Transcriber's Note
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal
signs=.
MAKERS OF
MODERN AGRICULTURE
[Illustration]
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
[Illustration: Jethro Tull
Founder of the Principles of Dry-Farming. 1674-1740.]
MAKERS OF MODERN AGRICULTURE
BY
WILLIAM MACDONALD, D.Sc.
_Editor, "Agricultural Journal," Union Department of Agriculture,
South Africa; and Corresponding Secretary for the International
Dry-Farming Congress_
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1913
_COPYRIGHT_
Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
PREFACE
When it is remembered what a prominent part Agriculture plays in the
history of all Nations, it does seem strange that so little is known
of the lives of those pioneers who have been foremost in the discovery
of fundamental principles, improved methods, and labour-saving
machines. Perhaps it is that farmers as a whole are not specially fond
of reading. This, however, is not to be wondered at, because after a
long day's work in the open air it is hard to rivet one's mind on
anything more serious than the headlines of a daily newspaper, or the
rose-tinted pictures of a rural magazine. Still, it is safe to
prophesy that the successful farmer of the future will not only be a
hard worker, but also a hard reader. And biography brings before us,
in a vivid manner, the onward march of modern Agriculture.
It is also of interest to note how much Agriculture owes to men who
could scarcely be called practical farmers. Indeed, the author has
been impressed, contrary to common opinion, with the success of the
Townsman who takes to farming. But this is really no more surprising
than that the simple-hearted farm lad should forsake the Old Homestead
for the fascinations of the City, and by reason of his character,
courage, and industry, become in a few years the Captain of some great
commercial enterprise. There will always be the ceaseless ebb and
flow of the human tide between country lane and crowded street. But it
is surely our plain duty to do something to make the life of the
worker in the field less dull and lonely, and more attractive by the
erection of pleasant cottages and the establishment of rural
industries: while, at the same time, we try to brighten the life of
the toiler in the town by freehold garden lots and sunlit, open
spaces.
I desire to thank the Editors of the several papers in which these
Sketches have appeared for kind permission to republish them in book
form: The _Graphic_ (Chapter I), The _Star_, Johannesburg (Chapter
II), the _Rand Daily Mail_ (Chapters III and IV), and the _Sunday
Post_ (Chapter V). To the _Journal_ of the Royal Agricultural Society
of England, I am indebted for the frontispiece (Jethro Tull), as well
as for much valuable information.
Royal Agricultural Society of England,
16, Bedford Square, London,
_September 1st, 1913._
CONTENTS
PAGE
Portrait of Jethro Tull _Frontispiece_
I. Jethro Tull 1
II. Coke of Norfolk 16
III. Arthur Young 39
IV. John Sinclair 54
V. Cyrus H. McCormick 68
"One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are
profitable company."--Carlyle.
MAKERS OF MODERN AGRICULTURE
CHAPTER I
JETHRO TULL : FOUNDER OF THE PRINCIPLES OF DRY-FARMING
_"For the finer land is made by tillage the richer will it become
and the more plants will it maintain."_--Jethro Tull.
Eight miles to the north-west of Reading, on a lovely reach of the
River Thames, lies the parish town of Basildon, in the County of
Berkshire. Here, in the year 1674, was born the man who revolutionized
British agriculture and laid the foundations for the "Conquest of the
Desert." Yet, strange as it may seem, until the other day Tull's
grave was unknown, and even now no monument marks the resting-place of
this illustrious husbandman. His family was of ancient and honourable
lineage, and he was heir to a competent estate. At seventeen he
entered his name on the register of St. John's College, Oxford; but he
did not proceed to a degree. Two years later he was admitted as a
student of Gray's Inn, and was, in due course, called to the Bar. It
is probable that Tull studied law not so much with the thought of
taking it up seriously as a profession, but simply in order to better
fit himself for a political career. Ill-health, however, made him turn
his attention to farming. At the age of twenty-five he married a lady
of good family, Miss Susanna Smith, of the County of Warwick, and then
settled down to farm in Oxfordshire.
His first farm was Howberry, in the parish of Crowmarsh. The land of
this farm was fertile and renowned for heavy crops of both wheat and
barley. Here Tull lived and toiled for nine years, till at last his
health broke down and he was ordered south to the milder climate of
France and Italy. So he decided to sell a portion of his Oxfordshire
estate and send his family to another farm in Berkshire named
"Prosperous," situated in the parish of Shalbourne. After an absence
of three years Tull returned to "Prosperous Farm"--a place for ever
famous in the annals of agriculture. Here he lived for twenty-six
years to the close of his strenuous, chequered career. Of this farm,
Tull writes: "Situated on a little chalk on one side and heath on the
other, the soil is poor and shallow--generally too light and too
shallow to produce a tolerable crop of beans. This farm was made out
of the skirts of others; a great part was a sheep down with a full
reputation of poverty."
While in Europe Tull took special note of the deep and careful
cultivation of the vineyards, where the tillage of the soil between
the rows of the grape vines was made to take the place of manuring the
land. On his return to England he tried this method at "Prosperous
Farm," first with turnips and potatoes, and then with wheat. And by
adopting this simple system with some few modifications of his own, he
was enabled to grow wheat on the same fields for thirteen years
continuously without the use of manure.
* * * * *
It was on his farm of Howberry that Tull invented and perfected his
drill in the year 1701. He has told the story of this invention in the
pages of his great work. Finding his plans for growing sainfoin[1]
hindered by the distaste of his labourers for his new methods, he
resolved to try to "contrive an engine to plant St. Foin more
faithfully than such hands would do. For that purpose I examined and
compared all the mechanical ideas that ever had entered my
imagination, and at last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring in
the sound-board of the organ. With these, a little altered, and some
parts of two other instruments, as foreign to the field as the organ
is, added to them, I composed my machine. It was named a drill,
because, when farmers used to sow their beans and peas in channels or
furrows by hand, they called that action drilling." And thus Tull's
drill, taken from the rotary mechanism of his favourite organ, is the
pioneer of all modern planters. His first invention was what he termed
a _drill-plough_ to sow wheat and turnip seed three rows at a time.
[1] A leguminous plant cultivated for fodder.
It was this invention that led Tull to enunciate his first principle
of tillage, namely, _drilling_. And it is the more amazing to reflect
that even after this long lapse of time many farmers still persist in
broadcasting their seed; for, as a recent authority working on the
semi-arid lands of Montana writes: "Sowing broadcast is bad at any
time, but in dry-farming it is suicidal." That the use of the drill
has everywhere effected an enormous saving of seed is common
knowledge; but let us hear what Tull has to say under this head: "Seed
(sainfoin) was scarce, dear, and bad, and enough could scarce be got
to sow, as was usual, seven bushels[2] to an acre. I examined and
thought the matter out, and found the greater part of the seed
miscarried, being bad, or too much covered. I observed, and counted,
and found when much seed had miscarried the crop was best." Here was
his second principle, _reduction of seed_, or, as we now say,
"thin-seeding," a practice which has been adopted by the dry-farmers
of Utah with remarkable success.
[2] At the present time it is customary to sow from 80-100 lb. of
sainfoin seed per acre.
Moreover, Tull was an ardent advocate of the weedless field, and he
saw, clearly enough, that dung was a serious menace to clean tillage,
as the seeds of troublesome weeds were apt to be scattered far and
wide over the farm. This led him to lay down as his third
principle--the _absence of weed_. But he certainly never, as is
sometimes said, condemned the use of manure. His experiments, however,
proved beyond the shadow of doubt that good crops might be grown
simply and solely by means of deep and constant tillage. So he says,
angrily: "The vulgar in general believe that I carried my farmyard
dung and threw it in a river. I have no river near; besides, my
neighbours buy dung at a good price; but it is known I neither sell
nor waste any dung. Against such lying tongues there is no defence."
Nevertheless, many years after his part was taken by none other than
the great scientist of Rothamsted, the late Sir John Lawes, who wrote
as follows:--
"Tull was quite an original genius and a century in advance of his
time. I consider he has been most unjustly accused of not placing
sufficient value upon farmyard manure; he advocated cleanliness, and
saw that dung was a great carrier of weeds. To give some clear idea of
the value of Tull's advocacy of drill-husbandry and the freedom from
weed which can alone be obtained by the use of the drill, I may
mention that so far as statistics will allow, I have ascertained the
average yield of the wheat crop of the world, and I am able to say
that the average yield is less than it is at the present time upon my
permanent wheat land, after more than sixty years absolutely without
manure. Here we have the result of Tull's three great
principles--_drilling, reduction of seed, and absence of weed_. If he
were alive now and were writing for the agriculture of the world, he
would, I think, be quite justified in saying everything he said in
regard to cleanliness and manure."
As a result of his studies, travels, and experiments, Tull published
"The New Horse-Hoeing Husbandry: or an Essay on the Principles of
Tillage and Vegetation" in the year 1731. The great value of this work
is that it is founded not upon mere theory, but upon actual
experiments in the field. The fourth edition, which I have beside me,
consists of 426 pages, with several plates, and 23 chapters which
treat of the following subjects: Of Roots and Leaves; Of Food of
Plants; Of Pastures of Plants; Of Dung; Of Tillage; Of Weeds; Of
Turnips; Of Wheat; Of Smuttiness; Of Lucerne; Of Change of Species; Of
Change of Individuals; Of Ridges; Old and New Husbandry; Of Ploughs;
The Four-Coulter'd Plough; Of the Drill-Boxes; Of the Wheat-Drill: Of
the Turnip-Drill; Of the Hoe-Plough; with an appendix concerning the
making of the drill and the hoe-plough.
Tull's idea--which was that by tillage soils might be constantly and
for ever reinvigorated or renewed--is summed up in his famous epigram,
"tillage is manure." He believed that the earth was the true and the
sole food of the plant, and, further, that the plant feeds and grows
by taking in minute particles of soil. And since these particles are
thrown off from the surface of the soil grains, it followed,
therefore, that the more finely the soil was divided the more numerous
the particles and the more readily the plant would grow. Although
Tull's theories were wrong, his practice has been followed by all
progressive farmers down to the present time. We now know that plants
do not absorb particles of earth, but take in food in solution.
Consequently, the more the particles of soil are broken up and
refined, the more plant food the roots can absorb. In this volume,
which must be counted an agricultural classic, Tull at once takes rank
as the foremost preacher of his time of the gospel of deep and perfect
tillage. And it is a work which, in the words of his great compeer,
Arthur Young, will "unquestionably carry his name to the latest
posterity."
The botanical world has recently been illumined by the splendid
discovery of the principles of heredity set forth by Gregor Mendel,
and the foremost exponent of the new science, Professor Bateson,
writes as follows: "We have at last a brilliant method and a solid
basis from which to attack these problems, offering an opportunity to
the pioneer such as occurs but seldom even in the history of modern
science." Cannot we, as agriculturists, say the same with equal truth?
For, to our thinking, Jethro Tull bears the same relation to
dry-farming that Mendel does to plant-breeding. For if, on the one
hand, his drill-ploughs are the models from which have been derived
the marvellous agricultural machines of modern times, then, on the
other, his clean husbandry, his seed selection, his deep and constant
tillage are the fundamental principles in the great new science of
dry-farming. Nor should we forget that both Mendel and Tull
enunciated their principles only after long and patient experiment.
The principles which we have adopted in our experiments on the
Government Dry-Land Station at Lichtenburg, in the Transvaal and which
we propose to follow on all stations hereafter to be established in
the Union of South Africa, are seven in number, namely: (1) Deep
ploughing; (2) drilling; (3) thin seeding; (4) frequent harrowing; (5)
weedless lands; (6) few varieties; and (7) moisture-saving fallows.
And we know full well that the more faithfully we adhere to this
scheme the richer shall be our harvests. But, after all, these
principles are merely the amplification, nothing more, of those
fundamental methods of tillage so plainly set forth, one hundred and
eighty-two years ago, by the genius of Jethro Tull.
Tull died in the month of March, in the year 1740, at the age of
sixty-six. In speaking of agricultural education we have frequently
urged the benefits to be derived from a liberal education, and we like
to recall Tull's own words: "I owe my principles and practice
originally to my travels, as I owe my drill to my organ." Here indeed,
was a man of many parts--a famous agriculturist, an able mechanic, a
good musician, and a keen classical scholar. His life, strange to say,
was one dauntless struggle with disease. For six years he scarce ever
left his room, and seldom in that period was he gladdened by so much
as a glimpse of his "hundred acres of drilled wheat." So they laid the
tired body of the simple-minded English squire under the yew-trees of
Basildon in the mellow soil he loved so well. But the bells of the old
church of Saint Bartholomew now ring out with a new, glad message,
for they tell the toiling husbandmen of all lands to be of good cheer,
for the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose; while the winds
and the waters carry the echo of Tull's name down through the
corridors of time.