicating
the earth, to stimulating it with mineral fertilizers quite foreign to
its nature, which were capable of producing crops of unfamiliar
magnitude. When I examined these crops carefully I could not help
being impressed, but after a time my first suspicions that they
could not be good for the land were confirmed. The minerals and
sprays killed the earth-worm, one of Nature's greatest servants;
they destroyed the micro-organisms and gradually affected the
humus that is the very parent of growth. I noted that while these
things were taking place deficiency diseases were spreading
everywhere and that resistance to disease was diminishing in
humans, animals, and green-growing things. Science, battling
untiringly and resourcefully with the effects, was ignoring the
causes; mankind was going in danger first of its health and then
perhaps of its life. I recalled a pregnant statement by that great
thinker, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who had looked upon the sorry scene
with his extraordinary powers of intuition and his deep knowledge
: “The time will come," he had said, “when the people of the earth
will starve in the midst of plenty."
Here, in a sentence, was the clue to the mystery. Mother Earth,
outraged by her exploitation, was giving them what they asked
for—bulk —and was denying them what they needed—vital
quality. And beyond the earth the forces and influences that affect
the soil, the rain, the snow, the dust from beyond our own sphere
and the cosmic rays that are a fruit of the light, were striving in
vain to serve a great instrument that had been handled without
reverence or competence. Neither the rulers of the world nor the
farmers themselves had grasped the truth that agriculture is not
only man's oldest occupation but the most vital and important of
all. I took nothing for granted; I began to experiment in search of
the truth. Forbidding the use of chemical fertilizers on my own
estates I proceeded to prepare compost on the lines laid down by
Dr. Steiner and after him by Sir Albert Howard. I fed the land
under my control with living food, I returned what it had lost in the
form it could assimilate and would welcome, and I saw for myself
that my efforts to find the truth had been rewarded. To-day
compost heaps made after the approved pattern from all the waste
that is too often fed to fires are a familiar feature of my farms and
plantations, renewing the life of the soil, replacing the lost humus,
enabling Nature to follow up her own prescription. The success of
the effort having been beyond question, I sought to spread the truth
and to help the many who had told me how they had been forced
to increase their doses of 'artificials' to produce crops that
diminished steadily and left the land sick. They had incurred a debt
that was bankrupting them. I published two small books, and my
post-bag assumed amazing proportions; from the Old World and
the New men wrote to thank me and tell me of their experiences
which confirmed my observations and expectations. Now I am
making a wider appeal and I may say that I have no wish or
intention to seek any personal gain from it. However this book
sells, not one penny of the proceeds will reach my pocket; I wish
to give, not to receive.
But if I am to succeed, you, my brother farmers, for whom this
book is written primarily, must make the necessary effort to
understand not only the place that the soil plays in the life of the
world, but the influences that touch it from afar. Don't be afraid
because you can't see. You can turn a switch and a voice may
come to you from another continent, but you can't see the ether
that is the medium through which the sound reaches you. Try to
realize the external forces that promote growth and understand that
they can only act on a receptive soil, never on a poisoned one. If I
can carry you with me in this matter I shall have achieved all I
hope for and shall have no ambition left. I shall say Nunc Dimittis
with a grateful heart.
I like to think of life as a transformation scene. When I was
very young—young enough to be taken to a pantomime—I would
look forward past the universal rejoicing that accompanied the
downfall of the demon of the darkness and the triumph of the fairy
of light to the scene that stood between the finale and the
harlequinade. At first the stage was dim and dark; then a front
cloth was raised and there would come a suggestion of change. A
further cloth would be lifted and there could be no further doubt;
cloth after cloth would pass upwards and at last the veritable
fairyland would be revealed. Perhaps my elders, having no
illusions, could not share a thrill that kept imagination alive from
one Christmas to another. Then I grew up and read in Arnold's
Light of Asia:
“Veil after veil will lift—but there must be Veil upon veil
behind."
There are veils for the young, the middle-aged, and the old, but
never have so many been raised for the benefit of humanity as in
my time. We may not have turned the new visions to the best
account, but none the less they have been given to us. What I
desire to stress is that many of these veils have been drawn from
agricultural progress.
We know more than our fathers of the fashion in which the
earth nourishes us. We are beginning to glimpse the forces that
intervene to render her works nugatory. I feel that we who have
farmed, or hope to farm, must study these forces in an intelligent
effort to co-operate with them, not only for sane food production at
present and in the future, but in a whole-hearted manner to remedy
the evils that have gone before. We must prepare to resist the
rifling of Nature's reserves which future generations must be
allowed to share. We owe a debt to those who are to come after us
if we do not wish to be regarded as fraudulent trustees. I insist that
every generation is trustee for the one that will follow it. The
treasures of Mother Earth are not unlimited; they cannot survive a
succession, however brief, of spendthrift generations.
 Never in recorded history has there been such a merciless
exploitation of irreplaceable treasures as the last hundred years
have seen. No one among our leaders has paused to think that the
world can become bankrupt, unable to pay its way because its
assets are exhausted, but this is the condition to which we have
come dangerously near. Coal, oil, gold are not inexhaustible, but it
may be possible to discover substitutes. Humus, on the other hand,
though it can be exhausted to the point at which cultivation fails,
can be renewed by a return to sane methods of agriculture, and
when we can give back to the soil what has been stolen from it, the
people throughout the world can live a healthy life and discover
new media for traffic and barter. No man, not even the soldier, the
sailor, the airman or the statesman can do more for the physical
regeneration of the world than the farmers who give back fertility
to the fields that have been ravaged by mineral fertilizers, yes,
ravaged and rendered worthless for the production of food that can
nourish the people and redeem them from the burden of deficiency
diseases.
Victory or defeat, new boundaries or old ones, progress or
decadence : all these things lose their vast significance for a world
that can no longer nourish man or beast as they should be
nourished.
That is why I say to you, my brother farmers, that your work
comes first in order of importance. Nor are there wanting men with
great knowledge and keen observation who hold that, with the
restoration of natural food to the people of the world, better health
will be associated with more temperate thinking and fewer angry
passions. They go so far as to believe that a long period of peace
and plenty will be among the first-fruits of a sane agricultural
practice, such practice as prevailed as recently as half a century
ago, when the balance between cereal and other crops was
properly regarded and the land was fed from the yards. Compare
the health of the people who had enough to eat of wholemeal
bread, fresh meat, and vegetables with that of those who eat
denatured white bread and flavour it with things out of tins.
Compare the health of the flocks and herds, the health of the plants
upon which agriculture relies, and those that maintain the market
gardener. This comparison can lead to only one conclusion. For
the sake of the world we live in and prepare for those who come
after us we must return to natural cultivation, and we have no time
to spare in returning to it.
Happily the danger is recognized; measures for restoring
Mother Earth to health are being devised. What remains is to apply
them, and the only man who can do this vital, literally vital, work
is the farmer. That is why I am appealing to you to do as I have
done, to start making compost on a large scale according to the
methods set out in these pages and to suffer nothing to be done on
your land that will reduce its capacity to serve you and your
children.
 “Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely, thine also it was
to hear truly." So wrote Carlyle at the end of his masterpiece The
French Revolution. But one does not need to present a masterpiece
to make the same comment.
CHAPTER IX Progress in Agriculture
I CAN REMEMBER when the ploughman guided a heavy wooden
plough with which only the strongest and most muscular of his
sturdy race could cover three-quarters of an acre a day on the stiff
clay lands. I remember when men carried sacks of a weight that is
now forbidden by law; when they faced all weathers and all hours.
But—and this is a point worth remembering—they lived to a good
old age; as a rule it was left to the workhouse to kill them. If we
enquire into the cause of their longevity we find that their wives
bought stone-ground flour with all the vital qualities of the wheat
and that they made their own bread in the faggot-fed brick oven.
The farm worker kept a pig and fed it with all the waste of the
garden, some toppings or middlings, and finally with a little barley
meal. He even contrived to keep a handful of chickens. When the
early autumn or late summer brought harvest, his wife and children
gleaned in the fields cut with the scythe or with a cutter that did
not bind the sheaves; one sack, two sacks, of grain might reward
their labours, and the miller ground it for them in return for the
offals. The family could buy 'fleet', or skimmed milk—there were
no separators then—for a penny a quart and, as we know, even
separated milk retains all the mineral content that builds up healthy
children and suffers no loss other than that of the fat.
Life in the open air; the plainest of simple food, with no part of
its nutriment stolen; vegetables from a garden whose soil the pig
had helped to mend; wayside fruit in season; poached rabbit now
and again; if there was enough to go round the children lived, and
if there was not enough the weaklings died. This was a tragedy,
but it passed unheeded.
There was 'four ale' to be had at the local public-house, an
honest enough brew, half a pint for a penny. If we wish to consider
the agricultural labourer as he lived, suffered, and endured, let us
be sure to give the credit for his endurance where it is due—to
food that none had sought to manipulate to their own advantage.
To be sure, butcher's meat was a rare luxury, but it was never a
necessity to any man, and even those who never tasted butcher's
meat of the dearer kind did not lack fat pork, of which the price, in
the writer's memory, has been as low as fourpence a pound.
I do not defend those times when the farm worker earned
twopence an hour—in fine weather; they were brutal. What I am
concerned to point out is that hard labour, bad lodging, and an
utter absence of holiday or amusement were associated with food
of far higher quality than the farm worker can command to-day,
when his wage has risen 350 per cent and he can claim holidays,
sickness insurance, out-of-work pay, and an old age pension. The
change in the worker's status is indeed considerable, but it is by no
means all to the good.
Agricultural progress has suffered a curious change. The
farmworker's cottage may have its wireless, electric light, and even
water-supply or a stand-pipe within easy reach; the days of the
long journey and a supporting hoop to fetch small quantities of
water from the pump have gone and are unlikely to return. Grocer
and baker and butcher call at the humblest home; the village store
has been reinforced by several shops. It may be that through or
near the village a motor-bus passes to the nearest town, in which
the tilt carts of the old-time carriers are no longer seen. The cinema
has been brought within everybody's reach, and the half-holiday
provides the needed occasion. The daily paper is delivered to every
cottage; there is a Women's Institute or a village hall. From the
superficial standpoint all is well with the village, from which men
and boys go to their work on motor-bicycles or ‘push pedals '.
But there is a subtle and unwelcome change to be noted. The
housewife no longer bakes her own bread, nor if she sought to do
so could she find the old-time wholemeal flour. The baker brings
her loaves made with a pernicious white flour from which most of
the nutritive elements have been extracted in the milling. When her
husband comes home for his evening meal it is not the rough,
simple, but wholesome ‘fry’ of the old days—bread, vegetables,
scraps of meat, of which anything left over would serve for
breakfast; it is something out of a tin. The village shop specializes
in these aids to bad housekeeping; many of them cost but a few
pence, and most of them are those few pence too dear. No need to
make jam any more when you can buy something with an
attractive label that may have thirty per cent of fruit in it if you are
lucky. The list of substitutes for home-made wholesome food
might be prolonged, but no purpose would be served; it is
sufficient to say that the strength of the sturdy farm worker is
being sapped and the national stamina is being lowered.
Not only is the national food supply being raised in
considerable part on a sick soil, but the millers and food
manufacturers are allowed to deal with it as they think fit, without
too much regard to its primary purpose, which is to maintain the
people in health. All this is part of the strange policy that keeps
wholesome fruit and vegetables out of reach of the poorer section
of the people, while forcing market gardeners to plough in healthy
crops and orchardists to allow fruit to fall to the ground and rot
there. Is there anything in the multiplication of machinery and the
forcing process as applied to crops and livestock, large and small,
that can atone for this mad method?
The countryman has one significant saving clause to aid his
life conditions under the new dispensation; he can and still does
grow his own vegetables and he does not dress his garden ground
with chemicals. He digs in the waste, he adds poultry manure if he
keeps a few fowls, though modern legislation has taken his pig
away from him.1 Sometimes he, too, makes a compost heap—
thanks, in his case, not to modern knowledge but to inherited
tradition. He is very concerned for his potato crop and prizes his
carrots, turnips, and onions. Then again, if fruit be plentiful and

1
It is being restored now.
sugar cheap, his wife, if she be one of the more domesticated class,
will probably make rather than buy jam, because she likes to know
what is inside the jar.
Sunshine, open-air work, fresh vegetables, pure whole-fruit
jam and good, cheap, imported meat, together with a certain
amount of milk from healthy cows—if such are available—will go
a long way to atone for the comparatively worthless bread. But
what is to be said for the population of our big towns, living in
overcrowded, sunless rooms and fed on devitalized food from
denatured soils ? Can we affect surprise at the spread of deficiency
diseases?
By a simple appeal to the House of Commons any
Government could pass a Pure Food Bill and take counsel with the
farmers to consider the state of the soil and repair the ravages of
the past half century. If the real need were put before the country
after an adequate investigation by a Commission on which the
medical profession, the farmers, and the Ministries of Health and
Agriculture were represented, there would be none to oppose the
rehabilitation of the soil and the introduction of legislation that
would save the housewife from exploitation.
Here is a simple problem of putting first things first. Of what
use is it for Governments to plan increased production, for
agricultural engineers to devise bigger and better machinery, for
service on the land to be made more attractive, for subsidies to be
given for wheat and sugar beet, for Boards to be established for
milk, pigs and the rest, if the quality of these products is to be
vitiated by a sick soil which we continue to poison or to neglect? I
would like to see a quiet but speedy awakening to the needs and
the rights of the land, but I am convinced that an awakening of
some kind is coming soon, and I pray it may not be too violent.
The man who betrays his country is denounced as a traitor; the
man who betrays every man's country, Mother Earth, is subjected
to no penalties. Qualified engineers can tell within a very few
years the life of a mine; they know it can yield so much and no
more. Why has nobody applied the same kind of calculation to the
earth and explained to the general public that every virgin soil has
so much stored fertility and no more, and that if it is taken without
replacement that soil must die?
I would like to see the abundant resources of the cinema
entrusted with the task of opening the eyes of the blind, and even
bringing home to those who know the truth but not the whole truth,
the facts as they are to-day. Then I would like some man of exalted
vision to picture our planet a hundred years hence if waste and
spoliation were allowed to persist and if the people continued to be
fed on the denatured food that saps energy, resource, and initiative.
Civilizations have come and gone; ours has not been granted any
measure of immortality. When great cataclysms come, when an
Atlantis or Lemuria sinks into the sea, or, to come nearer home,
when a Pompeii is destroyed, there are tens of thousands who are
taken by complete surprise. We who read of these happenings,
some so far away that they are no more than traditional, are apt to
say, “that kind of thing doesn't happen to-day ". They are wrong.
In parts of the world the evidences of disruption are all too clear.
And the amazing truth is that a sane and ordered agriculture could
still save the situation.
Get back to proper acts of husbandry. Alternate corn with
green crops. Feed the soil from the yards. Save everything that will
serve for compost. Stimulate soil bacteria. Cherish your earth-
worms. Learn, and having learned, remember, how trees help
rainfall and hold the land together. Ask the land for what it can
yield without the stimulus of mineral substances. Abolish every
spray that can kill bees or earth-worms. Allow no man to own land
without undertaking that he will respect it. See that all food
produced is living in the full sense and capable of building up man
and beast.
In this fashion you will achieve progress in agriculture, the
most important form of progress in the world since every other
form depends upon this one
CHAPTER X Erosion and the Banks
A FEW YEARS AGO it could be said in England that the 'Big Five'
Banks were, or could be if they desired, the largest landowners in
this country. When the war of 1914-1918 was over, and farmers
were either forced to buy their holdings or did so voluntarily in the
belief that they would make a lot of money, the Banks advanced
the capital that farmers could not find. Then, as we all know, the
Corn Production Act was repealed; prices were allowed to find
their own level and ruin spread through a farmland that had just
savoured the taste of prosperity for a very brief period. It is not too
much to say that the bankers as a class did not wish to hold land as
security, and although there may have been great agriculturists on
their Boards they were not concerned with the handling or ultimate
destiny of the farms apart from the question of profit or loss. One
might think that in their collective capacity they could have
exercised a great influence upon the scope and direction of
husbandry, but there is no evidence to show that the question was
considered.
The decline in soil fertility is not sufficiently marked, the
spread of extensive farming has not been criticized, the
significance of the flight from the land that cannot function for the
sufficient benefit of the agricultural worker is only noted by those
whose interests are directly concerned. Whatever the assets of our
English banks in terms of the land, they are not, I think, being
conserved. Indeed I know of only one bank in the world that has
shown sufficient vision and foresight to take an interest in
agricultural problems.
This is the Bank of New South Wales, a powerful and
progressive institution whose headquarters are at Sydney, whose
London office is in Threadneedle Street, E.C., and whose 850
branches are scattered— spread carefully would be the better
term—throughout Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
The directors of this bank, shrewd, far-sighted business men, have
recognized how soil erosion is undermining the agricultural
production of Australia and how, in their own wise words, this
erosion “involves lasting damage to a national asset".
Their clients, the skilled, hard-working farmers, many of
whom have an acreage of a size quite unfamiliar in Great Britain,
are puzzled and troubled by the spread of erosion, a subject to
which the Government of Australia has not yet devoted adequate
research. So the Bank of New South Wales has issued a spirited
guide to erosion control under the effective title, Conserve your
Soil. In this connection it is doing what I have done with my two
earlier books, The Soil and its Products and Peace with the Soil—
it is supplying copies free of charge to any applicant.
It may be said at once that, whether we judge the publication
as an historical survey limited to two or three sentences at once
brief and valuable, or as a modern guide, it serves a very useful
purpose and one that other banks dealing with other but kindred
troubles might do well to consider.
Few people are aware that the Mayan Empire of Central
America was destroyed by soil erosion and that the bitter poverty
of Northern China's millions can be traced to the same cause. The
exploitation of Africa for crops for the world market, and the
increase of flocks as tribal warfare has declined, have been factors
in soil denudation, though we may be sure that methods of
conservation are practised. Reference has been made to the extent
of soil erosion in the United States affecting hundreds of millions
of acres. Australia has only twenty million acres under crops, not
very much more than the area of England and Wales, which is
returned at well under twenty million acres. At the same time, in
this connection it is well to remember that Sir George Stapledon
says that there are in Great Britain fifteen million acres below the
1,500 feet level that could be made available for grazing, so that
the measure of our use is not the measure of our potentiality, at
least so far as the homeland is concerned.
To-day expert opinion tends to the belief that half the famous
wheat lands of Australia—about nine million acres—call for
erosion control. At present not more than 25,000 acres have been
handled to this end. Already wind erosion on many wheat farms in
the dry areas has removed the surface soil, yields in the orchards
have decreased throughout certain areas, some fruit farms have
been abandoned. Potato-growing areas have suffered diminishing
yields.
"Decent ethical standards," says the Bank's writer of the
publication, "demand that the ownership of land means more than
getting a living for one man for a few years. Land should indeed
be held in trust for future generations." This is plain common
sense; the world would be a better place to live in if this truth were
recognized—a truth I have been striving to present for a long time
past.
The appalling results of our indifference to the conditions
under which land is held provide a strong argument for national
control. In Australia, for example, it is quite clear that the rabbits,
which are a powerful aid to erosion, must be destroyed. They do
not allow trees to grow; they eat the roots of plants, they excavate
the soil to make their warrens.
Only official action can deal with so great a plague as rabbits
have become.
When the Governments of various countries are sufficiently
alarmed by the progress of erosion to take active steps, it is quite
safe to say that they will be forced to control cropping as well as
vermin, and to develop the cultivation of fodder crops.
The second necessity, in the opinion of the author of Conserve
your Soil, is to insist upon contour farming in the skilled fashion
that enables every furrow to check water flowing directly
downhill. This work is also helped by the construction of banks
and ridges across the slope. Illustrations are given to show how
contour banks and contour farming stop erosion.
There is perhaps no need to dwell further on this subject
because, after all, England is not suffering from this form of land
wastage. But it is interesting to note that this great Bank of New
South Wales, which is in no sense an agricultural institution, has
published plans and illustrations to make the method of preventing
erosion as clear and as simple as possible; all the technical
difficulties are explained.
The advantages of strip crops are emphasized. As they consist
largely of perennials such as lucerne, clovers, and grasses, they
serve not only to reduce the velocity of water running down
hillsides, but also to restore the nitrogen of the soil.
Generally speaking, it may be said that the cure for the greater
part of the troubles from which the soil is suffering is correct
husbandry. Already it can be shown that in Australia neglect of
erosion is causing land values to depreciate by as much as £4 per
acre, while where the land has been contour-banked its value has
increased by more than £1 per acre, partly because the valuable
upper soil has been retained and the rain has been held for the
benefit of the crop.
The clearing of trees on steep slopes is another evil that calls
for remedy, because the work trees do in binding the soil is of the
very first importance.
For the saving of Australia's orchards intensive cultivation is
advised. This conserves moisture, and where planting is done on
contours and terraces are built, orchards improve, while green
crops for autumn and winter check erosion and build up humus.
In parts of the country that suffer from wind erosion, continual
cropping with insufficient rotational grazing, coupled with the
burning of stubble, are said to be large contributory factors.
Improvement of pastures and variety of crops are called for,
and the planting of rye-grass is a great help to areas of drift;
whatever the objection, on that score of ergot production, rye is
regarded as the most useful of all sand-binding plants. After rye-
grass, blue lupin, evening primrose, pyp-grass, and marram-grass
are recommended. The result of proper cultivation of agricultural
land is shown by the records of a property in the north-west of
South Australia which is to-day said to obtain a bigger and better
clip from 39,000 sheep than was obtained in previous years from
100,000.
The writer of the book to which I am referring declares that if
trees are to be used to prevent erosion the people of Australia will
have to give proof that they have changed their attitude towards
them. The old Australian farmer's theory was that you cannot have
trees and grass, too. Modern experience shows that without trees
you can have neither crops nor grass.
What I would like to see would be a like regard for agricultural
questions by the Banks in the Old Country. Their interest in the
question must be very considerable. The home position grows
steadily worse. One hears on all sides, even from the followers of
the practice of mineral fertilizing, that the demand increases while
the returns lessen, and it would seem to be of the first importance
that investigation should be delayed no longer.
The Government is the proper authority, but in times like
these, when its best brains are so fully occupied, it is not
unreasonable to suggest that some investigation work might be
carried out by those whose stake in the land is sufficiently
considerable.
In the meantime it must be admitted that New South Wales has
led the way.
How far is soil erosion, whether produced by wind or water,
the fruit of man's neglect, ignorance or greed ? How far has the
reckless felling of timber accounted for erosion ? Man does not
understand, or perhaps he has not understood, the place of forests
in Nature's scheme, but he has not hesitated to destroy them and
often in steep, hilly country where they are needed most. Both in
the United States and in Australia trees have been cut to improve
the grazing, just as in England mineral fertilizers have been
employed to increase the cropping. In Australia the grazing has
been improved temporarily, and then erosion has set in and
travelled to lands previously unaffected. At home English farmers
have produced bigger crops for a while, and then the humus has
failed and even larger applications of fertilizers have been
associated with diminishing returns.
As I see things, the error is one; only the manifestation differs.
The effort is to exploit Mother Earth as though she were a poor
factory hand or a helpless shopkeeper's assistant. The reply of
outraged earth is a terrible one. It says in effect: “You have
misused me for your own selfish ends, I refuse to sustain you. I
will not yield my fruits by which you live; you must seek some
portion of my surface that remains inviolate."
The writer of the Bankers' book condemns two practices
followed in the wheat belt. The first is tree destruction, which
leaves the soil exposed to the wind and no longer held together by
root formations; the other is long periods of bare fallow, which
expose the bare surface of land to the wind. Trees and bushes
which protected the soil have suffered from grazing by sheep and
the sustained attack of rabbits. Vegetation is the best cure for
erosion, but neither rabbits nor sheep permit vegetation to thrive. It
is at least a matter for satisfaction that these truths are at long last
being recognized and that some steps are being taken here and
there to meet the danger.
Now for a moment I pause to point out that we demand about
five years of hard study from the man or woman who desires to
heal sick humans; we do not suffer patients to fall into the hands of
an unqualified practitioner. But we suffer Mother Earth to fall into
the hands of anyone who can buy a part of her and do not
safeguard the world's inheritance.
 The appalling results of our indifference to the conditions
under which land is held provide a strong argument for national
control. Resolute action is an expression of the Australian mind;
where men arc forced to rely largely on their own resources they
become swift and positive. There is no reason to doubt that when
the extent of the present menace and of the fashion in which it
should be met is brought home to the Australian settler, he will see
to it not only that he does what in him lies to check erosion, but
that he brings the facts home to any near neighbour who is
forgetting his duty. Small communities—and numerically
Australia may be so regarded—tend to pull together; they will
unite to meet a common danger.
I am told that a big bank in the United States is doing good
work on the lines of the Bank of New South Wales.
CHAPTER XI Farm or Factory?
THE TENDENCY SHOWN in past years to turn farms into factories must
be resisted for a good and sufficient reason. The factory deals with
dead things; the farm is concerned with life, the life in grain, in
stock, in the earth itself—everywhere the life force is urgent and
resurgent. This life process must constantly be borne in mind.
Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, one of the most notable exponents of
enlightened agricultural practice, says that farm and garden alike
must be regarded as a biological organic unit and that what is
biologically correct will be found to be most profitable
economically. He is a follower of the bio-dynamic method
practised to-day by upwards of two thousand farmers throughout
the world, and by gardeners past numbering. There is nothing
sensational in it; no spectacular profits can be made, but the land,
maintained in health, serves to build up healthy life in man and
passes to the next generation in the condition that fulfils all
Nature's demands. Along other lines to which I have been directed
by the exigencies of my own special duties I have come to parallel
conclusions, confirming these same methods of soil conservation
and food production.
The trouble is that the success of the factory in what may be
called the dawn of the manufacturers' era (it is only a century old)
has led men to believe that if a farm can be run on factory lines it
will give greatly increased returns. Profit, where it becomes the be-
all and end-all, rules and wrecks a startled world. Mechanization,
by destroying the earth-worm, and mineralization, by destroying
the humus, have changed the character of the farm. We increase
the fertilizers in order to maintain production, while plant disease
spreads and insect pests increase. What do sprays and minerals
cost agriculture ? What do they cost the soil? Did the land suffer
from the evils it knows to-day before this stimulation of the soil
was practised ?
Westward beyond the Missouri-Mississippi basin was the
bison prairie that became later, when herds succumbed to ceaseless
and uncontrolled persecution, good cattle pasture. Then came
arable farming, as intense in the pursuit of corn as the fathers of
the farmers had been in pursuit of buffaloes. The nitrogen and
humus of the prairie have declined by 35 per cent since then.
Disaster threatens more than a quarter of this cultivated area of the
U.S.A., which is ceasing to be one of the granaries of the world;
indeed, the States actually bought wheat in 1936. Canada, thanks
to monetary greed in farming, is moving in the same direction. In
the same year, 1936, Sir Merrick Burrell, of the Council of
Agriculture, declared that the fertility reserves in the greater part of
the soils of England and the decline of man power make rapid
expansion of foodstuffs impossible. He found that we do not plant
enough legumes which strike roots deep into the soil and give
effect to soil elements that corn cannot reach.
 The most productive cultivation in the world is the Chinese.
Pfeiffer says that in Shantung two and a half acres will support a
family of twelve, two pigs, a cow and a donkey. Compost is the
law of Chinese agricultural life and mineral fertilizers are
unknown. Exhausted soil is carefully composted, while the lower
soil is enriched with legumes. The great enemy of Chinese
cultivation is the destruction of the forests. The lowering of the
soil fertility in China by deforestation, in North America by over-
cropping, and in Europe by the unlimited and extravagant use of
machinery and artificial fertilizers, is perhaps the most dangerous
of all troubles of the years we live in, and the more dangerous
because it is not recognized.
I do not think for a minute that greed is the only cause of
wrong action. Very often it is pride. A man desires to show what
he can do with his land and his stock. He longs to have the most
prolific pig, the heaviest milk yielder among the county's cows, the
record egg producer among hens. He knows nothing of the
working of natural law on the land and there is no public body
empowered to supervise his acts in time of peace. If he could be
taught to regard the farm as a living entity, as part of the food
supply of the country entrusted to his care, a far better practice
would obtain.
In the days when I was young, commercialism had not laid
hold upon the farm. The agriculturist farmed according to age-old
convention; he respected agreements established by men who were
in touch with the actualities and verities of food production. He
was satisfied with yields that resulted from a sober and correct
husbandry. He worked to improve stock by selective breeding, and
corn by the use of new breeds of seed that were produced by
specialists. Sick soil was unknown, and neither disease nor insect
pests threatened to pass beyond control. Farming was a business,
he had little time for hunting or shooting, though he enjoyed a
day's sport, and if he went to market it was to buy or sell without
fear of rings or combines. He made no fortune, but he travelled
hand in hand with Nature from dawn to dusk.
Even the overworked, underpaid farm-hand was happy until
his strength failed and he was thrust into the prison called the
workhouse. There was no need to supervise husbandry in those
days, save in the interests of the men who did the hard work and
were so mercilessly exploited; the land was protected by stern
tenancy agreements. With the breaking up of estates after the Great
War and the sale of farms to farmers at high prices based on the
short-lived Corn Production Act, man felt compelled to force the
pace of production, and that is why the signs of deterioration have
become so marked in the past twenty years. To-day a great part of
the world's cultivable land may be likened to a sick man in the
hands of a quack.
CHAPTER XII Humus
THE BASIS OF MY COMPLAINT against modern methods of treating the
earth, Mother of us all, is that they tend to destroy the humus
without which plant nutrition is impossible. Before discussing the
nature and function of humus it is necessary to insist that it is
living and, having life, cannot be made by chemists, nor can its
function be usurped by the synthesis of dead chemical substances.
Humus is the name given to a certain living matter born of
plant and animal residues and holding carbon nitrogen and
phosphorus in reserve for plant production; it renders the soil the
'procreant cradle' of plant life. The humus in coal and peat is the
accumulation of countless centuries. The effect of micro-
organisms upon humus is of the utmost importance; they may be
said to stimulate its creative aspect and finally its decomposition,
while informing it with their own substance. But for the action of
micro-organisms, humus would retain its elements; they would not
fructify vegetation, the world would perish. Wherever there are
plant or animal residues, humus is produced; where micro-
organisms act upon humus, growth forces are released. Then they
react and interact, and the life force gains free expression.
With this knowledge—and recent investigation has made it
incontrovertible—no food grower can look without alarm upon
any system of food production that destroys the life-giving agents
of the soil. The properties that make the cultivation of land worth
while are derived from the store-house of humus, a store-house to
which only microorganisms can gain admission. It plays a further
important part by absorbing and neutralizing certain toxic elements
that would arrest plant growth. It does other work of immense
importance, but not calling for mention in a book that docs not aim
at presenting a scientific treatise and is merely a plain man's
warning to his fellow cultivators whose anxieties and varying
fortunes he has shared so long.
Suffice it to record a few of the outstanding characteristics of
humus. It is dark brown in colour, it is insoluble in water, holds a
large proportion of carbon and a large but varying measure of
nitrogen. It is always active, energizes the micro-organisms that
help it to function, modifies soils, forms combinations with some
soil minerals, and supplies nourishment for plant life. It has many
types and forms and serves life, so to speak, under several banners,
but of the vast and overwhelming part it plays on Nature's stage
the modern scientist knows much while not pretending to have
exhausted the subject. Micro-biology is a comparatively new study
of microscopic forms of life in soil; much of our precise
knowledge of humus is due to it. That is to say, while humus has
been known for upwards of twenty centuries, its precise nature has
been studied for only little more than one, and so complicated is
the subject that there are many aspects not yet satisfactorily
examined. But we know enough, more than enough, to understand
that the general attitude towards soil tilth and soil values must be
revised without delay. If much remains to learn, we can formulate
and justify a positive attitude here. At present science can show us
only a part of the total organic constituent of humus. Many other
compounds may be disclosed when methods of investigation have
travelled further. We have to learn the secrets of humus formation
and to unravel the mysteries of its transformation. All we can state
with certainty is that the various forms are making a vital
contribution to the life of the plant growth by which we live, and
that humus must be safeguarded against all further assaults unless
we wish to transplant the Missouri-Mississippi Valley conditions
to our once fertile fields, a danger that is increasing year by year.
To ignore or neglect the teachings in this regard is to hazard the
natural reserves of humus, and to court such a destruction of life as
no conqueror, however ruthless, has envisaged. Apart from this
grave consideration, even a small knowledge of the action and
purpose of humus should, I venture to suggest, give great
satisfaction to the tiller of the soil. He may understand that the
doors of Nature's treasure-house have been opened to him and that
he has been appointed one of the guardians of the earth, not only
for his generation, but for those who are to succeed when he has
mingled his dust with that of his forebears. He can see himself a
guardian of world prosperity, the fundamental prosperity without
which all material success is worthless. I say that the poor man
with the back garden or allotment who tends his plot according to
the rules of good husbandry is an example to his fellow-men,
while he who exploits a vast area is a reproach to them. Why strive
for a fortune in goods and chattels if in making it you are
threatening with deficiency diseases and slow starvation those who
are to be your heirs ? “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he
reap."
CHAPTER XIII Science in the Garden
SIR FREDERICK KEEBLE has been Professor of Botany at Oxford, he has
held high office at the Ministry of Agriculture and later became
director of the Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley.
Now he has written a book called Science Lends a Hand in the
Garden, designed, as he tells us at the close of his work, to
convince the reader that he must engage science as a permanent
garden hand. I hope and believe that, in the best interests of
gardens, readers will be unconvinced. I am sure that they will not
be uninterested, for Sir Frederick Keeble has taken all gardening
knowledge to be his province; he has surveyed the world's gardens
from China to Peru and has mastered all the known secrets of the
gardener's practice. The result is both astonishing and admirable. It
is admirable, because he is able to open new doors and windows
upon the garden scene while he deals with every garden problem
under the sun. It is astonishing, because he makes the kind of
statement that I have ventured to make, and I am an unlettered man
in the scientific sense, and he is a Doctor of Science, a Fellow of
the Royal Society, and many other honourable things. I know how
those who think with me will like the book, I know that they will
find a place on their shelves for it, but I am wondering how his
brother scientists will react to some of the frank statements.
Nothing more hopeful from my point of view has been published
since I began to work on the vast subject of natural food for man
and beast. One chapter after another brings its chuckle and its
thrill. Undoubtedly the author has added to a very considerable
reputation and has exhibited a breadth of view that is quite out of
the common.
The purpose of the book is to tell the story of modern
development in the garden, and the story of the extension of
modern knowledge. It is a fascinating record of achievement, some
of it at least to no end. It is this aimlessness that the author
recognizes and exposes with a charming frankness that will be
received, one fears, with very mixed feelings by those who think
that science has really achieved miracles, and that there never have
been equal records written on Creation's ample page.
One can forget, even if one cannot quite forgive, the kindly
references to iron and ammonia sulphate, to sodium chlorate,
copper salts, zinc salts, nitrate of soda and other inorganic
fertilizers from which every self-respecting garden should be free,
for our author does not take them too seriously. If this is going a
little too far, it is fair at least to state that he has not elevated
inorganic fertilizers to the place of Providence.
“Can it be doubted," he writes, " that there are yet to be
discovered other and even more subtle relations between the soil
and the plant and animal worlds? "
“Can it be doubted that of all problems that should preoccupy
mankind, that of the fertility of the earth is of the most
fundamental importance? "
 When a distinguished man of science writes like this one
would be pleased to regard his association with chemicals as one
belonging to his salad days when he was green in judgment. “We
still know nothing about the origin and nature of the fertility of the
earth," he says, and “science makes such spectacular advances that
those who contribute to them forget how little they add to our
understanding." After confessing, apparently without a blush, that
he uses sulphate of ammonia in place of lime in his compost heaps,
he admits that virus diseases of plants are on the increase, and
remarks caustically, “science assumes that the things it has
described explain the things that happen ". And again : “An
endemic pest of plants is a symptom of bad cultivation." I note that
he recognizes the efficacy of the very small dose of certain
minerals that plants acquire from their surroundings, but he does
not grasp the truth that Nature is a follower of Hahnemann, and
had been following him thousands of years before he was born.
He understands modern tendencies and deals with their
outstanding vulgarity in a pregnant sentence: "Of course, it is only
right and proper in a commercial age to prove all things and hold
fast to that which is cheap." And he recognizes the limitation of the
work that has engaged him through so many years—"we would
rather exercise our imagination in picturing how happier and
healthier we should all be if research could discover how to make
the world more fertile ". This, and much more wisdom, is to be
found in pages packed with the largest results of investigation of
the gardening problem, results gathered by men working with an
intense and praiseworthy assiduity at the task of ploughing the
sand and seeking, as our author has done with open eyes, to
grapple with an insoluble problem.
“The existence of deficiency diseases among plants is now a
well-recognized fact, and one with which gardeners must reckon,"
he says. And "many gardeners are worse off than they need be
owing to neglect to conserve by animal and vegetable refuse
composting, the fertility of the soil they cultivate ". Remember that
this is no follower of Rudolf Steiner or Sir Albert Howard, but a
level-headed, shrewd garden-lover who talks to us from these
pregnant pages. He has studied the Howard method, he has read
about Madame Kolisko's experiments, he has considered the
question of planting by the moon, but does not appear to have
tested them for himself. Of Rudolf Steiner he says nothing—a
notable omission, and one that some of us will regret. We would
welcome his fair and open comment on the anthroposophical
principles of cultivation, because it is clear from his frank
confession that he is true to his convictions and will not fail to note
the weakness in positions he has been so long trained to defend
and to support. You may turn to his pages for a picture of modern
endeavour, always daring, often hasty, diving into the depths as the
pearl fisher dives, and bringing up the oyster shells that must serve
for pearls, since pearls are unobtainable. And he knows, this keen
man of science, how to distinguish between pearls and oyster
shells. "Scientific men are finding out all about the ills that flesh is
heir to—except how to prevent them," he writes, and a few pages
later: "Science assumes that the things it has described explain the
things that happen."
It is unfortunate that he does not accept the theory that food
grown by aid of artificials cannot be so nourishing, so healthy and
so naturally adapted to the human body as food grown in Nature's
way. Here, and only here, he is with the old guard that never
understands and consequently never surrenders. He writes gaily of
sterilizing soil with formalin, chlorinated lime, carbon disulphide,
and sodium chlorate, “the least a death to Nature ". He tells of the
growth of disease among strawberries and tomatoes, of the gradual
degeneration of potatoes and the coming of healthy stocks from
Chile and Bolivia where, one may presume, the soil has never been
infected by the chemist. But nowhere can I find any sign of
recognition of the undeniable truth that all the major troubles of
man, beast, bird, fruit and vegetable have been on the up-grade
since we started to drug the land. “Until recently," he writes, “the
drug habit was confined for the most part to mankind, but now
plants are rapidly becoming victims of it."
So near and yet so far, so near to the link that connects the
world's sickness with the world's intoxication, and yet so far from
being able to grasp and give to the world the saving truth that
would come with so much authority from his lips or from his pen.
Time and again we find investigation coming to the very edge of
the truth and then, when it seems to be coming within its grasp,
turning away. When I am not being lulled by the pleasant sense of
the company of a man who loves gardens, I find myself stimulated
by the sudden hope that this is the voice we have been waiting for,
and in the end I come to the last page of all and find I am still
waiting. Yet I know full well that one should not be disappointed
about what has been withheld, rather one should be grateful for
what has been stated. I do not recall any work written by a man of
standing in the scientific world that shows a more open mind or
makes a franker confession of the limitation of the scientist's
position. If the scientist could come to the garden without bringing
the chemist too, the whole outlook would change. We should learn
much about the marvellous ways in which Nature fulfils her work;
we should be filled with astonishment, even with awe. But the man
with the mineral bag that threatens the humus and the bacteria and
the earthworm cannot possibly be admitted, even though the
scientist walk arm-in-arm with him.
I would like all who seek to spread the truth about the wrongs
inflicted upon the earth in the name of science since the coming of
the Machine Age and the sacrifice of the countryside, to read
Science Lends a Hand in the Garden. They can satisfy themselves
from the mouth of a leading scientist that the hand is a very dirty
one, and that the dirt is not the clean dirt of Mother Earth, but the
offensive, harmful product of the chemical works. This salient
truth is set out with due regard to the proprieties, but with a
definite quality of honesty and charm.
CHAPTER XIV Organic or Inorganic Fertilizers?
THE CONCLUSIONS OF SIR JOHN RUSSELL
SIR JOHN RUSSELL, OF ROTHAMSTED, one of our greatest living
authorities upon the soil and its problems, does not share my belief
that inorganic fertilizers are either bad for the soil or an important
factor in the degeneration of the nation's health in all fields of life.
His experience is so vast and his judgments are so temperate that
any views expressed by him command deep respect, even from
those who cannot accept them. Perhaps those who have been
actively associated with farming in tropical and temperate zones
alike may be forgiven if practical experience of acts of husbandry
has shaped their thoughts. I do not think less of Sir John Russell's
achievements because they do not affect my conclusions; all I seek
here is to examine his views fairly.
An important contribution from his pen appears in the Journal
of the Scottish Department of Agriculture (No. 4, Volume 22,
November 1939). In spite of two or three statements damaging to
the cause I have at heart, I can find in it considerable material for
satisfaction. If all scientists were as modest in their presentation of
opinion the path of the layman would be made much easier than it
is at present. The paper I refer to is entitled Organic and Inorganic
Manures; Their Relative Effectiveness. It is illustrated, provided
with graphs, and is most readable, in spite of technicalities.

He opens his paper, which was written for the British

Association's meeting in 1939, with a very definite statement: "The
oldest and best known method of manuring the land is to give it
farmyard manure, and this is not only very effective but also very
safe." He goes on to say what artificial equivalents can do and to
tell us of the residual effects of farmyard manure. Sir John says
that in bad seasons farmyard manure is better than artificials,
though it is not so good when the seasons are favourable—over the
whole period there has been deterioration in yields—I cannot be
clear from the context as to the source of this deterioration.
Farmyard manure has a better effect on the physical property of
the soil than artificials can claim. Farmyard manure also increases
the moisture content of the soil and the power of holding moisture.
Sir John says that a good market garden must be built up by years
of regular labour and regular dressings of farmyard manure —it
cannot be done quickly. Then he adds that farmers obtain the best
results from farmyard manure and inorganic fertilizers in
combination, but he says nothing definite about proportions.
Where cereals are concerned, wheat on plots fertilized
artificially for ninety years was found to contain as much vitamin
B as wheat grown on soil organically manured. Here I pause to ask
whether vitamin B is all that need concern us. German experiments
quoted by Sir John show that the growth curve of rats was the
same if food fed to them had been grown by aid of artificials or
organic fertilizers. Here again I would like to point out that rats
will thrive on food that will starve a man, and I believe, though I
speak without the book, that rats experimentally fed on wheat have
died of malnutrition. Sir John adds that fruit grown with artificials
in West Australia and South Africa is inferior in thriftiness and
quality to food grown with the aid of farmyard manure. He goes on
to tell us that farmyard manure supplies nitrogen and potash to the
plant, and humus to the soil, and that this humus improves the
granular structure of the soil and its power to hold water for the
plant; no such claim is advanced for mineral fertilizers. He tells us
that no organic manure has been found where the nitrogen has
higher value than in nitrate of soda, and a question arises in my
mind at once as to whether the extra dosage benefits the soil or
merely increases plant bulk. He thinks that compost is of greatest
use in tropical countries where labour is cheap and farmyard
manure is often burned for fuel. But after noting the Indore system
he makes no reference to Steiner, and of Sir Albert Howard's
methods he remarks that “as a maker of manure the human being
is almost devoid of agricultural value ". This statement justifies
those who follow Steiner in rejecting human refuse. There is no
evidence that sewage sludge possesses any special virtue in
increasing soil fertility or improving the health or feeding value of
the crops.
These are, I think, the salient points in Sir John Russell's
paper, and they must be of special significance to those who think
as I do, for the author is the Director, the universally respected
Director, of the Institute that follows the century-old teachings of
von Liebig and the practices introduced by John Bennet Lawes
who inherited the Rothamsted estate and brought in Joseph Henry
Gilbert to work there with him so far back as in 1843. It will be
remembered that when Lawes and Gilbert died within a year of
each other Sir Daniel Hall became director and was succeeded by
Sir John Russell in 1912. The work done at Rothamsted, now the
property of the Trust created by J. B. Lawes, has been the
foundation upon which the use of artificial fertilizers stands.
One hundred years ago little was known about the nature of
plant requirements. What might be called the chemical aspect has
been studied since then, and it follows that Sir John Russell, in
succeeding Sir Daniel Hall, has become the guardian of the
Rothamsted tradition and the protagonist of the methods
employed. Artificial fertilizing as a system could not have a
supporter with higher qualifications, and now after a hundred years
of experiments, all of which must be familiar to him, the best he
can say for chemical fertilizers is that, with the aid of farmyard
manure they are of benefit to the crops, that they do not reduce
vitamin B1 in wheat, and that rats are not badly affected in any
way by eating food raised by their aid. If men were rats there
would be nothing more to be said, save the suggestion that the
experiments in feeding should be prolonged over a considerable
term and that in any event they were not carried out at Rothamsted.
But, after all, rats will thrive in a sewer, and nobody will suggest
that men and women, or even cattle and sheep, can hope to do so. I
confess that I need something more than the evidence of rats and
so, I imagine, does Sir John Russell, who has merely given us such
facts as were to hand.
It is, of course, quite clear that as the representative of the
great Foundation he will be its best defender, and it is in the light
of his acknowledged position and standing that the admissions of
this paper that I have read and re-read become of such outstanding
importance to those who think as I do. I cannot help feeling that
the bonds that tie the farmer to the chemical bag and, as I see
things, threaten national and international well-being are, if not
actually breaking, becoming looser than they have been for many
years past. Admission is made in this remarkable paper that, in
addition to the known chemicals, plant growth demands boron,
copper, manganese, zinc and iron and that all these are present in
farmyard manure. Furthermore, we are told that farmyard manure
may increase the availability of the essential elements, for example
iron, in calcareous soils. Does not this amount to an
acknowledgment that Nature knows her business and looks after it
? Is it not a justification of the belief that some of us hold that the
cosmos has the earth in charge and feeds it with mineral-bearing
dust, perhaps through the food that animals eat and return in due
Course to the soil, wrought on we know not how!
The fact that the plant demands small doses, homoeopathic in
quantity, of minerals that cannot be applied effectively in large
amounts was unknown to our fathers. It is a discovery of recent
years and emphasizes the truth that Nature works like a great artist
rather than after the fashion of a half-trained mechanic. This is one
point of great importance in dealing with the man who relies on
inorganic fertilizers, but we who think that artificials are a
misfortune to agriculture must feel indebted to Sir John Russell for
very many valuable admissions made in the course of his address.
I have pointed them out already, but they are worth repetition
and emphasis as coming from the head of the Rothamsted Institute.
What has he to say in favour of organic fertilizers and what has he
to say for inorganics? Let us see how the statements stand when
tabulated for easy reference by those who are interested.
Of the first he says:

1. Farmyard manure is very effective and very safe,

2. Farmyard manure provides the best known method of
manuring the land,
3. Farmyard manure is relatively better than artificials in bad
seasons,
4. Farmyard manure builds up soil particles better than
artificials can,
5. Farmyard manure influences favourably the moisture
content of the soil,
6. Farmyard manure is the only medium for building up a
good market garden soil.
7. Farmyard manure is the only one of the common organic
manures that is effective for the making of humus,
and is not needed so much to-day because of the
shrinkage of the arable area (italics mine),
8. Farmyard manure helped growth of mangolds in a very dry
Summer and showed a marked superiority over
artificials. (This superiority is illustrated by a
photograph.)

Now let us turn to artificials:

1. Sulphate of ammonia has twice the nitrogen value, direct

and residual, of farmyard manure,
2. In good seasons artificials are relatively better than
farmyard manure (Broadbalk experiments),
3. In practice it has long been recognized that farmers obtain
their best results by using judicious combinations of
farmyard manure and inorganic fertilizers,
4. Vitamin B1 in wheat is present equally on land treated with
artificials and with farmyard manure,
5. No organic manure has been found in which the nitrogen
had a higher value than in nitrate of soda,
6x. Sulphate of ammonia has given better results than poultry
manure on runner beans (4%), potatoes and kale, but early
potatoes show a marked preference for the organic dressing
(28%).

Here we have nine points for farmyard, five for artificials, and one
(6x) divided between the two.
Now I am just a layman who has cultivated thousands of acres,
not without success, and when I ask myself quite dispassionately
to consider Sir John Russell's facts and figures I cannot avoid the
thought that, as the most skilled defence for ‘artificials' that can
possibly be put forward, there is nothing in the claims that need
concern gravely the man who prefers to follow Nature's way. It
was no part of Sir John's task to consider composting by the
Steiner method, even though he has disposed of the claims of
sewage—claims that Steiner repudiated. He did not turn to
consideration of the state of health of man, beast, bird, tree and
vegetable, or the increase of disease that has followed chemical
fertilizers like a rear-guard. Perhaps it was not necessary that he
should just then, though I cannot help hoping that the time may
come when he will, for his views are sure to be authoritative. He
has written enough in this paper to encourage those of us who
believe that a sane and balanced agriculture of the kind that our
Government calls for—in times of crisis—can be maintained only
by close observance of Nature's laws, the laws that the chemist has
violated, doubtless with the best intentions, for a hundred years.
It would be a fine thing for agriculture if Rothamsted, which
has all the time and facilities for prolonged research, would study
the qualitative results as well as the quantitative ones of organic
and inorganic manuring over a term of years with the aid of more
sensitive subjects than rats. The great Institute at Harpenden led
the way a hundred years ago. There is no reason why it should not
lead again, and this time along a safer road, taking due note of
work that has been done along unfamiliar lines.
I remember reading of a certain beleaguered city many years
ago, and often since:

“Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom
delivered the city."

As I see it, this story in its modern setting, the poor man is Rudolf
Steiner, whose wisdom will never be lightly denied by those who
have studied it, and the city is that of those who produce food for
all the world.
CHAPTER XV Confession
THERE IS LITTLE TO BE SAID in
praise of the conditions brought about by
war. They are grim and terrible enough, but out of the depths of
change a truth will emerge that might else have remained hidden.
There was a noted High Court judge who flourished in the days of
Queen Victoria; one of his obiter dicta was “truth will leak out,
even in an affidavit". I am content to point to the truth, equally
startling, published in an official document issued by the Ministry
of Agriculture soon after war broke out (Oct. 3rd, 1939). I quote it:

THERE IS POTASH ON THE FARM

Since most of our potash fertilizers came from Germany this
particular fertilizer is likely to be in short supply. But farmers need
not worry unduly. The same thing happened in the last war and we
got along remarkably well without it. Cereals do not normally
require much potash. The shortage will be felt most by such crops
as sugar beet, mangolds, potatoes and the legumes such as clover,
lucerne, vetches, peas and beans, especially on certain light soils.
Until 1890 potash salts were unknown to farming use; up to
then the manure heap did what was necessary. Farms working on
the four-course rotation can still do with little bought potash if
plenty of dung is made, for the animal retains little of the potash
contained in feeding stuffs. Hay, straw and roots contain relatively
a large proportion of the potash removed from the soil by them,
and if these crops are consumed on the farm where they were
grown, much of the potash will be returned to the land through the
manure.
But the manure heap must be adequately protected from heavy
rainfall. The liquid manure must also be saved, for this contains
much valuable plant food. It may be saved by collecting in tanks or
other containers, or by using plenty of litter to absorb it. The liquid
manure can be applied direct to the land, or by soaking it up in
some absorbent material such as compost or peat moss.

STILL MORE SOURCES

Other sources of potash on the farm are the leaves of root
crops or crop residues. Mangold leaves, for example, are
comparatively rich in potash. The leaves should be spread evenly
over the soil and ploughed in. The potash released by their
decomposition should suffice for a succeeding crop of anything
else. Potash in considerable quantities is also stored in the roots
of crops, especially in clover leys and grassland, and this should be
borne in mind when deciding on the cropping for the coming
season.
Those who live near the coast can meet any potash deficiency
by liberal applications of sea-weed. 'Broadweed' can be used after
rotting in heaps, but 'grassy weed' and 'tangle' should be dried and
burnt. A ton of 'broadweed' should yield 20 to 30lb. potash
(enough to manure quarter to half an acre of potatoes), while good
quality ash may contain 16 per cent of potash.
In inland districts potash may be obtained from brushwood,
sawdust, weeds, bracken, hedge trimmings, damaged straw and
fallen trees. They should be collected and burnt and used in
gardens for such crops as late potatoes, parsnips, carrots and spring
onions. Bracken ash only yields about 2.5 per cent potash, but
hedge trimmings and waste cavings each give 10 per cent. Flue
dust from saw-mills and smelting furnaces gives about 10 per cent
also. These ashes must not be exposed to rain.

FINALLY . . .
There is also another method of obtaining potash, specially
applicable where high farming has been practised and large
quantities of potash salts and cake-fed dung used. In such cases
potash has probably accumulated in the soil and it can be released
by applications of dressings of agricultural salt or lime.
Lime is usually preferable to salt on heavy soils; salt would be
more useful on light soils rich in reserves of potash. Salt would be
more generally suitable for mangolds, lime for leguminous crops.
Neither lime nor salt supply potash; they only set free potash
already in the soil.

So in a few lines we are assured that one of the artificial

fertilizers of which the use has been encouraged for fifty years is
not really necessary, and that Nature can supply it without calling
upon the chemist! I suggest that others are equally unnecessary in
a healthy soil, i.e., one that is fed by organic fertilizers after the
older fashion, or by the carefully prepared composts of to-day. But
I fear if people had protested against the use of imported potash
only a couple of years ago, they would have been greeted with
nothing kinder than a smile of contempt for ignorance. Even now
if we point out to the average man that the atmosphere can supply
the healthy plant with growth-promoting minerals in the
proportion the plant can assimilate advantageously, the same
contempt, kind or unkind, would be our portion. But if they can
only be persuaded to do without the potash from the chemical
works anything should be possible, for the place of potash in the
soil is assured. So is that of other chemicals, so gently added and
yet so necessary that, if Nature should withhold them, deficiency
disease must supervene. The truth is that Nature's prescriptions are
infinitely delicate and are administered, from the quantitative
standpoint at least, in homoeopathic doses. Only a very highly
trained man with great perceptive faculty and special machinery
for diffusion in minutest fashion could approach the method that
Nature employs. At best they understand and make no attempt; at
worst they treat the fields and gardens as lifeless things that
nothing can defile.
Now the Ministry of Agriculture has lifted a corner of the veil
that hides the truth about the artificials that are miscalled
'fertilizers ', and in so doing has deserved well of the farming
community.
Those of my friends who are old-fashioned enough to read and
love the words of Charles Dickens as I do, will remember how
Oliver Twist in the workhouse days of his youth went up to the
master, basin and spoon in hand, and said : “Please, sir, I want
some more." More than a hundred years have passed since that
episode was recorded, and now I find myself following Oliver
Twist's example with an official notice in place of basin and spoon
and metaphorically, rather than literally, I approach the Ministry of
Agriculture and say: “Please, sir, I want some more. I am not
asking for gruel, I am asking for further information about the lack
of real necessity for the chemicals that are called ‘fertilizers', and I
want to know why your officials of the Ministry have stopped
short at the potash fertilizers."
When I have tried to persuade some of the more obstinate of
my fellow-farmers that they should rid themselves of what I might
call the 'artificials mentality', how often they have said to me:
“Anyway, you can't object to potash; we can't do without that, no
growth is possible unless the land has potash," and when I have
stated my conviction that Nature supplied the soil with the
necessary potash for millennia before the first chemical works
appeared on its surface they remained unconvinced or convinced
against their will. And as we learned in the schoolroom :

“A man convinced against his will

Is of the same opinion still."

Now that we no longer desire to buy German potash salts we

are told that they are not necessary, and if Chile proves to be too
far away to serve as a source of chemical supply I am well
convinced that we shall receive due notice that her nitrates can be
dispensed with. It may well be that sulphate of ammonia is not a
necessity if it is not readily available. Speaking from my own
experience I know that none of these destroyers of humus,
bacteria, and earth-worms are sought by any self-respecting soil,
but then I am no more than a voice crying in the wilderness, and
even though a few other voices have been similarly occupied of
late years the sound does not travel nearly far enough across the
farmlands of my country. But if the Ministry were to raise its
powerful voice it might be possible to save space on cargo vessels,
to reduce outlays and put a period to the poisoning of those fields
on which we are asked to work as hard as we know how in order to
raise as much as is possible of the food we need. So with the
circular of October, 1939, in one hand I go to the Minister of
Agriculture and say to him boldly, “Please, sir, I want some more."
 SECTION III
THE ROAD TO SECURITY
CHAPTER 1 The Non-Stop Soil of China and Japan
“A TRIUMPH OF COMPOSTING "
HUMANITY'S FIRST TASK is to feed itself. It can get food only from the
soil. In so far as the soil is exhausted by the process of extraction,
it has to be manured or it would die. Here we have the basic
machinery of nutrition.
In the first instance the soil is fertile, and the alternative to
renewing its strength is to break into unworked land. This provides
a short cut to food supplies, but there is not enough soil on the face
of the earth to enable the world to live indefinitely on soil capital.
It follows that conservation of natural resources is the primary
duty of man. Should he neglect it for long he must starve.
Now in the old days, before Christianity was known, and in
the times when the early Briton went about with no other garment
than a coating of woad could provide, China, Japan, and Korea had
already solved the problem of food production. To-day, or rather
only thirty years ago, there were three people to the acre in Japan,
while China, for all her vast area, could claim only about one man
per acre, if we exclude areas that cannot be cultivated.
The average of certain Chinese holdings shows 2,000
consumers and 400 transformers (that is to say, livestock) to every
square mile of cultivated land. In parts of China from two to four
crops in the year are raised on the same ground, and it is not
uncommon to see three different crops being raised simultaneously
on one field. To-day, after thousands of years of experience in
food production, China is not widely affected by mineral
fertilizers, but of late Japan has surrendered to the lure and is now
using super-phosphate in large quantities. How far she will extend
this departure from ancient method and what the result will be, it
is, of course, too early to say.
Now we are face to face in the Far East with a curious
problem, because China, Japan and Korea alike rely for their
manure upon the human as well as the animal population, and
there are some who think that this practice might be safely imitated
in Europe. Those who have read Victor Hugo will remember that
he devotes a considerable section in one of his most famous novels
to rebuking his fellow- men for wasting the natural human
fertilizer. Dr. Rudolf Steiner, on the other hand, opposed its use on
various grounds unless it is first burnt and it may be suggested—
indeed I have heard the suggestion put forward—that what will
apply to the East does not necessarily apply to the West.
I recall an experiment in Australia for making fertilizer out of
human waste that failed conspicuously, and I have come to the
conclusion after long and anxious consideration of all the aspects
of the case that only a limited use is permissible and that in form
of a well-prepared compost. Direct application to the soil is, I
venture to think, undesirable and dangerous.
In China, so far as I have been able to find out, all waste is
collected, guarded against the weather and subjected to six months'
preparation. So far as the people of the country are concerned, they
have certainly not suffered. We have to remember that a great part
of the population lives on vegetables, a little pork or fish being the
only addition to the boiled rice, the salted cabbage or turnip, and
the many vegetable sauces, and a curious fact which nearly every
traveller will support is that the average Chinese land-worker and
his family, although their labours are unending and the results of
their work quite trifling, judged from a European point of view, are
all healthy and happy.
So valuable is land in the Far East that you find roads in Japan
kept to the narrowest dimensions in order to avoid waste of
ground, while the Chinese gardener can earn 10/- a week at the
low prices prevailing there on less than one-tenth of an acre.
After anything between thirty and forty centuries of close
cultivation the land of China and Japan is still fertile, flourishing,
and capable of bearing the immense burden which it is called upon
to support, while in three generations the agriculturists of the
United States have exhausted vast areas of virgin soil and left them
worthless and dangerous. The Americans have had the advantage
of the latest machinery, the most up-to-date methods and all the
social services, but the problem before their rulers is one no man
need envy. A like problem has come to Canada and has even made
its first appearance in Great Britain where, at present, we have no
land to spare in view of our commitments, though Sir George
Stapledon says we have 15,000,000 extra acres below the 1,500
foot contour that would make first-class grazing. Now, when we
come to consider the enormous achievement of Japan, China and
Korea, we find that for thousands of years, so far as we can learn,
the whole maintenance of the soil has been achieved by the aid of
compost. Compost has given Southern China two rice crops a year,
together with cabbage, rape, peas or beans as third or fourth crops.
The land has been thoroughly well worked, of course, and labour
has been easier to come by, for the Chinaman who gets the
equivalent of 6d. a day in the rural areas can look after himself.
Then, all over the country there are fish-ponds, also fertilized by
human waste which is deliberately catered for, and the work of
food production follows a close tradition of great antiquity and one
that has kept the Far East alive. The Chinese labourer who can
earn £5 a year and his food is regarded as well off, and poverty as
we use the term has not kept the people from a strict rule of
honesty and an extraordinary development of manual skill.
Dr. King, in his fascinating work, Farmers of Forty Centuries,
a book written for the American reader but published in England
and twice reprinted by Jonathan Cape, writes of the vast efforts
that China has made in centuries past to control the destructive
work of the rivers by digging canals, diverting waters and carrying
deposits of silt and organic growth upon the fields. It is the
Chinese system of canalization that has reclaimed and redeemed so
much land, and although floods are still one of the gravest dangers
with which China is threatened in peace time, the work of keeping
the waters in control has been going on for thousands of years. We
read that in the year 2255 B.C. the Emperor Yao appointed "The
Great Yu" as Superintendent of Works and gave him the task of
draining off the waters that floods had left, and canalizing the
rivers. Thirteen years were given to this work by “The Great Yu"
who afterwards became Emperor. The river Hwang-Ho is known
as "China's Sorrow" and "The Scourge of the Sons of Han", and
the construction of the Grand Canal went on for centuries.
"Canalization," says Dr. King, “has been a matter of slow, gradual
growth, initiated and profoundly influenced by the labours of
strong, patient, persevering husbandmen." It is calculated that the
total area of fields graded to a water level in China must amount to
over 100,000 square miles, and the terrible erosion that is common
to certain Southern and South Atlantic States of the U.S.A. has
been prevented.
It will be seen, then, that the labours of the farm-workers of
the Far East have been called upon to execute are of a most
extensive and difficult kind.
We have to remember that China is a poor country and that her
400,000,000 people must be fed. It follows that prices are
extraordinarily low. I take a few from a list that Dr. King
published; they are not, of course, quite up-to-date, the author is
dead and there is no evidence that they have been revised recently:

White Cabbage 1d. per lb.

Yellow Beans rather less.
Pea Nuts, Ground Nuts and Cucumbers round about 1½d.
Shelled Maize ½d.
Windsor Beans less than 1d.
Carrots ½d.
Long White Turnips ¼d
Artichokes a little over ½d.
Garlic just over 1d.
Large Bleached Celery 1d.
Ginger Roots rather less.
Spinach ½d.

There may have been changes, they are not likely to be

important. When we get to other food we find ducks' eggs 4d. a
dozen; hens' eggs rather less; pork 4d. per lb.; goats' meat not quite
so much; hens, by live weight, 3½d.; ducks, by live weight, 3d.;
and cockerels about the same price. Dr. King saw two good-size
roosters, weighing three lbs. each, sold for 1/8 the two.
When we come to consider the feeding of 400,000,000 people
largely on vegetables, we can see that an enormous measure of
fertility is absolutely essential and that no possible waste of soil or
resources can be permitted. When we come to look into the
method we find it is compost, compost, all the time and all the
way.
The vegetarian instinct of the Chinaman is supported by his
own study of the cost of producing meat. Oxen, as the Chinaman
has known for centuries and Rothamsted has known for
comparatively few years, destroy outright nearly 60 per cent of the
dry substance eaten and this passes off into the air just as wood
burns to ashes. Excrements account for 36½lb. out of 100lb. of dry
substance; only 6.2lb. is stored as increase. With sheep the stored
increase amounts to 8lb.; with pigs 17½lb. Hence only 4lb. in 100
of dry substance eaten by cattle is available as human food; only
5lb. of dry substance taken by sheep and 11lb. from pigs. Now we
know in the light of our modern research why it is that the Chinese
people long ago discarded cattle as milk and meat producers and
remain content to use sheep chiefly for their skins and wool, while
pigs, because they are the most productive of the four-footed
domestic animals, have been retained. Then, again, the Chinese
use succulent forms of vegetables which, because they have a
higher digestibility and a higher nitrogen content, compensate for
the loss of meat.
Dr. King points out that by devoting the soil to growing
vegetation which man can directly digest the Chinese save
absolutely 60 per cent by waste of the animal, while returning their
own waste to the field for maintenance of fertility.
The labour that the Chinaman gives to his fields must be seen
to be believed; nothing is wasted. Even the used-up straw thatch
from the roofs is spread on the fields for a fertilizer, and from the
canals as much as 100 tons of mud per acre may be distributed.
For lime they use the shells of large snails, and so close are their
studies that they have found out that soil from the mulberry
orchards improves the rice crops and that soil from the rice fields
helps the crop of mulberries. But when you tell the average
Englishman that by growing nasturtium among his apple-trees he
improves their quality and their resistance to disease he only
laughs, and when you tell him that horse-radish grown along with
potatoes improves the crop he looks upon you as a mental
deficient. Yet I do not hesitate to say that these relations between
growing things are of the utmost value and that in time to come all
the information that lies in obscure corners of the world and in the
minds of a few students will be tabulated for the use of one and all.
Dr. King watched the building of a compost stack of clover
and canal mud. The mud, which was thin, had been brought up
from the canal. Piles of freshly cut grown clover were spread on
the mud, and as the mud had been brought up some time
previously and was dry it was reduced to a consistency of a thin
paste by water from the canal. The stack was built layer by layer,
each layer of clover saturated with mud and tramped solid with the
bare feet. He found the completed compost stack measured 10ft.
by 10ft. on the ground, was 6ft. high and must have contained
more than 20 tons of green compost. During twenty or more days
this green, nitrogenous organic matter was permitted to lie
fermenting in contact with the fine soil particles of the ooze with
which it had been charged. “Here," he points out, “we have an old-
time application of a fundamental principle only recently
discovered in the West, namely, the power of organic matter,
decaying rapidly in contact with the soil, to liberate soluble plant
food."
In the West, whether we think in terms of the United States or
of Great Britain, the composting methods of China would not
involve the terrible hard hand-labour that prevails in the Far East,
for there labour has to live and that is the way of living. So careful
are the Chinese in making use of everything to produce food that
when fields are flooded preparatory to planting rice and the worms
are forced to the surface in enormous numbers large flocks of
ducks are driven to the fields to feed upon them. Then again, for
the potash which is essential to food production the Chinese and
Japanese alike use all the ashes of their fires; they burn wood (pine
bough fuel being a very important element), and the ash average is
4 to 5 per cent. Dr. King reckoned that the fuel ash for Japan
amounted to 14,000,000 tons annually, carrying 7,000 tons of
phosphorus and ten times that amount of potassium, and this was
returned annually to the land. In China it is reckoned that the
return would amount to eight times that sum.
It is said that in a single year the Chinese farmers apply over
23,000,000 tons of compost to their soil, nearly two tons per acre
of cultivated land, and this without fish fertilizer. In the long run
both Japan and China may be said to return to the land as much
nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium as they take from it, and the
medium for this return is compost all the time. Some of the facts
are remarkable. In Shantung, Dr. King found 12 people living on
2½ acres and 10 people living on 1¾ acres.
So carefully have the people of the East guarded their food
that it is possible to-day to see men driving herds of sheep and
goats down a path with cultivated land and crops on either side,
and the animals will go along without turning to take a bite. Even
the water buffalo will not take crops on the edge of the field on
which it is grazing.
It is well to consider the work of these Far Eastern people who
have lived on the same fields for thousands of years and have left
them as they found them, in point of fertility. Then turn to look at
land in the United States and Canada, in New Zealand, South
Africa and, unfortunately, in our own homeland, too. You find that
in the course of a single century man has wilfully impoverished
sufficient earth surface to keep millions of contented workers in
food and health. What is still more unfortunate is that he is actively
engaged in poisoning a considerable part of such residue as is left
to him.
The Japanese gardener can bring up his wife and family on a
little over a single acre and he can keep it fertile with the compost
of the city waste, animal manures, mud from the drains, fuel ashes,
and sod. He turns his compost heap three times in sixty days and it
is fit to use. It is impossible to say that there are no signs of
European degeneration in Japan because there is a big movement
from the country to the town, and people are being forced by
taxation to stimulate their land unwisely, but we may still say that
all the Mongolian races together, tilling not less than 800,000
square miles, have maintained a population of 500,000,000 in
comparative health and, so far as the work is concerned, in
happiness. Here is a most encouraging lesson for those of us who
are tempted to despair of agricultural progress when we see the
dangerous and undesirable forms it has taken in the past few years.
There is enough unattended soil in all the countries, sufficient
land that even erosion has spared, to feed the people while we
bring back the damaged surfaces into a condition of health and
productivity. We shall have to go back to study the wisdom of the
ancients, we shall have to remember that some of the greatest
discoveries of the scientists have been anticipated for centuries by
simple tillers of the soil who have been far closer to nature than
any agricultural college, however advanced, and any laboratory
worker, however skilled. We should do well to revise some of our
modern beliefs in the light of old faiths that have worked with
advantage, in order to avoid some of the modern mistakes.
CHAPTER II The Teachings of Dr.
Steiner
I HAVE ALREADY SAID SOMETHING about what we call the Steiner
method, after its founder, the celebrated Austrian philosopher
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Brought up on his native countryside
in touch with all the actualities of farm life, Steiner became a
teacher of Spiritual Science and took up farming questions towards
the end of an all too brief life. The method to be discussed is based
upon the philosopher's teachings, of which very little is known
outside the circle of his followers. He published many works
dealing with Spiritual Science and the development of mankind's
less familiar faculties, but he published no book about agriculture,
and was content, in response to urgent and repeated requests, to
deliver addresses to farmers on Count Carl von Keyser-ling's estate
at Koberwitz, in Silesia. The Count, a cousin of the author of the
remarkable Travel Diary of a Philosopher, helped the movement
at a time when it had few followers. Fortunately some record has
been preserved of these addresses, and it is to be hoped that in due
course they will be given to the world, for they assume an ever-
increasing importance as our agricultural conditions deteriorate
and men look for guidance to some system in harmony with
Nature.
It is not necessary to accept any outstanding man's teachings,
unless they answer to some inner conviction of our own, but it is
most inadvisable to disregard them or to forget that our inability to
respond to what we are taught may be due to the teacher but may
also be due to the pupil. The one thing that must attract both
friends and foes is the fearless way in which Dr. Steiner
approached his subject. He did not palter with principles; he would
not make concessions in dealing with what was to him the truth!
He did not mind how deeply he stirred deep-seated convictions
and established principles if he knew that both were false. At the
same time he was always more the friend and counsellor than the
dogmatic teacher. He never sought to impose his beliefs, it
sufficed him to express them simply and sincerely. There was
nothing in him of the doctrinaire. In the lectures at Koberwitz he
laid the foundations of a great structure, attracting the attention of
men who have striven ceaselessly to put his principles into
practice, with the happiest results. His capacity to take big views,
whilst others were content with small ones, is the outstanding
feature of these addresses from which I have gathered the views
expressed here. In all his addresses he showed himself modest and
free from assumption; he invited questions and showed, in
answering them, that his principles were susceptible of the widest
application.
“Agriculture," he told his listeners, “must not be subjugated to
the social economic principles practised to-day and, indeed, no
man is entitled to discuss the implications of agriculture unless he
has mastered the first principles of that practice, since it is only out
of practical consideration that agricultural policy can be
successfully devised." For him the economics of agriculture, as set
out by professors of economics, had no intrinsic value. They
appeared to him to deal with narrow and limited objectives and
not, as he held they should do, with effects and influences from the
whole universe. “We shall never understand plant life unless we
bear in mind that everything that happens on the earth is no more
and no less than a reflection of what is taking place in the cosmos."
Here, of course, his followers, or most of them, found that they
were out of their depth. He held that certain planets affect the
reproductive powers of plants, while others are concerned with the
processes that make plants valuable to man and animal for food.
We accept this now as something to be taken seriously, but when
he spoke first, nearly twenty years ago, the idea was new and
startling and it roused great opposition, as all new ideas must.
“Agriculture," he declared, “lives and has its being as part of
the universe, and a farm should be a self-contained individuality,
producing all its needs within its own boundaries." Here was a new
idea that commends itself readily to the intelligent agriculturist. As
already stated, he was a firm believer in planetary influence, and in
dealing with the planets he included the Sun and the Moon. He
taught that the near planets—that is to say, the Moon, Mercury,
and Venus—exercise influence upon all that grows above the
earth, while the rest of the planets, including the Sun, work from
below the surface. He taught that the upward cosmic stream uses
clay as a carrier, and the cosmic force is most active in the earth
between the middle of January and the middle of February, while
November and December are the months when life in the earth has
greatest effect upon growth.
When he turned to consider artificial fertilizers he said with his
usual restraint that “in the last resort man can but sparingly replace
by artificial means the fertility that the earth achieves by natural
humus formation ".
He regarded colour in the plant as a reflection of planetary
forces. The red, he told his students, stood for Mars, the yellow for
Jupiter, the blue for Saturn, while the green leaf is the reflection of
the Sun; and he made a startling statement that our familiar fruits
came into being at a time when humanity had a knowledge, born
of primeval and instinctive wisdom, that taught it to plant varieties
different from the primitive ones then in existence. “The close
relationship with Nature which was once part of man's equipment
must be recovered," he said, “if the world is to carry on, and the
science that only considers the physical, considers a corpse." He
told his hearers that water is far more than oxygen and hydrogen—
it is a distributor of moon forces. The old countryman who plants
by the moon is more ready to accept this than the man who has
been trained in an agricultural college. He held that every farm
should carry the amount of stock necessary to yield the manure the
farm requires; this was his idea of the self-contained unit, the
living entity, the microcosm.
 He explained at considerable length, and in confident,
convincing fashion, the place of certain elements in the universe.
Carbon, the philosopher's stone of the medieval alchemists, is, he
said, concerned with the formative processes in Nature. He called
it the great plastician. Sulphur he likened to the cosmic
imagination, out of which all that is formed in Nature must
ultimately proceed. Carbon works with sulphur and is the element
in which the ego lives. “Underlying all living things is the carbon-
like framework through which the spiritual moves." Nitrogen he
called the mediator between life and the spiritual essence, and the
material form of the astral. He pointed out that if a man were
placed in a confined space and a small part of the nitrogen of the
air were withdrawn, man could replace it from inside himself.
Between the material and the spiritual hydrogen acts as the
quickening link. The plant world exists in two divisions: nitrogen
inhalers and nitrogen exhalers, and out of the study of the nature of
the elements and their relation to the external invisible forces we
must gather our knowledge of the proper way to feed the soil.
Steiner taught that we must recognize the working of spirit
through Nature, that our daily food is intended in great part to
supply us with forces rather than substances, and that it feeds our
will as well as our body. We manure the earth to keep it alive, we
immerse our plants in an element of life, and the plant needs living
earth to grow in. At this point in one of his discussions he
emphasized his objection to mineral fertilizers. “If you use purely
mineral substances for manure," he said, “you will never get to the
real earthly element, for you will not bring it into being. Plants
under the influence of mineral manure do not enjoy a full life."
Here, of course, he went into the very heart of the contention I
have maintained for so long. Incidentally it is worth pointing out
that in very dry seasons minerals do not work in the soil; they must
be dissolved first. You can produce your plant by the aid of
minerals; you can have something that will give you all the
outward signs of being a splendid specimen of its kind, but it does
not enjoy a full life and consequently cannot communicate a full
measure of vitality. When you have travelled a little beyond the
very beginnings of the Steiner teachings you realize that he is
enlarging your world, establishing new relationships, opening up
new and delightful vistas.
In due season he spoke about his own composting system. “In
compost," he said, “we have the means of kindling life within the
earth itself," and he spoke of the etheric and astral elements, the
last released by quicklime, that are to be found in the refuse of
farm and garden, in the decayed grass, in the vegetable waste, even
in the bodies of dead animals. Many of his hearers knew
something about compost; few, if any, had grasped the nature of
the forces released by it.
He differentiated between certain animals, and pointed out that
all those with antlers are of a quick, nervous disposition which is
expressed in their eyes, while the cow, on the other hand, which
receives astral forces through the horns, is of a quiet, placid type.
In this connection note that antlers are formed out of the blood of
the animal, while the horn has a core of bone.
Then he taught the value of the special treatment of compost
heaps that has so foolishly been called a secret. All he wished to
do was to avoid uninformed and sensational chatter, and to keep
his methods of preparation from ridicule which might have
discouraged their acceptance before time was able to prove their
worth. He knew how dangerous it is to put the weapon of ridicule
into the hand of a fool, and that his proposals and methods were
both new and strange, demanding a measure of confidence not to
be expected of those who had not come within his circle.
He advocated the use of cow manure buried throughout the
winter in a cow's horn and then applied to the land in what from
the quantitative standpoint you might call a homoeopathic dose,
the contents of one or two cows' horns being sufficient for an acre.
Silica, quartz, or felspar, ground to powder, buried through the
summer in a cow's horn, kept indoors in the winter and used in the
spring, or later, is of great value to vegetables, as indeed to all
plant life, if sprinkled lightly over them after being stirred in a
bucketful of warm water for an hour; this stirring is of first
importance and should not be neglected or shirked. It applies
equally to the preparation of the cow manure. A piece as big as a
pea is all that is necessary to serve an acre. Dr. Steiner pointed out
that science does not tell man how to get the best nourishment for
his own organism, because it does not know, and he added a
significant hint of his attitude towards the farm as a unit when he
said that the cows' horns should be obtained locally, if possible.
Referring to the fashion in which human influences are
overlooked, he pointed out that there are some people who can
grow flowers in any window-box and they will thrive wonderfully,
while the flowers that other people have grown refuse to respond
and remain sick and drooping until they fade.
Here human influences are at work, but nobody understands,
although he told his audience that in olden times people could fit
themselves by certain definite practices to tend their plants. But
then, he added significantly, in those days you could learn more
from the peasant than the university.
To-day, he insisted—pleaded would perhaps be the better
term— we must fight materialistic world conceptions of the
universe. Negative knowledge is worth little or nothing. In our
farm practice we take forces from earth and air, and we must
replace them. “Remember always," he told his listeners, “that
mineral manure will not vitalize the earth. Great Nature does not
leave us mercilessly in the lurch if we fail to take into account, as
she does, her silicic acid, lead, quicksilver and arsenic, nor do we
suffer if we fail to take into account her potash, limestone or
phosphoric acid. She provides them freely with the rain, and
mineral substances are rayed into the soil from the cosmos in
minute doses. Life forces are more important for plants than
substances. On the other hand, to have the proper phosphoric acid,
potash and limestone content in the earth we must till the soil and
manure it properly. Heaven docs not give these things of her own
accord without man's co-operation."
From these general statements Dr. Steiner proceeded to
particular ones, of which he anticipated the general verdict. He
knew that the light he was revealing was too strong for normal
eyes. " All that I am saying now," he remarked once, "will seem
utterly mad—but so did the building of mountain railways"; here
he referred to the opposition that the project had to face. The
analogy was an apt one because he was building railways for the
mind, and taking them to heights hitherto untrodden, while critic
multiplied and hostility developed.
He spoke of certain plants. Milfoil (yarrow) he regarded as a
miraculous creation because it brings sulphur into right relation
with other substances, and he warned people never to root it up
from their gardens or farms if they could possibly afford to leave it
where it grew. Then came surprising directions. He told people to
cut off the heads, put them in the bladder of a stag and hang them
in the sunshine through the summer. Then they were to be taken
down and buried through the winter, though not very deeply. In the
spring they could be taken up and introduced to any compost heap,
however large, and they would make the soil receptive to
atmospheric silicic acid and lead because, he explained gravely,
the stag is the animal most nearly related to the cosmic forces. The
honour of giving such hidden knowledge to mankind—perhaps
one should say of restoring it—was reserved for Dr. Steiner.
At the same time and before proceeding further, it is only fair
to point out that to make these prescriptions from so brief and
incomplete a survey as this is like trying to drive a motor-car after
taking a correspondence course. These are not manufacturers'
formulae; they are lights on truths that belong to the realm of
forces rather than of matter. Those who propose to make their own
preparations should seek instructed assistance, for the first
attempts at least. In that way the beginner would learn the rationale
of the work, he would understand that he is up against very serious
and far-reaching aspects of agricultural work which should be
understood as well as practised. All who realize how magnificently
and selflessly Rudolf Steiner laboured for his fellow-men will, I
feel sure, be willing, even anxious, to do full justice to his work
and not to treat his prescriptions as formulae to be dispensed at the
chemist's. No man should use them without understanding, or
endeavouring to understand, how in the production of food for
humans, forces and substances work side by side. I cannot help
thinking that preparations put together without knowledge or any
interest higher than the attainment of profits may not realize
expectations. This is only an opinion, but a strongly felt one.
To bring calcium influence to work another plant is needed,
and this is camomile. The yellow-white heads should fill part of
the intestines of an ox and be buried through the winter in rich soil
in an exposed position where snow is likely to fall. In the spring
they can be taken up for use in the compost heap. Stinging nettles
are of great value. They should be buried for a year, and then dug
up and mixed with manure. From calcium he turned to oak bark, of
which three-quarters of the plant substance is calcium in fine
combination. You are directed to take this bark, just the outermost
layer, and break it up to a crumbly consistency, then place in the
skull of any animal, cover with peat mould and allow it to remain
through the autumn and winter at the bottom of a rain-water barrel.
Added to compost, this will combat and correct plant diseases. To
bring about correct relationship between potassium and silicic acid
you turn to the dandelion, gather the heads, let them fade a little,
sew in the mesentery of an ox and bury throughout the winter. To
establish relationships between compost and phosphoric
substances take valerian flowers, press them and dilute the extract
with warm water.
Dr. Steiner went on to point out that in Nature's judgment a
weed has just as much growth-right as any of the plants we find
useful, and added that in many parts of the civilized world a heavy
penalty has been demanded for mankind's ignorance of the cosmic
influences. People have given up all that the old instinctive science
had preserved for them. Weeds are often curative links influenced
by the moon, and a strong and powerful cosmic force is rayed
down on this planet by the moon. It works more effectively in wet
years than in dry.
I turn for a moment to admit freely and frankly that these
surprising dicta, which were the foundation of the charge of
mystery and magic levelled by the ignorant and unthinking against
Dr. Steiner, and gave such a formidable weapon to his enemies,
are very hard for even the twentieth century to accept. They recall
Gerarde and Culpeper and other herbalists of old time who spoke
so freely of the signs of the Zodiac and the influence of the stars,
but it does not follow that because we have abandoned certain
traditions they are lacking either in truth or value. There is a very
simple way of testing the activators that Dr. Steiner advised, and
that is either by preparing them after instruction and with all due
care, as many people are now doing, or by applying to the
Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation, Old Mill House, Bray,
Maidenhead, or to the Sunfield Agricultural Centre at Clent near
Stourbridge, Worcestershire, where they are prepared in bulk.
Then, when we have used them and noted their effect upon the
compost heap we can say definitely how much virtue is in them.
My own experience, going over a considerable term, is that they
do produce marked effects upon the health and growth forces of
plants, and in this connection it is well to remember another of Dr.
Steiner's statements : “Mineral manure," he said, “is a thing that
must cease altogether in time, for the effect of every kind of
mineral manure after a little while is that the produce grown on
fields thus treated loses nutritive value; this is an absolutely
general law."
 Dr. Steiner taught that plant diseases develop when the moon
forces enter the earth too strongly, the lower part of the plant
becoming too strong and the upper part too weak, and the cure for
these diseases consists largely in treatment with field horse-tail,
equisetum arvense. This plant consists almost entirely of silica,
and has many very valuable qualities if properly used. “In Nature,"
he pointed out, “all forces are interacting," and he complained that
science only studies the coarser interactions and ignores the finer
ones. It can do no other. Did not Sir Oliver Lodge tell us twenty-
five years ago that science has reached the boundaries of the
physical ? He might have added that the scientific mind is not
anxious to travel beyond those boundaries.
"A fruit-tree," Dr. Steiner declared, "is really earth, for that
which grows upon its boughs and branches is rooted in the
cambium layer which is the growing formative layer and is able to
create plant cells." He said that our trees gather astral plant
substances, and he advised students to cultivate the sense of smell
so that they may differentiate between the scent of earthy plants
and the scent of trees. He declared that if the earth held no trees
there would be no insects, and that earthworms have the important
task of regulating the ethereal vitality in the soil, so that if the soil
tends to become too strongly living, worms can release the
superabundant vitality. Just as the absence of trees would lead to
the passing of insects so the absence of birds would lead to the
stunting of vegetation. The world of worms and larvae is related to
the limestone or mineral nature of the earth, while all that flies or
flutters is related to the astral.
Dr. Steiner said that there was in past times an instinctive
clairvoyance among those who used the land. Intellect has driven
this gift away, but before men became so clever they were much
wiser.
Animals on farms need minerals, though they must not be
applied after the fashion of the chemists; we shall provide them
best by planting shrubs and bushes which animals like to nibble.
Mushrooms, even toadstools, can control certain plant diseases,
and it is no true economy to rid the land of trees, shrubs, and
bushes. Any hope that this will result in an increased crop is vain.
As Steiner said, you cannot engage in farming unless you have
insight into the mutual relations of Nature's husbandry." Before
learning how to tend stock properly, he added, we need to
understand the proper relation of animals to the world of plants,
the place of all things in the household of Nature. From the organic
standpoint the animal is in all respects a true inverse of the plant.
The animal takes, and the plant gives. When Goethe said:
“Everything in Nature lives by give and take," he was reviving the
old traditional statement. We must see in all these things the
interaction between animals and plants, and must not regard them
as separate and detached parts of creation. Creation is one; we are
all part of it, performing our various tasks in accordance with laws
that we have not yet learned to understand, but must learn to obey.
 Rudolf Steiner objected to the scientific term, “combustion
processes inside the body", and said that combustion is a process
associated with mineral and lifeless nature. He warned farmers
against shutting up animals in dark stables, saying that
confinement leads to deterioration, and he emphasized that the
farm is a living organism developing its astral quality in the air
above, much as fruit-trees and forests do; he also warned farmers
that they are interfering with the perfect natural cycle when they
reduce their livestock and bring fertilizers from Chile.
Odd hints about acts of husbandry were scattered in his
discourses. For example, he said that fodder plants when cut up for
animals should be steamed a little and spread out in the sunlight,
and he gave reasons. But it is important to remember that he did
not lay down hard and fast rules; he merely suggested. He believed
in freedom and sought to develop individuality. He sought to
stimulate the farmer's imagination and his realization of the
wonders surrounding his work. It has been well said that he did not
write or wish to write an encyclopaedia of farming; he sought to
teach farmers how to think for themselves in the light of
knowledge. "The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."
He favoured the adoption of vegetarian diet because, he said, it
draws from the organism forces that would otherwise lie fallow,
and the very forces that, if left alone, create gout, rheumatism and
diabetes. But here, as in every sphere, he left his followers free to
choose after hearing what he had to say. He was never pontifical.
He emphasized the value of tomatoes for their action upon the
liver, but warned that they should not be taken by people suffering
from cancer.1 He told growers to manure tomatoes with any kind
of vegetable refuse, throwing it together in natural form and, if
possible, making compost of the tomato plant itself. He
pronounced the tomato to be the most uncompanionable citizen of
all the plant kingdom.
Later he issued another warning, full of interest, when he said
that human beings cannot develop to the full in an atmosphere
permeated on all sides by electric currents and radiation, for these
have a definite effect upon the human intelligence. If you treat
foodstuffs with electricity, animals will become sclerotic and will
die sooner than they should. He went so far as to claim that
electricity is not meant to help living things—a timely warning for
those who heat their glass-houses by its aid.
In his lectures he warned his followers not to look for quick
converts, nor to expect to convert the scientist, because the lessons
of his years of training would leave an intolerable void if they had
to be rejected and to-day you can have scientific research without
any substance to it.2 He thought that his teachings would appeal

1
In connection with the most terrible and devastating disease that plagues humanity it may
be said here that Dr. Steiner inaugurated a new diagnostic and therapeutic method of treatment in
connection with cancer and cancerous tendencies that has achieved wonderful results.

2
See review of Sir Frederick Keeble's book for a latter-day confirmation of this.
most strongly to the small peasant farmer who is in touch with
Nature all the time and has intuition. He warned his students
against the use of sewage on the farm, declaring that such practice
is radically wrong—presumably in Europe, for he would have
been well aware of its prevalence in the Far East. He gave varied
hints from time to time to help the practical farmer, telling him to
plant horse-radish along the edge of potato and beet fields, and to
sprinkle cornflowers on arable land to eliminate the poppy. He
held stable-feeding of cattle responsible in part for the spread of
tuberculosis, and thought that animals fed indoors should have a
generous measure of feeding room, because they do not like the
breath of their neighbours. For wire-worm he advocated the
exposure of rain water to a waning moon for a fortnight; the water
should then be sprayed over the affected soil. Pine-cone seeds, first
crushed and then diluted to three parts in a thousand were
advocated as a cure for slugs, and he said that weak trees could be
strengthened by earth taken from the neighbourhood of the roots of
the blackthorn and silver birch; also that nasturtium planted under
trees suffering from aphis would control the trouble.
If all these statements sound a little disconnected, please
remember that they are the answers to questions addressed to him
by farmers when his lectures were delivered.
There is in this Steiner teaching a considerable measure of
astronomical observation which I have deliberately omitted
because I feel that this is not the place for it. Astronomy is for the
few; it is not a subject I have studied and consequently I am not
qualified to discuss it though I recognize, as all thinking folk must
do, that it is a field awaiting renewed investigation. At present, the
study of the stars lacks appeal to the average man; very few can
make it sufficiently strong for those who pride themselves on
being extremely practical. I think that those who make a close
study of Rudolf Steiner's teachings may be led to study the relation
of the planets to one another and particularly the earth's relation to
them.
It is a curious and encouraging truth that in spite of his strange
theories, his complete conviction and his indifference to criticism,
ridicule, distortion and mis-statement, Rudolf Steiner's teachings
have not only survived him, but are slowly yet surely building up
an enduring monument to his life and work. When a man eminent
in many spheres can say of himself “people will remark ‘what a
pity he has suddenly gone crazy ', or ‘all this will seem utterly
mad'," we can but recognize a fine, rare courage, for ridicule is
among the hardest burdens that a sensitive pioneer can be called
upon to bear. No mere research worker of ordinary calibre, Rudolf
Steiner was sustained by a faith that was as the shadow of a great
rock in a thirsty land; in spite of the hatred and opposition that
came to him from all centres of reaction he persisted to the end,
and to-day his posthumous reward grows. "Let us praise famous
men."
CHAPTER III The Hive and the Farmer
I HAD INTENDED, in the chapters devoted to the teachings of Dr.
Steiner, to add a lengthy resume of his discoveries relating to the
hive, for he brought to the subject of bee-keeping the same intense
application, the same deep knowledge, and the same illumination
that he exercised in the farmyard and the field. Nobody save
Steiner has written of the world of the hive in the light of astral
vision. Then I hesitated, because it might seem at first sight that
the world of the bee is too far removed from the world of the
farmer—though this is not really the case, since all life is one life
and one manifestation bears directly upon another. I knew, also,
that I must not run too far in front of accepted belief. Astral vision
is still, to the great majority of those who have not experienced it,
a figment of an unhealthy imagination, and it is not the purpose of
this book to enter into the question of psychic phenomena. Finally,
I thought it best, if only for the conservation of space, to deal
briefly with some of the lessons that I learned from the study of his
lectures to the simple workmen who built the Goetheanum at
Dornach.1 He was not thinking particularly of the farm when he
spoke to them or when he answered their many questions, but
there is a great deal relating to general agricultural principle that
may be gathered from what he said in passing.
One of his most significant utterances—or so it seems to me—
was made in connection with a very popular plant, American
Clover, that some bee-keepers grow round their apiaries. It served
for the text of a brief worth-while sermon on forcing the pace. He
warned them against it. He said that if bees took this clover in
excess, as they would do if the plants were available, it would lead
to overstimulation and subsequent weakness. Warming to his
work, he went on to compare this condition with that reached by
the cow-keepers who boast of their many gallon return from each
cow and regard as wasters those that do not bring in a heavy
volume of milk. He pointed out that calves from cows whose milk
yield is abnormal and forced do not thrive so well as those calves
whose mothers are healthy producers of a reasonable volume of
milk, declaring that you cannot increase for long the pace of
natural production with any approach to safety.
At another point Dr. Steiner warned his listeners against
introducing foreign queens into the bee-hive and urged the
advisability of rearing queens at home and not importing them.
"For a time," he said, “you may do very well by this method, but in
a generation or two, and you have to take long views, bees will
tend to die out because you have not treated them as they should
be treated."
It was also stressed that creatures we regard as pests are often
serving a purpose of which we know nothing at all; if we
exterminate them without knowledge we are likely to suffer
without understanding why. To take another example, he
1
These have now been published.
emphasized the enormous importance of earth-worms; but you
cannot take up a gardening paper without reading of some dressing
or mixture which, applied to a lawn, will kill the earth-worms right
away and so save the unsightly appearance of worm-casts which
appears to offend the sensitive eyes of uninformed people. Of
course, the proper procedure is to leave the earth-worms alone and
brush up and preserve the casts, which have such a considerable
humus value.
Dr. Steiner praised the aphides which, he said, “are nearly pure
nectar ", and he told how the ants capture them and take them to
their homes and put them into what corresponds to cow-stalls, and
milk them to drink the rich juices they exude. He told, too, of the
work that wasps do and how wasps in Greece have changed the
character of wild fig-trees, bringing sweetness to them in a fashion
that has been known and practised by the Greek husbandmen for
thousands of years. In the fig plantation man and wasp work
together. Then again he told how the old husbandmen were always
careful to preserve ant heaps because they knew, either through
ancient wisdom or inherited tradition, or both, that the formic acid
secreted by ants saves rotting wood from corruption and keeps
woodland sweet and clean when, but for the labour of the ants, it
would become corrupt by reason of the seasonal decay of trees. He
told his hearers that wasps were the progenitors of bees, though the
separation took place in the Atlantean Age of which we have but
the faintest records, even if the fact of a lost continent be no longer
matter for dispute.
I have urged, in and out of season perhaps, the oneness of all
life, the relationship between the greatest and the smallest,
between the distant planet and the earth-worm, between man and
the microorganism. The particular interest of Dr. Steiner's lectures
on bees lies in the fact that he stressed this relationship right
through and pointed out the extraordinary nature of the bee's
hexagonal cell and the recurrence of the hexagon in many other
directions—in sour milk formation and in the cross-cut section of
certain trees. Here are relationships into which we have not yet
pried. It might be said that we have passed them by unnoticed, but
if we wish to understand secrets of correct and natural cultivation
of our soil we must not neglect any evidence that shows Nature's
method of working with all the resources at her command towards
definite and destined ends which never were and never will be
associated with hurried profit-making. We cannot lose sight of the
basic truth that the cultivation of Mother Earth was given to man
as a way of life and not as a means of quick returns. Nature knows
nothing of profit.
Nobody can rise from the study of Steiner's lectures on bee-
keeping without reeling that he has been brought nearer the heart
of things than he was before, that he knows more of life and has a
better guide to conduct than he could have expected to find. I think
that the wisdom that permeates these lectures must make those
who have read them the more ready to accept the philosopher's
teachings when he turns to the farm and garden. It is on this
account that I have referred to them. Like all the author's
utterances they point the way to the quiet and tranquil path that
brings us nearer to the fullness of life and they do this better than
any other work from the pen of modern writers that can be cited.
There are plenty of artists who paint tranquillity on a small canvas
with a restricted palette, but Rudolf Steiner gives us all the world
for canvas and the colours of the rainbow are at the service of his
brush. He saw time and eternity, he even glimpses “the far-off
divine event towards which Creation moves ", in spite of all the
impediments in the path. And he shared all that was his with all
who sought to be the companions of his way, so that we who
cannot hear his voice can sense his thoughts.
CHAPTER IV Bio-Dynamic Farming
SOME OUTSTANDING FIGURES AND THEORIES
I DO NOT LIKE THE TERM, but I did not invent it and do not want to
apologize for it. Dr. Steiner gave his own title to his system of
agriculture, as he had every right to do, but it strikes the English
ear awkwardly, I might say unpleasantly. So does anthroposophy,
though it merely means wisdom in relation to man. It is such a
formidable word that some dictionaries prefer to ignore it. Small
wonder that when you speak of anthroposophical theories resulting
in bio-dynamic farming you alarm the plain man. I have always
regretted that the great thinker and teacher did not use simpler and
more popular terms; his theories would have gained far more
adherents and would not have had such an uphill road to follow.
The interesting fact is that the Steiner teachings have so much
intrinsic merit that they have survived all handicaps. Every farmer
and gardener knows that you may plant trees that take years to
establish themselves and then grow rapidly; the Steiner system of
soil cultivation is an example of the slow growth of a graft from
the tree of knowledge. I have lived long enough to see signs of a
vigorous and healthy growth and I count this among my blessings.
In England the methods arc based upon the work of a society about
which all too little is known; it becomes interesting, therefore, to
recall the early days of the Anthroposophical Agricultural
Foundation in this country.
THE ANTHROPOSOPHICAL AGRICULTURAL FOUNDATION AND
MRS. HOWARD PEASE
A world conference on Spiritual Science was held in London
in 1928, three years after Dr. Steiner's death, and during that
conference an address was given by Carl Alexander Mirbt, a
Doctor of Agriculture of Berlin, then a stranger to this country.
The audience was so impressed by what he had to tell them about
Dr. Steiner's agricultural methods and their importance to the
world at large that the first Centre was established at the Old Mill
House, Bray-on-Thames in Berkshire, with Mrs. Howard Pease as
Secretary and Dr. Mirbt as Adviser. During the last ten years more
land has been added to the gardens at Bray and much experimental
work is being successfully carried out; visitors are always
welcomed by Mrs. Pease. In addition to cultivating fruit and
vegetables she has a large apiary and a herb garden.
The membership of the Foundation has increased steadily and
a large number of farmers and private and market gardeners in the
British Isles are now making successful use of Rudolf Steiner's
methods. There are also practical workers in Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, Ceylon, South and British East Africa, British West
Indies, Malay States, and the United States. In Europe workers are
to be found in nearly every country. Lately other distributive and
advisory centres are now established, the first being the Sunfield
Centre at Clent, in Worcestershire, where there is a large curative
establishment for backward children; Dr. Mirbt was until quite
recently resident technical adviser on the agricultural side. In
addition to the extensive gardens at Clent there are three farms that
afford opportunity of training the younger generation in the way it
should go. At the various centres a persistent endeavour is made to
present the Rudolf Steiner method in its larger aspect and to treat it
as a part of that Spiritual Science which it was his mission in life
to teach.
The Dutch society continues to work on similar lines and can
claim many followers, but in Germany there is some difficulty
because, whereas the Steiner methods are approved by the best
judges, they are not regarded as being politically desirable, since
the teachings of spiritual science do not lend themselves to the
totalitarian idea. For some time the work was being carried on in
many directions by those who had come under the direct influence
of Dr. Steiner (and by all accounts this was an unforgettable
experience), but of late years the effort has been greatly
broadened, and the greatest danger in the opinion of its most
devoted adherents is that it should be divorced from those larger
teachings of which it is a part.
Dr. Steiner, as all know, insisted that agriculture cannot and
will not respond to the demand of any economic system. It will
never fall into the category of undertakings that can be speeded up
to yield quick profits; it is not a mere business; it is the first and
greatest of all the ways of life. In the years when we were told that
seed-time and harvest shall not cease, agriculture was already a
way of life, and that is what it is and must always remain. If you
lovers of the land who have sensed the vitality and response of
both soil and crops insist that it is the way of life, this is a view
with which I would be the last to quarrel.
My notes on the Steiner system would be incomplete without a
reference to Madame Kolisko, who worked for some time in the
laboratory at Bray. For many years a colleague of Rudolf Steiner,
she combines outstanding talent with a modesty that is at least
equally rare.
A student of medicine and zoology, she met Dr. Steiner in the
last years of his life and helped him to establish at Stuttgart the
Biological Institute associated with the Goetheanum. Here for
sixteen years she was engaged in research work in various
departments of biology and she has written some most attractive
and significant works on the influence of the moon on plant
growth and the influence of the stars. She was attracted to the
philosophy of Dr. Steiner by reading his book, Knowledge of the
Higher Worlds, and as a student of science she helped to prepare
his remedy for foot-and-mouth disease, and claims to have
discovered the cause of the trouble. A scientific formula exists to-
day for the preparation of the remedy, but the question of the
measure of the injection required to produce the best results is still
being examined; Madame Kolisko is working on this at present. It
is known that a preparation of coffee provides a cure; we do well
to remember that the policy of the Ministry of Agriculture is not to
cure sick beasts but to kill them as soon as possible, burn the
bodies, and compensate the farmer.
Perhaps Madame Kolisko is still better known by her
researches into the relationship between the moon and plant
growth, the moon and silver, the sun and gold, the planet Mars and
iron. She has given many years to the research and can declare
definitely that such relationships exist.
Subjects of the kind in which Madame Kolisko has done
pioneer work stand, of course, for the present outside the area of
my special interest, though it may be that connections will be
discovered in due course. But so far as the influence of the moon
on plant growth is concerned I think it may be taken that Madame
Kolisko's investigations have not only placed this influence
beyond the possibility of doubt but have shown how it works. She
has experimented with wheat, maize, tomatoes, carrots, beetroot
and other vegetables; the photographs she has taken showing the
relative dates of planting serve to demonstrate certain truths and
should even convince sceptics. Apparently seeds sown two days
before the full moon yield much better plants of the orders that
grow above the ground than if they are sown two days before the
new moon. The quality is also affected beneficially. Madame
Kolisko has also discovered, or at least recorded, certain facts that
affect forests. For example, if a tree is cut during the full moon
period it is full of energy and sap, and the wood does not dry
readily, while if trees are cut during the waning moon the wood is
quite dry and consequently has a better commercial value. This is
quite well known to natives in remote parts of the world, but our
fashionable scepticism has kept us from turning the knowledge to
full account. Where tree-cutting is called for on my own estates I
always see that the native practice is regarded. What interests me
most about Madame Kolisko's varied endeavour is that it
recognizes the life forces that are working round us all the time
and reveals the subtle and delicate fashion in which Nature's
processes are carried out. It is only when we have considered these
principles that we can understand how absurd it is to thrust great
doses of crude chemicals into the earth and expect that they will
force our farmlands to produce healthy and nourishing crops in
large quantities. Madame Kolisko's closely knit observations do
not receive much attention from the world at large to-day, but I
think a time will come when people will turn to them, not only
with ever-deepening interest, but with the pleasure that comes
when we are set upon the right road after wandering for a long
while in the dark. Her work, I have reason to believe, has borne
fruit in other directions, but here and now I am concerned only
with its agricultural aspect and the fact that she is firmly opposed
to the introduction of dead chemicals to the living soil, knowing
them for the deadly things they are.
The Indore system founded upon the Far Eastern method
observed and improved upon by Sir Albert Howard, aims at the
replenishment of the soil with the humus that is its organic food. In
the making it does not accumulate earth-worms but, once added to
the soil, it propagates them rapidly, promoting the bacterial action
that maintains the humus. The Indore compost requires manure,
and like that of China and Japan it includes human as well as
animal waste. In the making of Indore compost the temperatures
are carefully studied.
The Steiner system produces a compost that may be partly
vegetable and attracts earth-worms from the start, so that they are
already present in large quantities when given to the earth. The
Steiner method will admit farmyard manure but rejects all human
waste unless it is from the farm-workers and collected on the farm.
It is worth noting that Sir John Russell regards human waste as of
minimum value. According to the Steiner theories every farm is a
single unit with a life of its own and should carry enough stock to
provide for the replenishment of its soil. No special attention is
given to the temperature, but homoeopathic preparations of the
stinging nettle (urtica dioica), camomile, valerian, yarrow,
dandelion, and oak bark should be added to the compost heaps.
The preparations take the greater part of a year to bring to
maturity; they are said to receive and radiate cosmic influences—
simple fact which has raised the scorn of those who spell cosmic
without the 's' after the manner of the Philistines.
It is clear that Steiner's methods were first in the field, but
there is no real occasion for dispute between the methods; since
each has gone far to turn men's attention to a sure and conservative
method of cultivation and both founders have wrought mightily for
the next generation.
CHAPTER V Wanted: a Policy
I HAVE POINTED OUT in earlier chapters that much of the trouble we
are suffering from throughout the world to-day is due to the
farmer's desire to get the most as well as the best out of his land,
and in the pursuit of this desire he has failed to show consideration
for the land itself.
I have no reason or wish to go back on this statement, but it is
right and proper to emphasize the cause of conditions that the
world will have reason to deplore. It may be summed up in half a
dozen words—the lack of a stable and permanent agricultural
policy.
The English farmer in the past few years has seen much done
to help him. He has been in receipt of subsidies for certain crops
like wheat and sugar beet, while marketing boards have
endeavoured to reduce the chaos in the milk trade and the pig
market. One might even say they have succeeded, but the fact
remains that while the subsidies given to agriculture make a poor
showing by the side of those given to the manufacturer they suffer
from the further disadvantage of not being associated with a well-
defined national policy.
Except in times of war, when we are urged to push production
to the maximum, the farmer never knows quite where he stands.
The Government has not told him how much wheat, beef, mutton,
pork, bacon, milk, or eggs Great Britain should produce. It cannot
assure him of a fair price for his produce although it stands
between him and the ruin that must ensue if we rely for our food
upon the vast surpluses of other countries bought at whatever price
we like to pay—a price based upon the unpleasant truth that many
of the producers do not receive what we regard as a living wage.
It follows that the home producer feels compelled to rely upon
maximum output and undoubtedly, in his desire to multiply crops,
he has overlooked the limitations of the earth that is his medium.
That man has been praised who can make two blades of grass
grow where only one grew before, but this definition of
praiseworthy effort fails if the second blade of grass is obtained by
stimulating the soil to such an extent that it will very presently turn
sick and refuse to grow any blades of grass at all.
What we need more than anything is an ordered agriculture, a
system under which the best that a land can produce without undue
stimulus is the goal of endeavour, while the man who produces the
world's food, whether he be the farmer or the farm-worker, is
assured of a reasonable return from the community he keeps in
health and comfort.
Politics and agriculture have been associated for many years
and some of us cannot help feeling that the association is not a
very healthy one. Between them the politicians and agriculturists
have failed to frame a policy of agriculture because we are always
told that the role of this country is that of the manufacturer and that
we can only sell our manufactured goods if we are prepared to take
food in exchange. This may be so, or it may have been so, but if
the present tendencies are allowed to develop throughout the world
we shall be faced with two terrible conditions. In the first place,
the supply of food will fail us as area after area fails to remain
productive by reason of misuse; secondly, the food that is
produced will fail of its effect, which is not merely to fill but to
nourish us.
The whole fault appears to me to lie in the lack of a co-
ordinated policy which should apply to the Home Country, the
Dominions, the Colonies and Dependencies and even to the world
outside these ample boundaries with which we desire to carry on
business.
It is a matter of calculating on an international scale our needs,
requirements, and capacities.
Taking regard to what the Empire can consume, what it can
produce and, above all, how the earth itself can be kept in health
and a condition of productivity, it seems a long way from us in
1940 to the time when an ordered agricultural policy will prevail
not only in the British Empire but in the world outside its
boundaries. But, if I am not mistaken, if the observation of many
years has not been mis-directed and if its lessons have been
properly learnt, then we are not so very far away from the time
when the principles I have outlined will be accepted and followed.
The alternative to them will be world-starvation.
It is no reply to this suggestion to say that the greatest of our
troubles in the last few years has been the existence of gluts. There
is in Nature an ebb and flow that does not favour gluts. The earth
has her orderly habit of production and, if we have gluts, it is
because men have forced the pace of production for the sake of
immediate profits. The results have been, first, that they have
produced more than we can consume under our present distributive
system; and, secondly, that they have injured the earth by their
method of over-production so that already vast tracts of once
fertile land are sandy wastes that have passed right out of
production.
The remedy for this is, it seems to me, a careful survey of the
world's assets, ordered production to supply the world's needs, and
a system under which those who are engaged in feeding the people
of the earth receive the price of their labours.
You may say right away that this is impossible, or out of the
question. But is it so? Take the great industries of the world, the
commercial enterprises that have centres north, south, east and
west. They all come under the heading of big business and include
banking. In these undertakings everything is ordered and
controlled, so that production is made effective, free from waste,
and profitable in normal times and circumstances. Just so could
Great Britain, the United States of America, and other great
powers organize agricultural production. If they would decide to
utilize the resources of the lands they control for the benefit of the
people of the earth it would even be possible to take a census of
production and consumption and to regulate output so as to supply
all needs and hold such surplus as was found advisable against the
unforeseen calamities that are part of life.
With this wide survey, the man on the cottage-holding of five
acres is as closely associated as the great agricultural company that
controls thousands of acres, and the man who takes his sample of
corn to the country market in normal times is as important in his
way as those who dominate the grain pits of Winnipeg and
Chicago. For, when we come to consider it, the necessity for food
is one universal factor and the production of food is another. The
need for sustenance is common to all humanity and the danger that
their sustenance may be lost has become a very real one.
CHAPTER VI Sir Albert Howard's Contribution
“Trouble inevitably follows any attempt to short-circuit or to
interrupt the will of life; this is always followed by diseases in crops, in
live-stock and in mankind."
“SOIL, PLANT, ANIMAL AND MAN HIMSELF—are they not all ailing under
our care? " The man who asks this pertinent question is Sir Albert
Howard, formerly Director of the Institute of Plant Industry at
Indore in India and founder of the method of soil regeneration to
which he has given the now familiar name of the Indore Process.
He has surveyed the field of agricultural endeavour in
America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand and seen the
decay of fertility, the passing of old standards of health. He has
considered what he calls the ‘medicine cupboard ', the poison
sprays, the mineral fertilizers, the things that kill not only the
complaint but the patient, and he quotes the compilers of the
United States Year Book of Agriculture, 1938, who declare that the
“vitality of civilization is at stake ". His conclusion is that the
people of the Empire must seek to recover and to maintain the
health they have sacrificed. Working on his own lines and
independently, he shares many of Dr. Rudolf Steiner's views, and
sees the one way to man's physical salvation lies in giving back to
the soil what was formerly a part of it.
His Indore process of composting is spreading throughout the
East, where it is regarded as a commercially sound proposition. It
is being developed more slowly at home, where vested interests
have a powerful voice in the decision as to whether man shall live
on healthy produce which can be raised from the soil for the soil,
or shall die for the greater glorification of business. He has written
words over which I like to linger because they express my
strongest, innermost conviction : “The earth has been exploited for
gain—starved, poisoned and over-stimulated at one and the same
time by artificial manuring, de-timbered, over-grazed, over-
stocked and over-cropped. By the time Science was called in to
undo the results of her own folly, so far as was possible, the
balance between soil and plant had been rudely disturbed; there
was no fertility left to work on."
In an essay on Soil Fertility, one of his many notable
utterances, he points out that the old, well-tried balance between
crops and stock exists no longer and he claims that the most
effective way of restoring and maintaining fertility is by the
adoption of the method originally developed at the Indore Station,
whence it takes its name. He can point to the success of this
method not only in India and Ceylon, but in South Africa, Central
America and elsewhere, as well as in Great Britain of late.
He tells us that for the making of this compost we have
13,000,000 tons of British town waste annually, capable of being
wisely used. Apparently he is not at one with Dr. Steiner on this
question of the use of sewage; the doctor's followers will have
none of it in their composting scheme, though they admit farmyard
manure.
Sir Albert has pointed out that this question of restoring soil
fertility is one of the most important that can engage the minds of
men. Properly understood and carried out with resolution, it will, I
consider, make these islands self-supporting with healthy home-
grown food and so render the people capable of still greater
achievement in the future than in the past. The change-over is
almost as simple in method as it would be overwhelming in effect.
In my humble opinion Dr. Rudolf Steiner and Sir Albert
Howard are two men who have done more for mankind than
almost any of their contemporaries. The man who eradicates a
disease is worth more to mankind than the man who cures it.
Steiner, among those who have passed, and Sir Albert Howard,
among those who are happily still with us have called attention to
the most serious danger threatening mankind and have pointed out
the simple effective road to change.
It is interesting to consider the growth and progress of the
Indore method which has restored fertility to so many stricken
areas and to ask how far it owes its origin to the oldest civilization
in the world. Christianity is two thousand years old; the Chinese
method of soil cultivation, which is founded on the use of humus,
is at least twice as old. The result of the Chinese method is that the
largest number of people can earn a living from the smallest area
of land. All the animal and vegetable waste that can be collected
(and waste is unthinkable in rural China), is returned to the soil,
which renews its fertility year after year.
Terrible mistakes have been made in China in the treatment of
the earth outside the cultivation areas; the cutting down of trees
has had disastrous effects but, thanks to the maintenance of humus,
the people persist.
Sir Albert Howard's method is the outcome of tradition. He is
completely honest and admits that he sat at the feet of the Indian
ryot and absorbed the accumulated wisdom of the years.
The originator of the Indore process—and it may claim
originality even if it be the modern adaptation of an old wisdom—
has given forty years to the study of the health of crops and
livestock and to research into conditions that create disease or help
to resist it.
He comes from a family of farmers and began his research
forty years ago in the West Indies, where he studied tropical
agriculture. After a short spell at Wye College in Kent, where he
was specially concerned with hop diseases, he was appointed
Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India at Pusa,
where he was left with a free hand to make his own experiments.
He says that his best teachers were the Indian peasants themselves
and in a few years he had learned how to grow healthy crops
without any of what he has described as “the expensive
paraphernalia of the modern experimental station ". He made some
astonishing discoveries which are borne out by the researches of
Dr. Steiner, who was working to the same goal along his own
lines, each man seeing the truth through windows of different
coloured glass.
He found that insects and fungi are rot the real cause of plant
diseases but are rather the effect of unsuitable varieties or
improper acts of husbandry. He concluded that the policy of
poison spraying, so appallingly popular in this country to-day, is
unscientific and unsound and that we ought to be concerned with
growing healthy crops that would not stand in need of these
abominable aids to life. Then he turned to the diseases of cattle and
discovered that well-chosen and well-fed animals are insusceptible
to the prevalent diseases, including foot-and-mouth and rinderpest.
The time came when he could place his own healthy animals
among diseased ones and nothing happened.
It is worth while remembering that in this country we have
spent several million pounds—as much, I think, as £3,000,000 in a
single year—on killing and compensation in connection with foot-
and-mouth disease alone. In all probability we have yet to learn,
but we shall learn in time, that these troubles are due very largely
to faults in the soil and to the food with which our animals are
improperly nourished. It follows that when the virus of foot-and-
mouth disease, which is ultra-microscopic, comes along the
animals lack powers of resistance that would enable them to ignore
it. But Sir Albert Howard's more carefully studied stock could
survive in Pusa, Quetta and, finally, at Indore.
As the years passed he saw that the thing that matters most in
soil management is a regular supply of freshly made humus
prepared from animal and vegetable wastes, and that the real basis
of health is to be found in soil fertility. Sir Albert was then faced
with the problem of converting vegetable and animal wastes into
humus, and devised the compost method that is called the Indore
process because it was carried out first on 300 acres of land
belonging to the Institute of Plant Industry at that centre. The
result of this treatment of the land was that production doubled and
disease may be said to have disappeared.
I am particularly interested in Sir Albert Howard's work in this
connection because he has stated that had he been able to foresee
the future he would have endeavoured to raise on fertile soil the
food needed by his workers and their families, so as to
demonstrate the connection he is convinced exists between humus
and human health. This is the purpose of my own appeal to the
reader. I want to see this experiment carried out on a sufficiently
large scale in every country that claims to be civilized, because I
am quite as convinced as Sir Albert Howard can be that we have
here the secret of human health and consequently of human
happiness. I will go even further and say that it is the secret of
human progress and the human understanding which is necessary
to avoid such disasters as beset us in 1939.
For nine years past the Indore process has been spreading all
over the world and may now be found on plantations of coffee, tea,
sugar, sisal, maize, cotton, tobacco and rubber. In 1938 a million
tons of compost were being used by the tea planters; the coffee
growers have been even more insistent.
The first large-scale experiment in England was carried out at
Surfleet in South Lincolnshire by Captain Wilson, who produced a
thousand tons of humus in 1937 and has abolished from his large
and up-to-date farm all chemicals, whether as fertilizers or as
sprays. Messrs. Guinness and Company, the well-known brewers,
are making humus for their hop gardens at the rate of 10,000 tons a
year, with results that are quite remarkable, and another large-scale
experimenter was the late Sir Bernard Greenwell who, owner of
13,000 acres, used the pulverized town wastes from Southwark
mixed with farmyard manure and vegetable wastes and applied it
to his land by the thousands of tons. He told the Farmers' Club of
London that a fertile soil means healthy crops, healthy animals and
last, but not least, healthy human beings.
Sir Albert Howard told the story of his life experiments at the
meeting held in the Town Hall of Crewe in March, 1939, to which
reference has already been made elsewhere. He and Sir Robert
McCarrison were the chief speakers, and he wound up his address
by saying that humus feeds a plant by providing indirectly the
small quantities of nutrients needed by the green leaf for growth,
while artificials only supply salts for the leaf and are consequently
unable to influence quality. He went on to state what many
connoisseurs have noted, without being able to give the reason,
that meat and cheese from some of the celebrated pastures of
Europe have lost both taste and quality, and he attributed the loss
to the use of sulphate of ammonia which, unfortunately, is still
recommended by the authorities.
Sir Robert McCarrison is the authority who told us about the
vigorous and healthy races of North India who live on freshly
ground wholewheat flour, milk, pulses, fresh vegetables, and
occasional small quantities of meat. He says that food is the
dominant factor in determining man's physical endowment, powers
of endurance and resistance to diseases. He tells us that the human
stomach is designed to digest all sorts of natural food, but when we
present it with sloppy, disintegrated, highly sweetened and easily
digested food it is relieved of half its work and consequently
becomes functionally inefficient.
The great mass of the people is not getting this food and that is
why we find, by the results achieved in the Peckham experiment to
which I have referred elsewhere, that not one adult in ten is
entirely free from ill-health or tendencies to ill-health that must
develop with the years.
Proofs of the deterioration that follows the use of artificial
fertilizers have been forthcoming and are still forthcoming from
many quarters, but a significant English example comes from Lord
Lymington's estates in Hampshire, where wheat straw taken from
fields manured with organic matter serves ten years as roof thatch
while straw from similar land manured with artificials lasts only
half the time. No investigation has yet been made into the quality
of the grain that comes from fields treated in either fashion. It
would be extremely interesting. And we know that in Madras Sir
Robert McCarrison found that grain produced with farmyard
manure contained more vitamins than that grown with minerals.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Details of the Indore method and of areas in which it is being
used to full effect may well be of interest in this place, and I
preface them by quoting Professor H. E. Armstrong, F.R.S., who
has said, “Our land is in revolt. Deprived of manorial rights by the
incursion of the road-hog it is fast losing fertility."
Sir Albert Howard tells us that “humus found in the soil is
very similar to the old leaf-mould of our woods."
The remains of plants and animals decompose in the soil.
Substitutes for organic manures are resistant to decay. Valuable
materials are synthesized by groups of micro-organisms which
form the soil population.
When this mass of substance is oxidized it can be described as
humus and is capable of being incorporated in the soil. Sir Albert
Howard says it must not be prepared in the soil itself, but outside
the growing area to which it must be added. He finds that the
physical properties of humus exert favourable influence on the
tilth, moisture-retaining capacity and temperature of the soil, and
that biological properties of humus offer not only a habitat but also
a source of energy, nitrogen, and minerals for various micro-
organisms. The chemical properties of humus enable it to combine
with the soil basis and to interact with various salts. Humus is
steadily lost in the course of food production and must be as
steadily replaced.
In the preparation of compost, natural fungi and bacteria break
down suitable mixtures of animal and vegetable wastes, while
right mixtures in right proportions are dealt with by watering and
turning. Ninety days suffice to turn the wastes into humus. The
Indore process was devised between 1928-1930, the Chinese
methods being studied and followed. Sir Albert claims for his
compost that it is sanitary and adaptable and secures extra nitrogen
by fixation from the atmosphere. At Indore, wastes from 300 acres
yielded 1,000 cartloads of valuable humus yearly and very big
reductions in expenditure on artificial manures have been
achieved. This saving is perhaps the secret of the popularity of
compost throughout the plantations of the Middle East, but the
process has also been a great success in East Africa, too, on both
the coffee and tea plantations. They say this method of nourishing
the soil should reduce the cost of tea and coffee. In this connection
it is noteworthy that some of the growers in Darjeeling write that
artificial fertilizers affect adversely the quality of tea.
“Cane trash on the sugar plantation is composted during the
rainy season with mixtures of weeds, cow-dung, molasses, wood
ash and soil added. It takes ninety days to convert. Large sugar
estates could be made practically self-supporting as regards
manures, the cane-fields would manure themselves." So says Sir
Albert in dealing with the problem of the sugar-cane producing
countries.
One method of developing Indore compost in India has been to
keep working oxen under cover for ten hours nightly, bedded
down with dry maize stalk, wheat grain, grass and any other
roughage. After a week this bed is put into pits with wood ashes,
some earth, and ten pounds of rock phosphate per ton of compost.
The time taken to complete the work is once again ninety days. At
one station in India 1,250 cartloads of compost were prepared in
1934-1935 from cotton stalks and crop residues. Now the
composting system has spread throughout India. Irrigation is being
extended and as water : to dry areas it brings intensive agricultural
material for making humus. Compost is used at a Leper Farm,
from which the superintendent writes that by spreading it over a
field to a depth of about quarter of an inch he ensures a crop three
or four times heavier than could otherwise be obtained.
Composting has been adopted at Government residences in
Calcutta Barracks and Darjeeling.
In Kenya a composting process has been recently developed
for use in native quarters and this may ultimately lead to a change
in the practice of shifting population.
The question of crude sewage sludge is where Howard and
Steiner part company. Howard agrees in following the Chinese
tradition; Steiner emphatically rejects it unless it has been burnt.
Howard also approves “the necessary addition of artificial manures
". But if artificials are necessary it seems to me that the claims of
the Indore process are correspondingly reduced; perhaps I have not
understood this statement, though I do realize that we cannot yet
have enough compost to go round.
In our grasslands and clover leys we have, just where they are
wanted, vast stores of crude organic wastes awaiting Indore
utilization. Eel worm disease of potato is due, Sir Albert thinks, to
excess of N,P,K. (nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash). We pay too
much heed to growth and too little to decay; each is part of
Nature's scheme. While the West has suffered from artificial
manures, 1,000 million cultivators in the East have never heard of
it and their methods have kept vast numbers alive, if not in health,
because mankind needs not only healthy food but enough of it.
Costa Rica has paid a glowing tribute to Sir Albert Howard
through the Director of the Institute for the Defence of Coffee.
Central America is not perhaps the place where most Western
Europeans would look for free, regulated, progressive ideas—
which shows that we know less than we think we do. For Costa
Rica invited Sir Albert Howard to explain the position and he did
so in good, strong words; I quote a few :

1. The good earth lies bruised and broken in the relentless

grasp of human avarice.
 2. It is difficult to reconcile the conceptions of health in plant,
animal and man with the standards that pass muster in the present
day.
3. It is possible to stand on high ground at the head of a valley
in Ceylon and to distinguish with accuracy those portions of a tea
estate which had been treated (perhaps once only) with dressings
of humus, from other portions which were still being manured with
artificials. . . . Resistance to disease was distinctly noticeable. The
explanation put forward is that the improvement is due to the
stimulation by humus of the mycorrhiza which occurs in absorbing
roots of tea, of various forest trees and fairly generally in the roots
of other plants.1
4. Animal wastes, even if such substitutes as dried blood are
resorted to in the absence of farmyard manures, are absolutely
necessary. A just balance between animals and crops is Nature's
law and it cannot be evaded.
5. If a suitable area of land which has suffered badly from
erosion were protected from the run-off by a catch-drain, and
brought back into forest as quickly as possible, the methods of
Nature would come into play again and an example of these very
methods would become available for purposes of education and
very solemn warning.

If I have dwelt at length upon this paper written in honour of a

pioneer so far away as Costa Rica it is because I feel that it
illustrates very clearly the lines of sane progress. What is true in
the temperate regions is equally true of the tropics.
Research may modify some of Sir Albert's principles, but it
cannot affect the value of the work he has done. I am inclined to
join issue with him on the question of using human waste. I have
watched experiments carefully and seen them fail, and I am not
convinced that what is good for the Far East is necessarily suitable
to the West, where conditions of race, diet, and life vary so greatly.
At the same time, if the valuable constituents of human waste such
as phosphorus and calcium could be recovered and if there were no
super-physical change in their nature it may well be that the world
would be healthier and wealthier. But we should all do well to seek
advice from those who have studied deeply and with some interior
illumination.
Let me add that there is no question in my mind as to the
possibility of improving quality by the use of human waste. The
question of quality is the one that worries me in view of Dr.
Rudolf Steiner's solemn warning against its use. I cannot think that
because a system can be followed successfully in the Middle and
Far East, and East Africa, where flesh eating is comparatively rare,
will necessarily be effective in the West. After all, quantity in
production is quite a secondary consideration and relates to those

1
Mycorrhiza is a composite structure made up of a root and a fungus which carries
on joint life in the active root system; the relationship is symbiotic and essentially
different from that in a root attacked by a parasitic fungus.
who buy and sell rather than to those who consume. The point has
been well put by Sir Robert McCarrison in a lecture at the Royal
Institution quoted by Sir Albert Howard in a lecture to the Royal
Institute of Tropical Hygiene, and of late Sir John Russell has
stated that "as a maker of manure the human being is almost
devoid of agricultural value". There is a certain quality of finality
about this.
Perhaps the difference between the Steiner and Howard
methods of composting lies deeper man the inclusion or exclusion
of human waste and vegetable activators. With Steiner the system
was part of his Spiritual Philosophy, a profound comprehensive
theory of the relation of the human to the Divine that cannot be
lightly studied or easily understood.
Sir Albert Howard gives a straightforward direction to
farmers. I think that in this direction he prepares the way for the
larger conceptions of his predecessor. He might not accept this
contention, but it is at least an admissible one and is based upon
the closest study and practical experience that the life of an
agriculturist has brought me. To withhold that view would be to
refuse utterance to an intense conviction.
CHAPTER VII Invisible Helpers
IN ORDER TO GET A CORRECT OUTLOOK upon the agricultural scene we
should, I think, realize how the fertility of the earth is constantly
receiving reinforcement. It comes from earthquakes and from
volcanic eruptions, as Vesuvius, Etna, and Krakatoa can testify.
The Sahara pours invisible dust over Europe at all seasons. Eroded
rocks in America have contributed nearly a thousand million tons
of matter in a year. Dust storms serve soils at great distances.
Winds carry dust, vegetation holds it, dew precipitates it. Dust and
compost make fertile soils; there is potash in the dust and, some
say, iron and calcium, too. The mountains feed the plains. Chlorine
and iodine travel with the rain and, where sea-water evaporation is
aided by a strong sun, the quantity is considerable.
Cosmic dust has an important part to play. The weight of a
single year's deposit has been estimated as high as a million tons.
It will be seen from this skeleton survey, founded on the
researches of Pfeiffer, Gustafson, Harry Jenny, Walter Wiley and
other eminent students of the soil problems, that Nature has all the
earth in her safe keeping and, working along lines that we cannot
hope to comprehend in their entirety, demands nothing more from
us than obedience to her decrees.
A point all too often overlooked is that what may be called the
natural working of the soil is continuous. Soil bacteria, alive and
dead, are enriching factors; they are said to contribute as much as
600 lbs. of humus to an acre of healthy soil, and they assist the
formation of phosphoric acid. The part they play in corn growth is
a considerable and important one.
The late Edgar Wallace wrote a story about a man who
devised a plan to rid the earth of earth-worms. As he was in danger
of succeeding a scientist shot him, acting, if my memory serves
me, on behalf of humanity. Certainly humanity was well served.
The worm, disregarded or despised and regarded by many as
having no better function than to feed birds or attract coarse fish, is
described by Pfeiffer as the most important humus maker on
cultivated lands in the temperate zone. It digests organic refuse and
excretes humus. The work it does in aerating and draining the soil
is known to intelligent farmers. Take away earth-worms and you
rob the soil of its life. That is one of many reasons why those of us
who seek rational methods of soil cultivation turn away from
chemical fertilizers which, as we see things, do grave injury to the
earth by destroying earth-worms and arresting the progress of the
micro-organic world. The earth is a living, pulsing entity, but any
man can kill the portion of it under his control by the use of
corrosive substances that have found their way to the market in
recent years. Should this be permitted?
There is an Eastern saying : “First the man takes a drink, then
the drink takes a drink, and then the drink takes the man." So it is,
mutato nomine, with the soil. First the farmer or the orchardist
gives the ground a drink in the form of a strong nitrogenous
fertilizer, for example. The response is immediate; his crops are
brighter and better. The land has taken a drink. Then the drink
takes a drink; the nitrogenous fertilizer must be given in an
increasing dose to maintain the stimulus, but the cultivator
supplies it and even extends the area of his treatment; he believes
that he is forcing the hand of Nature with profit to himself. Then
the drink takes the land. Earth-worms are dead; humus is going or
has gone, and all that can be produced is a synthetic food
responding to chemical formulas but quite without the former
power of nourishing and sustaining man. The soil has suffered a
disabling change.
It is my plea that this alteration in the soil should be studied by
experts, that the place of the earth-worm in Nature, discovered by
Charles Darwin in mid-Victorian times, should be re-stated.
There is no man, woman or grown child in these islands who
should not be aware of what is due to the Earth Mother, who
should not be informed, if only in the most elementary fashion, of
what our duty is to the store-house from which we draw life and
vigour. As we till our soil we deepen the cultivated portion very
slightly indeed, but sufficiently to release a fresh store of what
bacteria and humus yield to the universal well-being. The work
done by micro-organisms is thus brought into the active sphere of
cultivation. Rain, snow, wind and dust are working ceaselessly for
the preservation of the soil; the farm-stock is returning what it has
taken, so that the land is its debtor. All the way through the Nature
cycle in our fertile fields we are dealing with living forces, and the
fruits they yield hold all that is required to keep us well and
vigorous. Can any quick and increased profit justify interference
with natural forces ? I hold that it could not even if it were
successful. But the truth is that success can only be temporary; for
all the damage we do we must pay the price, and it is a terrible
one. Success is more within the capacity of the earth-worm than in
the men who pin faith to mineral fertilizers. These will not make
humus; they can but destroy it, and humus has been defined as at
once “the product of living matter and the source of it "
(Waksman: Humus).
CHAPTER VIII The Cure of the Soil
IT MAY BE SAID WITH CONFIDENCE that fertility can be restored to an
exhausted soil, but only by a reasoned, scientific method.
Farmyard manure may be rated too highly. Improperly applied, it
will fail of full effect; the building up and treatment of the manure
heap can be carried out properly only by the aid of expert
knowledge. A certain degree of decomposition is essential. The
real purpose of manure must not be forgotten—the production of
humus—and to this end the question of permutation must be
closely studied. A good general and visible test for an effective
manure heap is the presence of earth-worms in large numbers.
Horse and cow manure are effective, and the questions of heat and
moisture are important, but though animal manures are very
valuable it is possible by the careful study of composting methods
to limit the need for the farmyard's assistance. All the waste of the
vegetable garden, the grass from the lawn, the leaves from the
wood or hedgerow, ditch cleanings, hedge trimmings, even
bracken, will serve. This material is put in a shallow pit; to start
the work a shallow layer of manure is helpful without being
essential. A little unslaked lime should be sandwiched between
compost and soil layers, and moisture must be maintained. Newly
fallen leaves are a great help. Most weeds have a value in the
compost heap, and nettles are the most useful. It is safe to say that
no man can attempt to make compost without the prompt
discovery that he has a lot to learn and without discovering that the
effort required is worth while.
Of late the Ministry of Agriculture, recognizing that fertilizers
are threatened by the war, has suggested the making of composts
and has issued certain directions. But there are right and wrong
ways of preparation. Composting has its subtleties, and if you are
going to apply it to your own fields or gardens it is well to do the
work in the most effective way. Inasmuch as the followers of the
late Dr. Steiner and of Sir Albert Howard have specialized in the
subject and are willing to give directions and advice, it must be as
well to apply to them; they are always ready to help applicants.
The one fault to avoid is belief that any mixture of garden
waste, however haphazard its collection, situation, and
arrangement, is as good as any other and can be relied upon to
produce full results. Cultivation of the earth, whatever the method,
demands a certain relationship between the man, the work, and the
goal, some effort to understand the why and wherefore of every act
of husbandry. At the same time it is better to apply any well rotted
waste material to the soil than to apply inorganic compounds that
in the long run benefit nothing except the seller. In the matter of
compost the question is just one of the degree of good; some
benefit is assured.
In the work of the farmer close attention to detail is obviously
of the first importance and it is certain that much valuable manure
and com-post is lost because this food for the soil is left lying
unprotected on the land and allowed to lose its quality. The life of
the compost or manure must unite with the life of the soil, and
these additions must neither be left exposed to the weather nor
buried beneath the area of soil activity. No ploughing should be
deeper than is necessary, whether for roots or grain.
If these commonplaces are emphasized it is because no system
of soil treatment can do what is required or realize hopes if
Nature's laws are neglected. Above all it is essential to remember
that Nature will not be hurried and that salts, water, and carbonic
acid are air-borne and that of the bulk of the plant less than 5 per
cent is derived from the soil.
Perhaps if we look for the root of our trouble it lies in the fact
that the farmer has been taught how to practise certain acts of
husbandry and has never felt forced to consider the why and the
wherefore. He tends to treat the soil as something that has no real
life of its own, a mere medium for growing things, ready to
respond to any stimulation and be the better for it. The vast life of
humus and bacteria means nothing to him, even though he knows a
good soil when he sees one, and understands all the duties that
stand between seed-time and harvest. He knows how to feed his
stock, but is not yet aware of the fashion in which wrong methods
of restoring lost fertility to the soil may keep his pastures from
being effective. When the old four, or more, course rotations were
followed; when the farmyard supplied the fertilizers and land was
limed from time to time, reasonable crops were won from the soil,
and the food raised was above suspicion. Then came the invention
that denatured our bread and threw the land out of its stride and
multiplied diseases among plants and stock, and a widespread
bewilderment has resulted. Every farmer knows that all is not well
with the modern methods, but there is no ready information for
enquiring minds. All too many earnest agriculturists are groping in
darkness, as I had to do until my attention was directed to the
works of men such as Rudolf Steiner and Sir Albert Howard and I
began to make experiments on my own farms and learn something
of the possibilities that await correct acts of husbandry. It was a
long and tedious process, not lacking in surprises and
disappointments, but I am glad to think that these have been useful
and productive.
CHAPTER IX Medical Opinion
IN THE TOWN HALL OF CREWE in March, 1939, 600 doctors, local health
authorities and farmers from the County Palatine of Chester heard
the testimony of the doctors of the Panel Committee to their belief
that after a quarter of a century of medical benefits nothing has
been done for the prevention of sickness.
The principles laid down in the Medical Testament to which
thirty-one doctors of the Cheshire Panel Committee (representing
some 600 practitioners) subscribed, is that in the case of foodstuffs
based on agriculture the natural cycle from animal and vegetable
waste through soil and plant to animal and man must be complete
without the intervention of a chemical or substitution stage.
At this meeting Sir Robert McCarrison and Sir Albert Howard
spoke. The latter urged that soil fertility must be the basis of the
public health system of the future and that agriculture must be
given its place as the foundation of preventive medicine.
The testament proclaims outstanding facts. Year by year, say
the doctors of the Panel Committee, we have been consulted by
our patients more and more often. Our daily work brings us
repeatedly to the same point—"this illness results from a lifetime
of wrong nutrition". Anaemia is due to too little iron in the food.
Wrong nutrition accounts for gallstones, appendicitis, gastric and
duodenal ulcers, colitis, and diverticulitis.
Reference is made to the McCarrison experiment on rats, for
apparently we can learn something about ourselves from the
reactions of these trouble-bearers. Three classes of diet were
employed, good, bad and indifferent:

The good diets made for good health in rats.

The indifferent diets made for indifferent health in rats.
The bad diets made for bad health in rats.

Diseases of badly fed rats were those of which one in three

sick persons among the insured classes in England and Wales
suffer. The conclusion drawn is that no health campaign can
succeed unless the materials of which bodies are built are sound.
Right feeding would prevent most sickness. It is clear then that
Nature must be allowed to play her part and that the right food is
that which has responded to the regular cycle of agricultural action
without any artificial intervention.
There is nothing new in all this, at least for those of us who
have been studying questions of vitality and nutrition, but it is of
first- class importance to the movement towards sane living to find
the medical officers of a county uniting in an admission that
disease and malnutrition are effect and cause. Some of us knew
this, but we are no more than a tiny minority at present groping our
way along the difficult road to recognition. If Cheshire could give
the lead to all England she would win renown; if England could
give the lead to the world, a peaceful revolution, the most helpful
in the history of the Christian era, would be accomplished. The
only difficulty is to relate the findings of the doctors to agricultural
practice. This should not be difficult, though effective liaison
remains to be established, but with Sir Robert McCarrison's
experiments and Sir Albert Howard's system of composting set
before the skilled and experienced farmers of the County Palatine
of Chester it is safe to hope that experiments in the direction of
clean farming will be made in many directions; it may be that
these experiments will be so planned as to reveal some of the
truths of nutrition that are now obscured. Nobody need fear that
this public testament will be allowed to fall into oblivion, or that
the admitted failure of our Health Services to ensure good health
will be overlooked. At the same time it is not too much to suggest
that if the medical services had not been so largely reorganized and
extended since the early days of the century the results of national
neglect of the soil would have been still more marked. As things
are we have better means than ever before of healing unhealthy
conditions that need not exist and must pass as soon as we adopt
the right attitude towards the land.
CHAPTER X When Peace Returns: Some Proposals
WHEN A GREAT WAR comes to an end and the people affected directly
or indirectly turn to consider the best uses to which the remains of
their material wealth can be turned there is always an unfailing
stream of suggestion. The world's rulers are assured beyond all
peradventure how they may bring about the millennium if they
will only make the requisite effort and, expressed briefly, the
recipe would appear to be quite a simple one. It is to give those
who put forward any proposals the benefits that they most desire
and believe they deserve. Ways and means are left to the
Government concerned.
In this chapter I am going to put forward my own proposals,
but they will vary from the bulk of the company they keep because
there will at least be nothing in them of personal advantage. I have
nothing to seek on my own behalf, directly or indirectly. At the
same time, if those proposals are taken as seriously as the times
demand, they should not only bring some benefit to everybody but
should also reduce very considerably the need for many other
claims.
What I urge is a union of all Governments to consider the
physical state of the earth from which every man derives his
sustenance. I would like them to recognize that the cultivable soil
of the world is a very precious possession and that war has been
waged against it, devastating, merciless war, for more than half a
century until millions of acres have suffered almost irreparable
loss. The loss has not been fully recognized by the world's rulers,
but they can no longer ignore it.
I state, without fear of contradiction by any whose opinions
count, that no peace can be of any validity that docs not include
peace with the soil. To bring this about I would like to see a
national committee of scientists directed to enquire in the most
searching and comprehensive fashion mat they themselves can
suggest what the present state of the soil's health is, what effect its
sickness has upon the nutritional value of common food plants and
how these values, if lost or diminished, can best be restored. I am
taking it for granted that every competent scientist is bound to find
that the soil is sick, that its produce is diminishing, both in quantity
and quality, and that the resultant danger threatens the fabric of a
civilization which, whatever its limitation, is the best we have been
able to reach.
Following this enquiry, or rather associated with it, would be a
series of analyses of micro-organic life, an enquiry into the
question of how it is affected by currents and forces that are felt
rather than seen, and how it is possible to bring back life-giving
forces to denatured soil. Here the students of cosmology and the
leading physicists must play an important part.
Further, I would like a series of analyses, showing so far as
possible the food value of plants taken from fertile, living, organic
soil that has not suffered treatment from inorganic chemical
fertilizers. Secondly, the value of food taken from soil treated with
artificial chemical fertilizers and without any addition of living
organic substances; and, lastly, of soil depleted in whole or in part
of its micro-organisms. Furthermore, the question of the relative
values of cooked and uncooked green plants and tubers should be
worked out for the benefit of every man who at present has
insufficient information.
Following that, I would like to see a proper analysis of the
relative food values of the wheat kernel, treated and untreated, so
that we may learn the precise value of the endosperm which serves
to-day for the white bread of commerce and, there is every reason
to fear, for the spread of deficiency diseases. Then, I would like to
see the world's leading medical men called upon to state the result
of denatured food upon the nervous system. The psychologists
might be of great help in this examination.
The next point of importance is the relation of vitamin content
in food to the state of the soil in which that food is grown. Is it
possible to raise food of a full vitamin content from soil in which
the humus has been depleted and worms have been destroyed or
seriously reduced by mineral fertilizers or sprays?
The President of the Royal College of Physicians, referring to
the fact that Rothamsted could detect no difference between crops
produced by natural and artificial manuring, expressed the opinion
that this does not prove that foods grown on soil well provided
with humus are not superior. He thinks some quality in foods
grown in a natural fashion may have escaped detection down to the
present, just as vitamin content escaped chemical analysis down to
a few years ago. Again, what is the relation between soil life and
plant life, and if the first is tampered with can the second be
healthy?
Again, how far does the decline in national physique, reported
from all recruiting stations down to the time of the war, result from
malnutrition, and how far is malnutrition due to insufficient food
and to food lacking in essential qualities ?
When these questions have been answered we shall be in a
position to consider the necessary steps to give back fertility to the
soil and health to all the forms of life that feed upon it. Statistics of
the increase of every kind of disease in man, animal and plant
would pro-vide sufficient justification for an enquiry into
conditions upon which the life, not of one nation, but of all
nations, may be said to depend.
Finally, if those who are best qualified to judge should come to
the conclusion that the state of the soil calls for prompt and
decisive action, it will be necessary to organize agriculture on new
lines. These, while they make the competent cultivator's work
worth while and provide sufficiently attractive conditions to retain
good men on the land, must emphasize the basic fact that we hold
the earth's surface as trustees for the generations to come, and that
we can no longer do or suffer anything that will reduce the value
of the asset that has been entrusted to each generation in turn. The
significance of this statement would undoubtedly be greatly
enhanced if reference were given on Government authority to past
civilizations that have disappeared from the face of the earth
because mishandled soil refused to support them.
The justification for these enquiries is the necessity for prompt
action in a matter that concerns us all. To be frank, even brutal, it
may be said that while knowledge grows, greed outpaces it; while
knowledge walks, greed runs and has been gathering momentum
for more than half a century.
A universal survey of the world's productive capacity is
needed, and this survey should be followed by an effort on the part
of all the nations that control production to agree to a system by
which it can be brought about in accordance with natural law and,
following this, can be distributed equitably throughout the world.
There would appear to be no reason to doubt that Nature's
capacities can be expanded legitimately and to the advantage of
mankind; it is the money-mad rush of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries that has thrown the cultivable earth surface out of gear.
Greatly daring, I would go even further, I would suggest that if
this common interest in the shallow food-producing surface of our
planet can become matter of general acknowledgment we shall
plant not only the seeds of healthy crops but the seeds of a
universal understanding. We shall recognize the essential
brotherhood of the children of men. Health and comparative ease
are to be had for the seeking, provided the seeking be intelligent
and sufficiently modest. Man cannot set Nature's paces; on the
contrary, he must accommodate his own to hers, for in every
struggle that may result from disobedience and presumption
Nature says the last word.
CHAPTER XI Plans for the Future: A Temporary Compromise
I HAVE ALWAYS REGARDED the late Marquess of Salisbury, the
statesman who went to the Berlin Conference with Lord
Beaconsfield, as one of the greatest public servants of my time,
and I have never forgotten one of his aphorisms. He said in a
public speech that “compromise is the essence of statecraft ".
Here was a quiet, unsensational presentation of a truth that
touches not only statecraft but all life, a little masterpiece of
wisdom compressed into half a dozen words. In the views that
have occupied so many of my working hours and so much of my
leisure for years past, I have borne Lord Salisbury's statement well
in mind, even while I have resented its implications; it has saved
me from fanaticism and from the useless fervour that sees the end
without considering the means.
It is a simple truth that I am utterly opposed to the use of
mineral fertilizers and that I am convinced of the necessity of
abandoning them, but my common sense tells me that until the
farmer has sufficient organic fertilizers to hand he must rely in
some measure—a steadily diminishing one I hope and believe—on
the others. I have to recognize the truth that the coming of power
to the farm has robbed it of a very large amount of manure, that the
rules of mixed farming have not been observed as they should
have been, and that it is a physical impossibility to supply at short
notice all the organic fertilizers that the land requires. But from the
start it should be used to the fullest possible extent and artificials
reduced correspondingly. If I were a State Director of Agriculture
and knew that the land was being maltreated, my first step would
be to see to the adequate provision of organic fertilizers and only
then to insist upon their use. I might find a precedent for a drastic
order but I would not make it. For example, there is at Rothamsted
a plot on the continuous wheat production area that has no manure,
organic or inorganic, and has produced wheat for a hundred years.
Part of this no-manure plot was bare-fallowed in 1938 and in 1939
yielded thirty-nine bushels to the acre. Does that not set one
thinking modestly of the limit of our knowledge ? Does it not
suggest that forces are greater than substances? The most we can
do is to follow our lights modestly and go forward with a sure
conviction that cosmic forces beyond our limited powers of human
measurement and analysis are at work to give us each day our
daily bread. There is immense refreshment in this thought, and it
can sustain us while we deal on matter-of-fact lines with what we
can see, touch and estimate
exactly. If I admit the practical wisdom of limited use of chemical
fertilizers until we have been able to return to a more natural
method, it is because I wish to see the farmer convinced, not
against his will. but in accordance with it. I want him to grasp the
truth that the mineral requirements of the plants he grows are only
a part of their needs. I want him to recognize the formative forces
that lie a little beyond his vision. Nitrogen, potash, phosphates and
lime are in the plant but they are not the plant, even though they
are all that analysis will yield. It is very hard to explain, but in the
"Song Celestial" Sir Edwin Arnold has a few lines that seem to me
to express the position. Krishna is speaking:

"See! as the shoreless airs

Move in the measureless space, but are not space,
(And space were space without the moving airs)
So all things are in Me, but are not I."

All the elements are in the plant, but they are not the plant, and for
lack of recognition of this simple truth many scientists have been
led astray, and the earth has suffered by their lack of vision. In the
course of time men will come to understand that plants, when their
formative forces have been stimulated, can derive their needs not
only from the soil but from the atmosphere and from the cosmic
forces whose presence and influence Sir James Jeans has
recognized more clearly than the rest of his contemporaries. The
average man recognizes only material forces and substances. Let
none blame him; he must be taught as those of us who are a little
before him on the road to knowledge have been taught in their
turn; and while he is learning the new way he must follow the old.
What we must seek is to spread the knowledge and to disarm
criticism by pointing out that in no small measure we do but ask
him to return to the tradition of his grandfathers, merely taking
such steps as modern methods have devised to smooth the way.
One does not seek revolutionary processes or the violent
disturbance of great business interests. Rapid evolutionary method
is called for and I think the effort should be made to direct the
attention of the great chemical industries to the world's essential
needs so that they may cease to be parties to the exploitation of the
earth which must be as much to them as it is to us.
I am not ashamed to be an optimist. It is not necessary to
associate a crusade with hatred, ill-feeling, or contempt; such
emotions get you nowhere. We have not to condemn those who ill-
treat the soil, but rather to persuade them that there is a better way
to satisfy their legitimate needs. We have no right to criticize lack
of vision, but we must endeavour to increase the store of vision
that has to serve humanity. Above all, we have to help the
agriculturist to understand that his task is the most important, I
might almost say the most sacred, of all. Here is the medium
through which Nature distributes, her bounty. It is in her power to
feed mankind so well that human activity and capacity may be
extended in a fashion beyond his imagining; if he neglects his duty
through ignorance or of set purpose he may arrest all progress; he
may broadcast disease or ill-health throughout the world. Who
doubts which path he will follow if he can see both clearly?
The best efforts of every country's farmers are needed by their
country as never before. The gravest danger before mankind is not
that of war and peace, rash though that statement may seem. It is
the danger that our first needs may fail us, and in that case all the
world will be defeated, there will be no victors, only vanquished. I
feel that the present struggle has turned the attention or mankind
away from a war in which all the nations might and should be
working side by side.
While I have endeavoured all through my long life to keep my
feet securely planted on the ground, even though my head was in
the air, while I have avoided all relations with what people call the
supernatural I have recognized very humbly and gratefully the
existence of the superphysical. I have learned to understand that
we are all far more ignorant than we care to admit, particularly in
the world of plant growth and plant life, and that our materialistic
conceptions of the universe are a profound error based largely
upon the unfortunate fact that that pride has usurped the place that
belongs of right to humility.
I think we should endeavour to prove that there is a spiritual as
well as a natural science, and that it is moving forward to take its
place in the world just as the steam power and the electric current
and the wireless waves and the combustion engine have done. It
will not be so easy to grasp in its beginnings, but the grasp will
come when the followers of natural science can be moved to
enquire into it. We know, too, by reason of Rudolf Steiner's life-
work, that there are clues to this science that cannot be overlooked
for long, and that the businesslike farmer and gardener can become
an apostle of a very modest and unassuming Master who gave up
his work in other fields because, as he saw things, the world was in
danger of starvation. Who, looking round at conditions as they are
to-day, will say he was quite wrong?
All that is needed to improve conditions is the growth of
knowledge. Already I know the movement is spreading and I
believe that the time cannot be far distant when every agricultural
country will have its areas given over to clean soil treated with
compost and farmyard manure along the rather different lines
advocated by Dr. Steiner and Sir Albert Howard, so that
agriculture may make its choice. I cannot doubt what that choice
will be, because, writing as a practical agriculturist of many long
years' experience, I write of what I know. Moreover, the world
understands that it must preserve its resources and that of all its
possessions the land is the first and most valuable.
The farmer is in the truest sense the vanguard of civilization; if
he nourishes his generation and leaves the land at least as healthy
as he found it he enables creation to carry on. But if he neglects his
job or if he mistakes its nature and thinks that land actually
belongs to him and can be exploited for his private ends and
handed over in a lifeless state to his successor he betrays that trust,
and no man on earth has a more exalted one.
Because things are as they are I close on the note on which I
opened —the note of compromise. What is wanted is that all
farmers should be convinced by actual experience and observation
that there is a better way than the one that the most of them are
following to-day. To bring this about there should be no
expression of superior knowledge or superior practice; the
endeavour should be the best of all appeals— the interest of
suffering humanity, the bulk of which even in the twentieth
century of the Christian era enjoys neither adequate nourishment
nor sound health, though both are within easy reach.
CHAPTER XI I Forgotten Faiths
DR. FARADAY FRANKLAND, F.R.S., writing nearly half a century ago, had
something to say in his book, Our Secret Friends and Foes, about
the change brought about by micro-organisms in connection with
animal and vegetable matter. (It might be said that the micro-
organisms of a new idea were activating grey matter in all
directions.) He pointed out shrewdly that but for bacteria the earth
would be covered with the remains of plants and animals
undergoing little more change than the minerals of the earth's
crust. Then life would come to an end, since it is by decomposition
that the fertility of the soil is maintained; the world would become
a barren waste without it. First plants would go and then animal
life. He found animal life depending on the products elaborated by
micro-organisms from animal and vegetable refuse. He recognized
the necessities of the situation. "If one link be broken the whole
mechanism must collapse."
Then Professor Frankland stressed the need for nitrogen (he
said nitric acid) on land supplied with purely mineral ingredients
such as potash, lime, and phosphoric acid. But he fell into the error
of believing that the soil generates nitric acid from nitrogenous
manures, and then referred to the discoveries of the French
chemists, Schloozing and Muntz, that bacteria are the friends and
agents of soil fertility. The Professor went on to tell how in 1890
Europe took 480,000 tons of nitrate of soda from Chile, and he
was clearly impressed. Science could be astounded by vast
quantities then, and the possibility that homoeopathic doses of a
plant preparation might affect great acres of soil would have been
dismissed as unworthy of consideration.
Later, he reminded us that scientists for more than half a
century had denied that free nitrogen in the atmosphere can be
assimilated or utilized as plant food. Long afterwards it was agreed
that microorganisms bring about soil changes.
It is possible to see from this brief note of the last generation's
beliefs, which have been confirmed for the most part, how long it
has taken to present a fairly accurate picture of growth and to bring
people to see that death and decay have as great a part to play in
relation to the soil as life and growth. The changes go on
continuously, life to death and death to life, but what the scientists
of fifty years ago had not glimpsed were, first, the presence of
cosmic forces playing a great and important part and, secondly, the
vital truth that the earth is alive and the mineral fertilizer is dead,
and you cannot serve the cause of nutrition by growing living
substances by the aid of dead ones. It might have been reasonable
to expect scientists to question, even if not to doubt, the wisdom of
bringing half a million tons of dead fertilizers to Europe's fields in
those days when we had ample stock, and horses drew the plough,
and farmyard manure was plentiful and straw was not sold off the
farms. But it is of interest to turn to Professor Frankland's day
when the great rush to exchange soil fertility for manufactured
goods had not quite got into its stride and the food that men ate
was certainly of better quality than that which has resulted from
the chemist's labours. In those days, or in those immediately before
them, the theory of the spontaneous generation of life had staunch
supporters, and it was left to Pasteur to disappoint them and face
their anger. They would not believe that there were germs in the
air, because they could not see them.
It is not difficult to find among scientists of to-day much the
same attitude. What lies beyond the immediate domain of the
sensory system is suspect. While a wholesome scepticism is a
safeguard, a great deal in modern scepticism cannot be associated
with that qualifying adjective. The spontaneous generator, if that
term be permissible, held that the smallest amount of air was
sufficient to generate life in blood cells and other highly sensitive
substances. Of course, Pasteur was scientist jusq'au bout des
ongles, as his countrymen say, indeed science has been saved for
the past century by its brilliant and enlightened exponents. But
they all have to fight disbelief and ridicule. Pasteur in the sixties of
the last century, Lodge, Crookes, Barrett and Steiner later on,
active workers like Pfeiffer and Wachsmuth who are with us to-
day. The story of the lives of Pasteur and Steiner bear startling
witness to the treatment meted out to those who try to serve
mankind to the best of a vast ability. Pasteur lived to hear the
plaudits of the world, Steiner died amid violent outcries of his
traducers, he did not live long enough to enjoy his reputation while
he lived.
The trouble is that men have to work very hard and with
sustained effort to enter the ranks of trained observers, and they
are very reluctant to leave the lines they have been brought to
follow. Only genius dare to do that, and must pay the price. There
are so many outcries against ideas and theories that are either new
or have been resurrected from the past that it is interesting to turn
back for a moment to the years when the incursion of von Liebig
into the storehouse and granary of mankind had not come of age.
Then we find that scientists were still unaware of the existence of
bacteria and ascribed many of the processes of Nature to this
admirable phenomenon of spontaneous generation. Having
accepted the idea they were prepared to defend it against all
comers. Because Pasteur had the courage to stand up against them
he had to face a bitter struggle. I remember seeing the story set out
very vividly on the screen. In later years Rudolf Steiner assailed
the strongly held citadels of a materialistic agricultural science,
and his followers are carrying on the struggle though they have no
outstanding leader to-day and would be dead if ridicule could kill.
Happily they are able to turn from the critics to the land itself and
offer proofs to all who have the wish to receive them. It is
unfortunate that these bitter struggles should range round so vast a
question as the nourishment of mankind.
All men must or should admire the endeavour that leads to the
attainment of additional knowledge, and though we may smile at
the theories of spontaneous generation as we smile at the Huxleys
and Haeckels who dismissed Providence so lightly, it is no ill-
natured laughter. It is founded more on regret than amusement,
and at the same time there is a certain consolation in contemplating
the advances and retreats of the scientific mind, since some of the
advances are as dangerous as the retreats were inevitable. I am
hoping that as the result of modern investigation, however
unorthodox it be, inorganic fertilizers will be first reduced and then
abolished from our fields, that the work of Steiner and Howard
will win universal acceptance and that it will bring back health to
stock and pastures and consequently nourishing food to mankind.
The aid of science here in examining results and drawing
conclusions that all can understand may well prove incalculable,
and the N,P,K. mentality can submit to treatment by skilled
biologists. We all scatter mistakes along our path from cradle to
the grave and can plead human fallibility. The only sin is to persist
in them when we may reasonably be supposed to know them for
what they are.
CHAPTER XIII A Course For Farmers
IF WE ARE TO MAKE real progress in the world of agriculture, if we are
to bring home to those most concerned the new-old aspects of the
most honourable and praiseworthy of all industries, we should
seek to spread modern teaching through the length and breadth of
farmland. Talk about compost to an older generation and they will
be familiar with it; either they or their fathers looked to it for the
soil's fertility. Speak to them of earth-worms and they will be
quick to admit the debt the land owes to their ceaseless labours. I
have heard men found their objection to mineral fertilizers on the
perfectly good and sufficient ground that they drive earth-worms
away. But if you turn to the questions of humus and bacteria,
response will be small, while cosmic dust and mycorrhiza and the
rest will evolve no response at all. One may even be conscious of
the uneasy sense among listeners that somebody is talking
nonsense, or at least is discussing matters that have no real bearing
on food production or modern life.
Yet if we are to make agriculture a vivid force, capable of
fulfilling its colossal task, farmers must have a larger sense, not
only of their status and responsibilities, but of the forces in Nature
that are working for them, the forces without which their efforts
would yield no response. This task of educating in the light of
modern knowledge will not be difficult, for the observant farmer is
nearer to, and more intimately associated with Nature than any
townsman, and he is well aware of the existence of forces that he
does not discuss save in general terms. He is not unaware of the
existence in the soil of elements that are hostile; he has not
overlooked the question of soil deterioration; he has learned that
since he turned to artificials for a short-cut to prosperity the quality
of his land has not improved. He has noted the spread of sickness
and insect pests, he would welcome an explanation and a guide to
better conditions and does not know where to turn for them. He is
not like the old-time farmer of the U.S.A. and Canada, who would
break up virgin soil, take three straw crops in succession, sell the
holding as an ‘improved’ farm, and go off into the wilds to spoil
more land, chuckling over the plight of the ‘suckers' he had left
behind. In England there is no soil to spare, even though much of
what we have is extensively farmed, or perhaps not farmed at all
within the meaning of the words to a conscientious agriculturist.
The Englishman likes to stay put, to farm where his father and
grandfather farmed before him; he has a loyalty to the land,
sometimes an affection for it.
So it follows that if his finances permit and the outlook is not
too grim, he is ever ready to listen to those who can help him to
understand and improve his holding. The response to the modern
county agricultural organizer is very great, so that if it should
become possible to convince authority of the advantage of organic
fertilizers, composting methods, and the treatment of the soil as a
living thing, the road to agricultural regeneration would be an easy
one to follow.
In so far as all agricultural experts are gravely concerned with
the diseased state of so much land and stock, there must be many
among them who will turn an attentive ear to the new doctrine of
natural treatment of the soil, if they know that it is advocated with
the idea of bringing land, stock, and crops back to health and is not
aimed at exploiting the land or the farmer in any way.
What is needed is that the people who have followed up the
Steiner and Howard teachings in this country should record their
experiences carefully and, if they have neither the time nor the
inclination to approach their fellow-farmers and gardeners, place a
simple record at the disposal of those who are prepared to deal
with the question in public when they have co-ordinated the
results. For the development of the new knowledge and to spread it
far and wide workers and demonstrators are needed in every
county, and they should endeavour to get in touch with the
National Farmers' Union. Farmers may not be inclined to respect
new methods but, knowing how greatly improvement and
regeneration are called for on their holdings they will, at least, be
interested. Progress will, perhaps, be slow, but if it is to be real,
there must be no county in which the theories and facts on organic
manuring and the action of humus are not within the reach of all
interested parties. We have one or two establishments that can be
inspected; there is one in Lincolnshire (Surfleet), one in
Worcestershire (Clent), and a third in Berkshire (Bray), a
systemized experiment is being carried out in Suffolk (Haughley),
and there may be others but they cannot do sufficient to meet the
needs of the times, needs recognized to-day by many of the leaders
of agricultural thought. I do not hesitate to say that all who are
carrying out either of the great modern methods, whether they
follow Dr. Steiner, as I do, or Sir Albert Howard, whose principles
have so much in common with those of Steiner, they should at
least allow, even invite, all interested parties to come and see for
themselves. The matter is of international importance and should
be so regarded.
Teachers should be completely frank about the homoeopathic
preparations of plants and bark that Dr. Steiner advocated for use
as activators and prove their worth in practice rather than by
troubling about the theory. You confuse, alarm or annoy people if
you talk about phases of the moon, signs of the Zodiac, or cosmic
forces. But if you take preparations of silica, dandelion, stinging
nettle, camomile, oak-bark and valerian and show that their
addition to your compost heaps adds greatly to their effectiveness,
there will be no further cavil, nobody will talk of magic, black or
white. After all, few of us who accept medicine at the doctor's
hands know how it functions, how it is made up or why the
constituents are used. We are content to accept authority.
So it is with the Steiner activators; when the results are
recognized as being of real value to the land, the peculiar methods
of preparation, generally associated with a long period of
incubation below ground, will be admitted to possess a broader
basis than eccentricity, and to be completely free from what is
called ‘magic '! I think that in this regard the farmer will be a
readier convert than the layman, because if he is one of those who
works with his hands, and is not merely the director of other men's
labours, he will know that ours is indeed what Sir James Jeans
calls a mysterious universe.
There can be no man with any measure of imagination in his
makeup who works on the land and is unaware of forces that he
can shape, but cannot thwart or overcome, who does not know that
while they are imponderable they are decisive. There are few who
have never been awed by the knowledge of power and purpose in
the realm of their endeavour, who have not recognized that we do
but stand upon the threshold of knowledge. I have even heard
farmers admit that this element of association with unfamiliar,
silent forces accounts, in part, for the abiding interest they take in
the land; they know that, whatever the world's esteem may be, they
are members of a privileged and honourable class. Many would
not leave the land save under compulsion, few are happy away
from it. Their pride in good farming is not merely a matter of
favourable bank balances. They know that their holding reflects
their individuality, they regard its achievement as their own, it is
their certificate of land-worthiness, if I may so phrase it. Show
them a better way of cultivation than they are following and they
will be quick to follow and faithful in pursuit. But until they are
aware of what correct fertilizing methods stand for and involve,
they cannot be expected to join a new movement that reverses the
disastrous teachings of a century and invites their return to a
sounder basic method while taking advantage of modern
knowledge that is really helpful. This is as it should be, for the
farmer, a conservative and traditionalist by instinct and training,
has been pushed out of his normal stride of late years, first by
machinery and chemical fertilizers and now by more machines and
more fertilizers. He knows that the land is passing out of control in
spite of all these aids, and out of this awareness comes a
willingness to consider new ideas and the revival of old methods.
He may even be heard to admit that heavy yields, whether of corn,
milk or eggs, may be too much for the field, the cow and the hen.
His receptive mood is the pioneer's opportunity, not to be lightly
missed, but only to be used effectively by careful organization.
I think that those who have the national welfare at heart, and
do not mind facing the necessary ridicule and misrepresentation,
will have an occasion, the need for which has been greatly
emphasized by conditions arising out of the war. Mineral
fertilizers may be nasty, personally I think they are, but none could
call them cheap, even if there were no better alternative associated
with their prolonged and indiscriminate use. There may not be
sufficient organic material to go round, but if what is used is left
uncontaminated it will tell its own tale, and this time to an
interested audience. As a result, I venture to believe that men will
listen and set out to make the utmost use of all material that lies to
hand, and those autumn fires of garden waste, so pleasant to look
at with the eye of the body and so painful to regard with the eye of
the mind, will become things of an unregretted past.
In normal times we are apt to ridicule sentiment, but when a
crisis comes to our affairs, we wake to the truth that it is one of the
strongest of the forces directing human conduct. It is the
foundation of the patriotic impulse that turns men to scorn delights
and live laborious days, and offer up their lives for love of a
country and its institutions. It is a like feeling that, working in a
lesser sphere, stirs the minds of many men who farm their own
land, or so they think of it, though in truth the greatest among us is
no more than a tenant for life with power of appointment. But men
feel a sense of responsibility towards their acres and any one of
them would feel proud and happy if he could be assured that his
skill or daring or care had brought his fields and his stock from
sickness to health and left them a worthy inheritance for those who
must presently take his place.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I attach great importance to the method of approach. The man
who wishes to point out the advantages of sane fertilizing methods
has no occasion to mix his plea with abuse of other methods he
finds in use; he must come as friend rather than a teacher, as one of
the great brotherhood to which the nourishment and support of all
men are entrusted. There is no excuse for the abuse of faulty
methods, all that is called for is a plea for their rejection in place of
something better. A teacher should not forget to point out that
although modern methods of composting are affairs of this
century, the middle-aged farmer's grandfather had his compost
heaps, and kept his land in good heart by their help. As a result he
had fewer diseases to contend with and those he had to face were
not so devastating as the modern variants, although to-day he can
command the services of experts on a scale unknown to his
forebears. If his livestock, corn, fruit and vegetables had been as
susceptible to disease as they are to-day, he would have been down
and out. His grandfather knew neither the latter-day diseases, nor
the modern remedies, he had no county expert to whom he could
turn. But he raised healthier crops and better stock on cleaner land
than his grandson has ever known. The effort required is to give
that grandson an equal chance and then with the aid of modern
knowledge he will achieve results to wonder at. As I see things,
only the misuse of minerals stands in his way.
CHAPTER XIV The Imperial Effort Called For
WHEN I FIRST SUGGESTED that expert examination of the health and
function of the soil in relation to plant growth was a necessity in
these latter days, those who found themselves in agreement with
me pointed out that the work would involve expenditure on a very
generous scale and that no provision was forthcoming to meet it.
This may have been so when the question of healthy food from
untainted farm-lands first occupied my mind, but since then there
have been large and significant extensions of Imperial unity and
joint Imperial endeavour. Those whose attention has not been
directed in the past, as it must be in the future, to the varied, urgent
problem of food production may well have passed the changes by,
so I do not hesitate to record them.
Much good work had been done before 1927 when the
Imperial Agricultural Research Conference met and decided to
share the expense of maintaining eight Research Stations in the
United Kingdom. Already the Dominions were supporting the
Imperial Institute of Entomology and Mycology in Kensington, at
Slough and at Kew, together with other institutions at Cambridge,
Princes Risborough, and Leeds. They understand better overseas
than at home the vast importance of healthy crops and the danger
of new, unexpected diseases.
Following the great gathering in 1927 these subjects were
listed for expert examination in the Homeland :
Soil Science, Plant Genetics (two stations), Agricultural
Parasitology, Fruit Production, Animal Nutrition, Animal Health
and Animal Genetics.

The stations chosen were :

The Plant Breeding Institute at Rothamsted,

The Welsh Plant Breeding Station at Aberystwith,
The East Mailing Fruit Station at Maidstone,
The Rowett Institute near Aberdeen,
The Veterinary Research Laboratory at Weybridge,
The Animal Breeding Research Department at Edinburgh.

It will be seen that the Imperial effort is a very considerable

one and doubtless those who organized the layout of endeavour are
well satisfied with its scope. Money, personal effort, sustained
enthusiasm : these are the forces that move the world—sometimes
in the right direction. But is this effort, for all its merits, really
adequate to our needs? I think not. Indeed, I submit that a question
of vast importance, dominating all others, has been overlooked.
If it be true that deterioration in the health of all forms of life,
the spread of deficiency diseases in man and beast and the growth
of parasite and insect pests, is due to altered conditions in the soil
following the free (I might even say indiscriminate) use of mineral
fertilizers, what is there in the whole programme of the Imperial
Agricultural Research Conference that will heal the sickness of the
world? What is there in the work of the new and old Imperial
Bureaux that will enable them to tackle the trouble in its
beginnings, to treat disease and degeneration at their source, to
eradicate rather than to cure? I, and those who think with me, are
well assured that no permanent good can result from treatment of
sickness whether in man, beast, bird, tree, or vegetable. What we
need is the establishment of conditions in which diseases will not
arise. Such conditions can be reached by the many; already they
have been attained by the few.
The main hindrance to progress in scientific work is man's
objection to admit the unorthodox practitioner. He does not want
his company or his effort, and will oppose him at every turn with
the best conscience in the world. The homoeopath is rejected even
though science is discovering that Nature herself practises along
the lines indicated by Hahnernann. Osteopathy is taboo though its
successes are past counting. Nature cures abound and many of
them justify their title, though not perhaps always on the grounds
put forward by their practitioners. But even if the practitioners
have qualified in the schools and turned to their speciality from
purely altruistic motives they must face the resentment and
opposition of those who have not gone beyond the orthodox
teaching which is a means of livelihood and nothing more.
It is a simple and awkward possibility that disease would
decline if we were to return to the cultivation of clean land with
organic manures, if we were to restore to the earth by means of a
compost—-properly prepared according to the prescription of
Rudolf Steiner, Sir Albert Howard, or even the English farmers of
a hundred yearn ago—what we have taken from it. The time would
surely come when many Institutes that exist to study disease would
be able to turn their attention to the much more profitable study of
health, though the change-over would provide a trying time. One
of the first of their discoveries might well be that health, and
consequently efficiency, is the national birthright of man, and that
he can inherit it to the full if properly fed. Travelling a little farther
along these lines a further discovery would assuredly be made.
Farm stock fed upon healthy, natural food would either resist
disease or struggle back to health with comparatively little effort,
while plants starting life in a healthy soil grow away from disease,
because they carry in themselves that which enables them to resist
it.
If these contentions be admissible, and I know from my own
post-bag that practical agriculturists in both hemispheres share
them, I would suggest that the Governments of the Dominions and
the Colonies should enlarge their Imperial Bureaux to the extent of
establishing one CHARGED WITH DETERMINING THE NATURAL FORCES THAT
PROMOTE GROWTH, THE EFFECT UPON NUTRITION OF CHEMICAL FERTILIZERS, THE
PRECISE FORM IN WHICH THE PLANTS AND SOIL DERIVE NOURISHMENT FROM COSMIC
DUST, THE MEASURE OF INORGANIC NOURISHMENT CONVEYED TO THE PLANT AND THE
EARTH BY RAIN, DEW AND SNOW, THE EFFECT OF UNRESTRICTED MINERAL DRESSINGS
UPON HUMUS, EARTH-WORMS, MICRO-ORGANISMS AND MYCORRHIZA.
 It might prove difficult to test out the effect upon human
health of food grown under natural conditions, but a herd of cows,
a few bullocks, a pen of pigs, and a fowl run with say a hundred
birds to an acre, could be tested against controls, while in a
hospital the normal diet might be tested side by side with one free
from all forms of contamination and scrupulous (or unscrupulous)
factory handling. If the experiment were to prove beyond
peradventure that our real enemies are the chemical bag and the
unscrupulous exploiter of food, we could suppress the exploiter
and treat the honest men of science as I have already suggested we
should treat the medical profession in a healthy world, i.e. pay
them just so long as their services are not required—a novel and
generous form of unemployment benefit. Then, if trouble comes
they will give their services, and if it is clear that the root of the
evil has been destroyed there will be none to follow in their
footsteps, until mankind makes another silly blunder in the pursuit
of wealth or leisure, or in his perennial endeavours to get
something for nothing.
I plead for a really Imperial outlook upon the twin problem of
health and nutrition. What shall it profit an Empire to wield
"dominion over palm and pine ", to control a vast part of the
earth's surface, to aid the other great democracies to impose the
laws of civilization upon the planet and to promote the best
interests of hundreds of millions, if by neglect of the cultivable soil
of Empire we are going to breed a race unfit to bear the burden of
its responsibility? What are the great Bureaux that have been
established in the homeland worth to the centre or circumference
of Empire if they overlook what may be called the fundamental
danger underlying all progress? Imperialists or not, Britons need
no reminder of the extent of their obligations, nor of the fashion in
which their world position is challenged; they know that only a
nation with citizens in the A1 class can hope to carry the enormous
burden of Empire in the face of challenge undreamt of when that
Empire was acquired. First in the Imperial field, given riches
beyond the dreams of avarice, we have long been insular in our
outlook, and not without cause. Until Bleriot flew the Channel we
were in very truth surrounded by a sea that "serves us in the office
of a wall, or as a moat defensive to a house, against the envy of
less happier lands".
We have lived unchallenged. It may not have been wise to
slack and relax, but there was little danger. Now the whole
position has changed, and only the largest and wisest efforts of our
statesmen, ambassadors and pro-consuls, and all those who serve
them, will enable us to hand the Empire to our children.
I urge the Bureaux of Agricultural Investigation, to which a
copy of this book shall be sent, not to dismiss the matter hastily or
contemptuously from their consideration. For long years past, and
with a very full sense of responsibility, I have controlled the
temporary destinies of many thousands of acres. I have farmed, so
to speak, with my ear to the ground, and with my eyes wide open
and my imagination quick to respond to intimations, however
slight. For myself I have seen the difference between haphazard
cultivation for profit and those more serious acts of husbandry that
are founded upon humble recognition of our place in life as
trustees of the fortunes of Mother Earth, trustees for those who are
to come after. In the course of the years, while pursuing all acts of
husbandry in the most practical fashion and with due regard to
profitable farming, whether for rubber, stock or corn, my
convictions have been strengthened, and my one remaining desire
is to help others to see the truth as it has been shown to me, merely
saving them some, at least, of the strenuous labour by which I have
reached it. All the information I have gathered is freely at the
disposal of any who care to use it.
The point I wish to emphasize here and now is that all the
machinery for an effective Bureau exists. It can work side by side
with existing ones, and there can be no authority in the Bureaux
who would not welcome such an enquiry and its results, if only
from the scientific end. Moreover, even the first results would
certainly affect the trend of research in all the Bureaux. Whatever
personal interests and concerns may exist, research workers must
welcome knowledge that will enable them to grapple with their
ever-growing problems. For they will realize that a new key has
been provided that will open the doors now so heavily barred
against knowledge.
I have no wish to claim finality for any of the views I set out;
it suffices me that they are set out in the good faith that is founded
upon observations and experience. I only claim that they are
worthy of close consideration by unbiased experts who should for
choice be men whose knowledge of the acts of husbandry and the
soil's response is founded upon actual practice over a substantial
term of years. I want experts who have recognized for themselves
that in agriculture we deal with living forces expressed through the
life that permeates and sustains the universe.
Like all good democrats I prefer a minimum to a maximum of
laws, regulations and restrictions; I feel that common sense is
democracy's best legislator. But I cannot avoid the firm conviction
that the time has come when laws should be made, and rapidly
enforced by every civilized country, to guard the fertility of the
soil. For thousands of years legislation to protect property has been
devised, improved, amended, made more harsh or more lenient in
accordance with the movements of the human conscience. To-day
the greatest of all property, the asset by means of which we carry
on, without which life must perish, stands not only without
protection, but in such urgent need of it as has never been known
in human history, or at least so much of that history as stands
recorded.
I declare positively that the soil demands protection and that
every Government must take note of the demand. In a little while,
let us pray it be not too late, the plight of the cultivable surface of
the earth will force itself upon the attention of legislators. Then
they will be compelled to frame laws for its protection and to
penalize severely all those who, whatever the cause or the
medium, injure those powers of healthy production by which we
live. To do this work investigation must precede action, and in the
Bureaux set up in 1928, with the aid of the one additional Bureau
for which I plead, the instrument of investigation will be to hand.
In this way the necessary change and the necessary legislation
can be brought about by the common consent of men of good will
throughout the Empire, and when the Empire has spoken the rest
of the world will not only take notice, but will discover for itself
the greatest need of the hour. No country can allow another to
outstrip it in the race to the goal of improved conditions of life and
health, and this improvement is in the soil we cultivate. Nor would
any thinking man desire delay. In some time, possibly remote,
perhaps nearer than we dream, mankind must come together and
substitute harmonious association for antagonism and the sin of
separateness. In a future perhaps not so distant as we imagine the
United States of Europe may precede the United States of tie
World, and why not? Are we not all travellers between the eternity
of the past and the eternitv of the future, knowing neither whence
we come nor whither we wend ? I believe very sincerely that in the
universal effort to bring the earth into line once more with human
needs, to check its violation and exploitation, there is common
ground, on which the enemies of yesterday can meet to reconcile
their differences, render justice to those still suffering from its
withdrawal and prepare to face the future in unity and peace.
What common cause can be equally urgent and compelling?
Just as men go to the aid of the victims of disaster in the depths of
the earth or the angry spaces of the sea, so they might well unite in
the greatest life-saving effort that human history can hope to set on
record.
CHAPTER XV Parliament and the Earth Problem
AFTER MANY YEARS of subdued expressions of doubt, criticism of and
definite dissatisfaction with some of our agricultural practices are
beginning to make themselves heard. It was only the appointment
of a practical agriculturist like Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith to take
charge of farmers' business that saved protests from becoming
more vocal last year. Every farmer appeared to be growing aware
that there was something fundamentally wrong with his interests,
though few appeared to relate it to the loss of soil fertility, due to
wrong methods of cultivation. Some farmers have turned in time to
the methods of compost-making advocated by Rudolf Steiner and
Sir Albert Howard; the Ministry of Agriculture has suggested a
return to composting which, by the way, was common farming
practice down to the middle of the nineteenth century. But of
adequate recognition of our needs, and effective measures to meet
them, there is still no sign.
We are all apt to over-estimate the force of the printed word; it
looks well and, on this account, we arc inclined to believe that it
must be effective. But the book, other than a work of fiction, that
sells ten thousand copies in two years must be regarded as very
successful, and after it has been read and set aside, and perhaps
mildly discussed, the force of its message is dissipated. Few books
win a second reading.
The real medium for reform in the British Empire is the House
of Commons, and half a dozen determined men, patriots in the
highest sense of whatever party or parties, who are determined to
work for the betterment of the physical world, would soon attract a
large company of thinkers united in the defence of the earth.
I have no acquaintance with parliamentary procedure, but I
imagine that the first effort of such a group would be to apply to
Ministers of Health, Agriculture, and Food to make a serious
enquiry into the spread of deficiency diseases and the problem of
soil values. Each in his turn would be called upon to give what
explanation he could of the spread of certain diseases in this
country in face of the enormous efforts to combat them. For
example, in 1938, deaths from cancer averaged nearly 200 a day,
and cancer is presumed by many of the people with authority to be
a deficiency disease. If this is a deficiency disease, then how far
does devitalized food account for it? Statistics suggest a definite
measure of responsibility, for death figures have bounded up since
mineral fertilizers came into use.
It may be said that cancer occurs in quarters where there is no
reason to suspect any food deficiency, but against this it may be
contended that much of the food eaten by people who have all the
money they need is deficient, and that the diets of the rich are
often as ill-balanced in their way as the diets of the poor.
The Ministry of Agriculture should be urged to set up a
committee of impartial experts, including physicists, to enquire
among other things into the effect upon the soil of repeated
stimulants, upon the nature and function of humus, upon the work
of micro-organisms, upon the stimulus given to growth by earth-
worms, upon the effect of poison sprays and, finally, upon the
effect of artificial fertilizers when they come into contact with the
life that is in the soil.
The same Ministry should be asked to enquire into the reports
and records of those whose land has been changed over in the past
few years, and in place of being fed from the yards has been fed
from the chemical works. The question of compost could be
investigated further and experiments made in every part of the
country.
When the autumn returns, countless tons of hedge trimmings,
grass, and other waste products eminently suitable for compost, are
made into heaps and burnt—a destruction of the material for
growth that cannot be justified in normal circumstances and must
be particularly regretted just now.
It goes without saying that such a group as I have suggested,
though they would be in no sense a political party, would in the
first case be subjected to ridicule and caricature, but that is the
early stage through which all reformers must pass, and it should
not distress any sensible man or woman. On the other hand, if the
post-bag of a solitary individual like myself can afford any
indication of the state of the public mind, the work of what I might
call the “Save the Earth" group would meet with an immediate
response, and so soon as that response became clear and was
recognized, immediate steps would be taken to meet or at least to
examine the claims of its representatives. Then the trouble would
begin, because those who are not interested in, or are opposed to,
reform would become busy. It goes without saying that
associations to combat reform would be set in action and all the
means that propaganda has at its disposal would be used to deride,
abuse, and misconstrue the efforts of reformers. This need not
occasion alarm or even annoyance. It is part of the rough road that
all reform must travel, and if we turn to consider the history of
great movements for the benefit of mankind we shall see that it is
indeed an inevitable stage. We have only to turn back to the
movement for the abolition of slavery to know how violent and yet
sincere the opposition was. There is something akin to the
abolition of slavery in this movement for freeing
the land, because those who accept and follow the suggestions I
have put forward are really seeking to free the land from slavery of
association with substances alien to its nature, substances that
force immediate results at the expense of the future benefit of the
world at large.
Many things may attract men to the pursuit of politics and the
acquisition of a share in the direction of the laws of their country,
but I for one can conceive no nobler aim than that which seeks to
make all the world better able to bear its burdens and to redeem
vast tracts of it from infertility and waste.
 It is well to remember that every great idea has to come to
birth in one brain and that all the ideas that have helped and moved
the world have started, so to speak, from zero. The founders of
religions, the saints and the prophets, have without exception
started alone, and I see no reason why a very small body of public-
minded men should not, if they were resolute, determined, and
convinced, build up a body of opinion that would do more to help
the world than all the dictators, all the armaments, and all the
economic policies put together. Do not doubt this. When you come
to think the matter out, dictation, war, and policy will cease to
stand for anything in the day when the Earth Mother refuses to
concern herself any more with her rebellious children.
Many a young man, happily circumstanced and able to give
his best, enters public life with a keen desire to serve his country.
Let him ask himself if he can find any nobler task than to strive for
the well-being of the soil that sustains mankind. If I were young I
could not hesitate; being old, I cannot do less than urge those
whose life work lies before them.
CHAPTER XVI Old and New Knowledge
I REMEMBER READING that when the telephone was still in the
experimental stage, an eminent scientist remarked that although it
was a useful and amusing toy enough, and might even serve for the
exchange of messages from one part of a house or office to
another, there was no occasion to take it seriously. The laws
regulating the transmission of sound, his special study, made it
clear that the extreme range of communication would be in the
neighbourhood of forty yards! Again the history of two centuries
teaches us how steam had to combat prejudice before it could
replace wind as the motive power of ships, whether designed for
peace or war.
Every new idea has to struggle against man's innate opposition
to change, unless it promises to yield large and instant profit, in
which case he will embrace it, so to speak, with both hands,
satisfied that the end will justify any means. At the same time we
find a modern tendency to decry all forms of knowledge broadly
based upon the supposition that we have a great deal to learn about
the world we live in; many of us act as though we had nothing to
learn. Take astronomy, for example. For literally thousands of
years the influence of the planets upon the earth was admitted by
those who took the place occupied by the scientists to-day. There
were great schools of astronomy, great students of stellar
influences. They taught that the planets, among which they
included both moon and sun, had their part to play in our lives, that
they exercised ascertainable influence in many directions.
Then came great changes in human mentality. Men repented of
their beliefs; they grew ashamed of association with influences that
could not be encompassed by a definition, and decided that beyond
the cognition of their senses there was nothing at all, and that
mankind was a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Life was just a stage
on to which men were pushed to make what money and enjoy
what pleasure they could, until they returned to the nothingness
whence they sprang. With their own individual efforts, and without
any reference to an obsolete Omnipotence, they would fly through
the air, sail on and below the seas, spread happiness or destruction,
and fill or empty the little lives of other men.
Then slowly but surely powers beyond their control began to
manifest themselves. The greatest cities in the world, the finest
machinery, a surplus of food and goods brought satisfaction to few
and happiness to none. To-day there is not in all the centres of
civilization a dictator who dares to walk abroad unguarded, a man,
woman or child whose life is safe from aerial attack, any
outstanding monument of civilization that may not come crashing
down. In a world of extraordinary plenty millions look in vain for
work. And to make matters worse, though the conditions of war
have been brought about by claims for what is called 'living room'
and means of subsistence for overcrowded populations, the
countries, both those that have and those that make demands, have
a deadly agricultural policy in common. I use the words advisedly.
They have been so concerned with production in terms of quantity
that they have ignored quality altogether. They have conquered the
air, up to a point; they are lords of the sea and submarine world,
but the Earth Mother is angry with her tumultuous, turbulent,
undisciplined children, and the danger confronting them is
destruction on a scale no war can parallel.
We are face to face with a terribly serious crisis in world
affairs. It is not merely a matter of war and peace between nations,
whose differences may be adjusted by victory, defeat, or
exhaustion, but of war between the earth and her children, human,
animal and vegetable, all save the human element being innocent
of offence.
I am an old man; my association with the land has been long,
intimate and, odd though the term may seem, filial. I have
endeavoured to be a good son of the soil, and my reward has been
a clear conviction on certain matters of vast importance to us all.
Should I hesitate to set them down because of their comparative
novelty or because the school-trained professors will not wish to
follow me without all manner of data unobtainable just now?
When you are learning to drive a car you need an expert by your
side; later you can drive alone. In the matter of agricultural work
many professors are still relying on first aid. I have passed that
stage, I speak with the knowledge born of long intimacy with the
earth. Here, then, are beliefs so real to me that I feel justified in
offering them to you who are so patient as to read and so courteous
as to spare the time to consider without bias. I do not ask to be
believed, I only ask the reader to consider this question with just a
part of the care I have given to it. Are my statements reasonable ?
Do they offer an explanation of the state into which the health of
the world has fallen? Remember, when I say the world I mean the
man in the great city, the cow in her stall, the box-fed bullock, the
pig in the sty, the poultry in the pen, the poison-drenched apples in
the orchard, the pest-laden vegetables in the market garden. My
contention is that health failure is universal and the cause a
mixture of greed and ignorance. I have endeavoured to set out
some of the fundamental principles that guide me and might be
helpful to my farming friends, and I cannot help feeling that all
farmers come under that heading, for as I see it, those who tend the
earth belong to the greatest brotherhood on its surface.
For the replenishment of worn-out soils and for the
maintenance of soils that are in full bearing, the continual supply
of sufficient mineral salts of a properly vitalizing kind is essential,
but we do not require the aid of the chemist or chemical works.
The necessary mineral salts are supplied by animal and plant
residues, and from the floating dust of the cosmos. All that we
have to do is to apply them at the right time and in the right way.
Plant and animal residues must be given in adequate quantities,
and when the soil is fed in this natural manner it acquires the
strength to take additional minerals from the cosmic elements.
 These are sources without limit. They maintain the fertility of
the earth in a state of Nature and render it capable of producing
food for man, animal and plant with unfailing regularity. In fact
one may go a little further. One may say that the absorption of the
life-building elements by the earth is only possible when the soil is
made living and fertile by animal and plant residues, the residues
that were once informed by the life that has now left them. They
contain vast colonies of organisms, including bacteria, fungi and
earth-worms. They represent the portion of the great life cycle
allotted to natural soil and plant life.
I have long maintained this principle of living soil fertility. I
have endeavoured to advance its claims in two books already
published: The Soil and its Products (1938) and Peace with the
Soil (1939). If man were properly fed he might expect to know
nothing of disease. As things are, although he knows it not, he has
to make up the deficiency that faulty and dangerous food
production have brought about by means of:

1. open-air exercise,
2. sun-bathing,
3. taking specially selected foods containing vitamins—a
quality that all foods ought to possess.

In so doing he has successfully contacted vitally important

elements and forces that make for health. It is good that mankind
should take open-air exercises and bathe in sunlight, but the
efficacy of the last resource is a diminishing one, because year by
year the bulk of our food is less and less able to accomplish its first
purpose. The disheartening fact remains that health and
preventable disease are not far removed one from the other,
although men are so slow to realize the fact. If we would turn to
natural healthy food production from soil innocent of poisonous
substances the natural plant foods produced would give the nations
back their health and strength and stability.
I do not know what the future will bring forth, but as I pen
these lines I have the sure conviction that they contain the truth
and nothing but the truth. I am not so presumptuous as to suggest
that the whole truth is here because man, after all, is a very finite
being and Nature is infinite, and we can only glimpse her laws,
though if we study those we can see it is certain that others will be
revealed to us in due season.
CHAPTER XVII Epilogue
WHAT IS THE UPSHOT of this endeavour to help towards the
improvement in the health of the community, the livestock of the
farm, the fruit-trees in the orchard and the vegetables in the
nursery garden?
It is my contention that all measures of national improvement
are associated with social philosophy; the farm is a world in
miniature. The matters I have discussed here are in my opinion
vital to the well-being of the race—I might say the whole of the
human race—but I do see that the changes to be brought about are
not a mere matter of regulation, restriction, and physical effort. If
they are to succeed something more is needed, something that will
bring us from the chaos wrought by industrialization and
mechanization to a saner and more carefully ordered life. Rudolf
Steiner is the only man known to me who could see beyond the
purely material consideration at stake.
Just as individualism, run wild in company with industrialism,
brought about confusion to industry, so it has threatened
agriculture with ruin. Nothing can be more injurious to the welfare
of the world than the belief that the land belongs to the farmer-
owner to do what he pleases with it to secure his individual
advantage. This misconception is the very root of the matter—this
will to exploit advantage without regard to the interests of the
generation to come. The factory owner is free, we are told; why
not the farmer? The answer is, of course, that the factory, for all its
noise and movement, is a dead thing and the farm, for all its peace
and quietness, is alive. If the farmers would think of those who
will come after us, we might yet preserve our heritage. Many
farmers will work ‘heavens hard’to amass money for their
children, while if they would leave them the inheritance of a
healthy soil it would be a greater gift and one more enduring.
We must not think of agriculture as providing a single instance
of reckless and unconsidered action, it is part of something far
bigger. The farm has been affected by the spirit of the times, the
spirit that has filled the great industrial centres with slums and
unemployed and at the same time with unexampled efforts toward
human betterment. Man has been given the means of marvellous
expansion by his good genius, and at the same time his evil genius
has perverted its employment, turning all too often a blessing into
a curse. Side by side with development marches unemployment;
apparently we cannot turn our good fortunes to wise account, some
mysterious balancing asserts itself.
This has affected agriculture in two ways. In the first place
widening knowledge of the circumstances of the world we live in
has lured countless farm-workers and their sons away from the
land. Secondly, the rising cost of labour since the starvation
standard could no longer be maintained has forced the farmer to
increase production with a reduced staff. Hence comes the demand
for more and more machinery and heavier doses of chemical
fertilizers. This is not the fault of the farmers; it is the outcome of
the modern economic conditions. Derelict areas on the one hand,
over-stimulated ones on the other, have been associated with a
lower standard of national health and brought about a great
discontent with the simple life lived in close association with the
earth.
It seems to me that invention took the world by surprise in the
years following the Napoleonic Wars and that it fostered a certain
materialism, a certain insistence upon success as the only criterion
of effort. It was impossible that this outlook should dominate the
cities and leave the countryside untouched. In the early fifties the
chemists appeared on the scene in the wake of von Liebig and
opened vistas that the greatly harassed farmers hastened to
explore. He had to face many handicaps which did not lack
justification; foreign imports from countries where a low standard
of life ruled forced him to rely on quantity-production. There was
no suggestion that the aid of the chemist might not be altogether an
advantage to the farmer or the land. Machinery soon began to
make its presence felt and very soon the gleaners disappeared from
the fields, for the machine needed none to bind the sheaves. The
old leisured pace that added so much to the charm of country life
had gone, not to return. Labour was reduced, the younger
generation began to turn to the towns where the factories
welcomed strong and greatly enduring workers, while their wives
found in the company that crowded streets afforded, and the
amusement, first of the public-house and much later of the cinema,
a splendid substitute for fresh air and healthy food with attendant
discomforts.
The tin-filled grocer's shop and the fried fish shops became
centres of attraction. Town housing had something to commend it,
but in the country the farmers, for all the economies in human
labour, were not better off. They became increasingly aware that
neither stock nor fields were as healthy as they had been in their
fathers' time. Later they found that their returns were falling and
that the stimulant they had been giving to the land no longer
sufficed. It was necessary to increase it; the necessity could not be
denied.
No man in charge of a profitable boarding school is more
concerned about the risks of an outbreak of scarlet fever or
diphtheria than the farmer must be about the risks of trouble to all
his stock and crops. To-day he cannot but be conscious of one
significant fact—nothing has the old-time resistance to disease. He
knows that foot-and-mouth disease may come like a thief in the
night, that swine fever may empty his pig-sties and that he will be
lucky if his poultry do not go down before diseases for which there
is neither diagnosis nor cure. If he has a dairy herd free from
tuberculosis and mastitis he is among the very fortunate few. In his
fields insect pests, new and old, are on the increase. He is suffering
from excessive production, just as so many of the factories in the
towns are doing, but the quality of what he produces is open to
doubt.
Are we not all travelling too fast, are we not losing sight of the
purpose of life itself? I have purposely limited myself to the
agricultural question in this book, but on looking round the world
to see the agricultural situation as it is to-day, I can but be aware
that it is no more than an aspect of a universal deterioration,
though perhaps the most vital aspect.
As I see things the town is primarily responsible for the
downfall of the country, for the gauds of the great cities are of
permanent appeal. They led the farmers of the great lands overseas
to sell the stored fertility of generations for the produce of the
factories and the workshops; consequently to-day, over vast areas,
the great bulk of the fertility of those lands has disappeared. And
because all the traffic in the world's natural wealth, all this haste to
stimulate production and to waste in a generation the stored wealth
of the centuries, is a defiance of the laws of Nature. We have been
smitten with plagues just as the Egyptians were in days of old. The
only difference is that the Egyptians recognized their punishment,
if only for a little while, and we do not—or at least we have not
yet. There are only a few men who have watched the ripening of
an evil harvest with understanding, and their warnings have gone
unheeded save by the few.
The saving clause in the situation is the universal recognition
of the truth that at least something is radically wrong with national
nutrition and national health, that the strong and robust are a
minority, that the under-sized and the under-nourished and the
sickly are to be found in every street in every town in the British
Isles, that neither panel doctors, nor the health centres, nor the
private practitioners can cope with the existing conditions to their
own satisfaction. In view of these undeniable facts, is it not
reasonable to look for the time, even to deem it not far off, when
people will ask whether the food they eat can be at fault? This time
must come and then the trouble will be traced to its sources, and
we shall realize that the ill-health that is rampant throughout all the
kingdoms of the earth, human, animal and vegetable alike, is due
to our abuse of the earth itself, to our endeavour to short-circuit
Nature and get her to yield the riches of the soil as she has yielded
the wealth that lay hidden in her depths in the deep-level gold
mines and the coal seams that lie in the depths of the sea? I repeat
that Nature allows dead things to be exploited, but will not suffer
man to tamper with life without demanding from him the full price
of his folly.
When we take liberties with the soil we are withdrawing the
life that was lent to it. An outraged earth yields no crops save
disease in forms past numbering; it is an evil life usurping the
place of the original healthy one. We have travelled far and
travelled at ever-increasing pace in the wrong direction, and now
voices are calling to us to retrace our steps, acknowledge our error,
and pay our penalty before the possibility of making amends is
lost.
Happily for us all, recuperation is one of the life forces, and
even though it be true that the evil that men do lives after them, it
only has a limited power of survival. A succeeding generation with
deeper insight and wider survey can see why and where its fathers
failed; it can placate the outraged earth, control the Al Capones of
commercialized food production, and recognize not only that
sudden wealth may be purchased too dearly, but that good health is
the best prize life can offer us.
So I feel I can close on a note of optimism and confidence. In
the history of civilization there have always been periods of
retrogression following in the wake of progress. Time out of mind
all civilization has seemed to be in danger as it is now, as it was in
the years following the Black Death and the Thirty Years War—to
name only two outstanding European tragedies, and leave out
those that afflicted South America and parts of Africa. But another
generation has come along and set the crooked straight. The worst
of the crisis that faces humanity is that it is not fully understood
and that it is over-shadowed by a more dramatic one. Of course,
had it been recognized when it first manifested there would have
been no threat in it to-day. We should have done early in ease what
we must do with great difficulty as the eleventh hour approaches.
We have to remember that the world has never known such a
revolution as the last century has brought about by the
development of machinery, transport, and swift communication,
uniting China to Peru and Cape Town with the English Channel,
annihilating distance and bringing about such an interchange of
services and commodities as would have seemed fantastic when
the present century was born. I like to see in the present chaos the
process of welding that may unite the nations before this century is
over. What better incentive could be provided than the task of
restoring the earth, our common heritage, to the condition in which
it may function for the good of all ? Common necessity may well
be the cement of common action, and there is danger that the
ultimate purpose will be overlooked.
In this machine age we know that repairs are an important part
of the engineer's work. If an engine is over-worked or carelessly
handled it must go to the shops and a number of skilled artisans
will be called upon to examine every joint, to remove damaged
parts and replace them by sound ones. In the world to-day we
leave the obvious repair works to the areas of erosion, to the Dust
Bowl and to other parts of the world where forced production has
stolen the soil's life. This is, so to speak, the surgical side of
repairs. Then the medical side claims attention. We must restore
the damaged limbs of the Earth Mother, and after that we must
attend to her general state; it corresponds to the tuning in of the
skilled motor mechanic. There is grit in the jets; the accumulator
may have become disconnected; something has happened that is
either stopping the engine or making it work irregularly.
 There is a foreign substance in Mother Earth to-day. It is
causing her to function badly, to produce food that cannot fulfil its
purpose; the skilled mechanics, call them agricultural experts or
what you will, must investigate. The owners will be urgent; they
may insist that the engine should continue to run, but they must be
told that they must first remove the cause of the trouble.
In his brilliant History of Europe, Dr. Fisher, Warden of New
College, Oxford, whose recent passing all his friends must deplore,
writes in the epilogue: "The law of diminishing returns has begun
to operate in the farmlands of the West." On the last page (1222 in
the edition before me) he writes: "The developing miracle of
science is at our disposal to use or abuse, to make or to mar."
These words have a specific as well as a general appeal. They
carry in some four lines more authority than I can hope to compass
in all my pages. But they strengthen and support my contentions,
since the whole is no more than the sum of its parts and agriculture
is the most important part of civilization, past, present and to
come.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I glimpsed the cause of death, disease and strife,

The sound of needless suffering touched my heart,
I filled with toil my long, rich span of life
To yield this legacy when I depart.

I have taken a liberty with Walter Savage Landor's famous

valedictory lines, adapting them to sum up my position. Only this
one piece of work remains to do; it is the completion of a life-long
task.
I believe that I have been very greatly favoured, in that my
eyes have been opened to a danger threatening all the world,
civilized and uncivilized alike. By the side of this danger, war and
the destruction wrought by war fall into second place—a bold
statement, but one that I am prepared to maintain. When war is
over and peace returns, the world will repair its physical ravages;
within the space of a generation many of the wounds of war will
be forgotten. Time will have applied its anodyne to the rest. But if
the danger on which my closest attention has been concentrated for
so long is not checked, the nations will still be at war, not between
themselves but with the outraged earth, mother

of them all, who can be their best friend, their harshest judge and,
if they offend too far, their destroyer.
For many years past the world's cultivators, acting in
ignorance at best and in greed at worst, have been endeavouring to
force the pace at which food grows, to produce extravagantly
without regard either to the quality of the produce or its effect
upon the health of the nation. This movement along the road to
ruin is a little younger than the manufacturing era and, as it has
grown, the world has witnessed a remarkable development of
every kind of deficiency disease. Statistics have set this fact
beyond the reach of contradiction. Terrible and distressing
maladies have multiplied their destructive capacity; against them,
while the world fears and wonders, the men of science labour in
vain; they may cure or palliate effects, but the causes elude them.
It is my sincere belief that I have found the cause of the trouble
that is mastering both hemispheres, and that this cause is the
neglect of the simple rights of the soil.
We are indifferent to the truth that the health of the earth
depends upon invisible as well as visible influences, that it is
affected by the action of cosmic forces. This idea is too new for
many of us. Yet there is a certain tempo in the action of the seed in
the ground, in the flowers of the corn and in the ripening ear, and
the forces that regulate this can neither be seen nor measured.
Most marvellous of all the machinery of action is that which
makes the earth bring forth her fruits. It is a mystery, it is the very
work of God; there is in it Very much more than meets the eye.
Man in his earliest wisdom learned something of the systole and
diastole of production; he knew what might and might not be done,
and out of this knowledge came a sane system of food production.
The stock grazed and gave back fertility to the soil; the farmer
knew that his cattle, sheep and pigs would feed the land as surely
as they fed him; he knew that soil fertility must be renewed. Then,
just as the manufacturers of our era brought about the exploitation
of the world's treasures and the backward native races, so the
desire to bring about big, even exceptional, results enforced
neglect of the old practices that had procured the health of the soil
of those who cultivate it and those they supplied. Gradually the
harmony that existed when stock replenished the fields was
forgotten. No scientists came forward to tell the people that the
harmony was in truth inviolable, that the cultivation of the earth is
a work of such overmastering responsibility that the fate of all life,
human, animal, and vegetable, is bound up in it. Great scientists
were beginning to tell of imponderable, invisible forces in their
relation to correct acts of husbandry. Nature does not speak, she
acts; she has plagued mankind with plagues worse than those that
fell upon the Egyptians in the time of the Exodus. This, as I see it
now and as others will see it in no distant future, is because they
have interfered with Nature's processes.
Working both in tropical and temperate zones, and immersed
in my studies of that part of the world's surface for which I hold
myself responsible, the truth has come to me more and more
vividly. With knowledge came the full determination to spread the
light that has come to me; it seems to be my special call to duty. I
have been at work in this direction for some years and have been
greatly encouraged by the response made to my publications in all
parts of the world. I have found to my delight that many had
suspected that all was not well, that they were waiting for some
indication which they could follow up on their own fields. Now I
am trying to set my theories out in a more durable form and to a
larger audience through the medium of an established publishing
house that can circulate a book at home and abroad. I desire
nothing save the knowledge that I have played in all modesty the
part of a pioneer. If my theories are correct—and here is their
significance in a sentence—what I have called denatured foods are
the cause of the spread of such plagues as cancer, influenza,
rickets, pneumonia, dental troubles and a host of others; they are
the origin of the worst happenings to the intestinal region. On the
other side of life they attack the nervous system and are
responsible for the violence and hysteria that run riot through the
world to-day, perpetuating hatreds, causing wars, and threatening
the fabric of civilization. Food that lacks the full flow of cosmic
forces must bring about deterioration of physical and mental
health.
You may laugh at this to-day, but not, I think, for long.
Knowledge is moving towards regions where the truth will be
made manifest. It is nothing to me that I may not be here to see the
general acceptance of the views I have set out, since acceptance
must follow as surely as light follows darkness in the visible
world, and what greater reward can come to any worker than the
knowledge that he has thrown a beam of light before those who
work in darkness? If there be a greater, I neither know nor desire
it.