The Soil and Health

Albert Howard, David Major

• Publisher: A Distant Mirror
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780648859499
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Agronomía

This is a newly edited revision of Albert Howard's important text on organic farming and gardening, and the central role of humus in maintaining soil health and fertility.

THE SOIL AND HEALTH is a detailed analysis of the vital role of humus and compost in soil health - and the importance of soil health to the health of crops and the humans who eat them. The author is keenly aware of the dead end which awaits humanity if we insist on growing our food using artificial fertilisers and poisons.

Albert Howard (1873-1947) was one of the leaders of the British organics movement in the mid-twentieth century. He was the first westerner to document and publish research on traditional techniques of agriculture, including Indian and Chinese farming and management of the soil.

"Agriculture is the fundamental industry of the world and must be allowed to occupy the primary position in the economies of all countries." - Albert Howard

CONTENTS

1 - Soil Fertility and Agriculture

1.1 The operations of Nature

• The life of the plant
• The living soil
• The significance of humus
• The importance of minerals

1.2 Systems of agriculture

• Primitive forms of agriculture
• Shifting cultivation
• The harnessing of the Nile
• Staircase cultivation
• The agriculture of China
• The agriculture of Greece and Rome
• Farming in the Middle Ages

1.3 Soil fertility in Great Britain

• The Roman occupation
• The Saxon conquest
• The open-field system
• The depreciation of soil fertility
• The low yield of wheat
• The Black Death
• The Industrial Revolution and soil fertility
• The Great Depression of 1879
• The Second World War

1.4 Industrialism and the profit motive

1.5 The intrusion of Science

2 - Disease in Present-day Farming and Gardening

2.1 Diseases of the soil

• Soil erosion
• The formation of alkaline land

2.2 The diseases of crops

2.3 Disease and health in livestock

2.4 Soil fertility and human health

2.5 The nature of disease

3 - The Problem of Manuring

3.1 The origins and scope of the problem

• The phosphate problem and its solution
• The reform of the manure heap
• Sheet-composting and nitrogen fixation
• The utilisation of town wastes

3.2 The Indore Process

• - Some practical points
• - The New Zealand compost box
• - Mechanisation
• - The spread of the Indore Process

3.3 The reception by scientists

1. Soil Fertility and Agriculture

1.1 The Operations Of Nature

The introduction to this book describes an adventure in agricultural research and records the conclusions reached. If the somewhat unorthodox views set out here are sound, they will not stand alone, but will be supported and confirmed in a number of directions — by the farming experience of the past, and above all by the way Nature, the supreme farmer, manages her kingdom.

In this chapter, the manner in which various natural operations function will be briefly reviewed. In surveying the significant characteristics of the life — vegetable and animal — met with in Nature, particular attention will be paid to the importance of fertility in the soil, and to the occurrence and elimination of disease in plants and animals.

What is the character of life on this planet? What are its great qualities? The answer is simple. The outstanding characteristics of Nature are variety and stability.

The variety of the natural life around us is such as to strike even the imagination of children, when they see in the fields and copses near their homes, in the ponds and streams and seaside pools round which they play — or if, as a consequence of living in the city, they are deprived of these delightful playgrounds, even in their back yards or in the neighbouring park, there will be an infinite choice of different flowers and plants and trees, coupled with an animal world full of rich changes and surprises. In fact, there is readily found a plenitude of the forms of living things that constitutes a powerful introduction into the nature of the universe, of which we ourselves are a part.

The infinite variety of forms visible to the naked eye is carried much farther by the microscope. When, for example, the green slime in stagnant water is examined, a new world is disclosed — a multitude of simple flowerless plants — the blue-green and the green algae — always accompanied by the lower forms of animal life. We shall see in a later chapter (Chapter 8, Rice) that on the operations of these green algae, the well-being of the rice crop, which nourishes countless millions of the human race, depends.

If a fragment of mouldy bread is suitably magnified, members of still another group of flowerless plants, made up of fine, transparent threads entirely devoid of green colouring matter, come into view. These belong to the fungi, which are of supreme importance in farming and gardening.

It needs a more refined perception to recognise throughout this stupendous wealth of varying shapes and forms the principle of stability. Yet this principle dominates. It dominates by means of an ever-recurring cycle, a cycle which, repeating itself silently and ceaselessly, ensures the continuation of living matter. This cycle is constituted of the successive and repeated processes of birth, growth, maturity, death, and decay.

Buddhism calls this cycle ‘the Wheel of Life’, and no better name could be given to it. The revolutions of this Wheel never falter and are perfect. Death supersedes life, and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.

Because we are ourselves alive, we are much more conscious of the processes of growth than we are of the processes involved in death and decay. This is perfectly natural and justifiable. Indeed, it is a powerful instinct in us, and a healthy one.

Yet, if we are fully grown human beings, our education should have developed in us the ability to grasp intelligently the vast role played in the universe by the processes making up the other, or more hidden, half of the Wheel. In this respect, however, our general education in the past has been gravely defective, partly because science itself has so sadly misled us. Those branches of knowledge dealing with the vegetable and animal kingdoms — botany and zoology — have confined themselves almost entirely to a study of living things, and have given little or no attention to what happens to these units of the universe when they die and to the way in which their waste products and remains affect the general environment on which both the plant and animal worlds depend. When science itself is unbalanced, how can we blame education for omitting in her teaching one of the things that really matter?

For though the phases which are preparatory to life are, as a rule, less obvious than the phases associated with the moment of birth and the periods of growth, they are not less important. If we can grasp this, and think in terms of ever-repeating advance and recession, recession and advance, we have a truer view of the universe than if we define death merely as an ending of what has been alive.

Nature herself is never satisfied, except by an even balancing of her processes — growth and decay. It is precisely this even balancing which gives her absolute stability. That stability is rock-like. Indeed, this figure of speech is a poor one, for the stability of Nature is far more permanent than anything we can call a rock — rocks being creations which themselves are subject to the great stream of dissolution and rebirth, seeing that they suffer from weathering and are formed again, that they can be changed into other substances and caught up in the grand process of living: they too, as we shall see (in Chapter 7), are part of the Wheel of life.

However, we may at a first glance omit the changes which affect the inert masses of this planet, petrological and minera-logical: though very soon we shall realise how intimate is the connection even between these and what is, in the common parlance, alive. There is a direct bridge between things inorganic and things organic, and this too is part of the Wheel.

But before we start on our examination of that part of the great process which now concerns us — namely, plant and animal life, and the use man makes of them — there is one further idea which we must consider.

It is this. The stability of Nature is secured not only by means of an even balancing of her Wheel, by a perfect timing, so to say, of her mechanisms — but it also rests on a foundation of enormous reserves. Nature is never a hand-to-mouth practitioner. She is often called lavish and wasteful, and at first sight one can be bewildered and astonished at the apparent waste and extravagance which accompany the carrying on of vegetable and animal existence.

Yet a more exact examination shows her working with an assured background of accumulated reserves, which are stupendous and also essential. The least depletion in these reserves brings about vast changes, and not until she has built them up again does she resume the particular process on which she was engaged.

A realisation of this principle of reserves is thus a further necessary item in a wide view of natural law. Anyone who has recovered from a serious illness, during which the human body lives partly on its own reserves, will realise how Nature afterwards deals with such situations. During the period of convalescence, the patient appears to make little progress until suddenly he resumes his old-time activities. During this waiting period, the reserves used up during illness are being replenished.

The life of the plant

A survey of the Wheel of Nature will best start from that rather rapid series of processes which cause what we commonly call ‘living matter’ to come into active existence — that is, in fact, the point at which life most obviously, to our eyes, begins. The section of the Wheel embracing these processes is studied in the discipline of physiology (from the Greek root phuein, ‘to bring to life, to grow’).

But how does life begin on this planet? We can only say this: that the prime agency is sunlight, because it is the source of energy; and that the instrument for intercepting this energy and making use of it is the green leaves of plants.

This wonderful little example of Nature’s invention is a battery of intricate mechanisms. Each cell in the interior of a green leaf contains minute specks of a substance called chlorophyll, and it is this which enables the plant to grow.

Growth implies a continuous supply of nourishment. Now, plants do not merely collect their food: they manufacture it before they can feed. In this, they differ from animals and man, who search for what they can pass through their stomachs and alimentary systems, but cannot do more; if they are unable to find what is suitable to their natures and ready for them, they perish.

A plant, on the other hand, is in a way a more wonderful instrument. It is an actual food factory, making what it requires before it begins the processes of feeding and digestion. The chlorophyll in the green leaf, with its capacity for intercepting the energy of the sun, is the power unit that runs the machine. The green leaf allows the plant to draw simple raw materials from diverse sources, and to transform them into complex combinations.

Thus from the air it absorbs carbon dioxide (a compound of two parts of oxygen to one of carbon), which is combined with more oxygen from the atmosphere and with other substances, both living and inert, drawn from the soil, and from the water which permeates the soil.

All these raw materials are then assimilated in the plant, and made into food. They become organic compounds, i.e. compounds of carbon, classified conveniently into groups known as carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Together with an enormous volume of water (often over 90 per cent of the whole plant) and interspersed with small quantities of chemical salts which have not yet been converted into the organic phase, they make up the structure of the plant — root, stem, leaf, flower, and seed.

This structure includes a large food reserve. The life principle, the true nature of which evades us and in all probability always will, resides in the proteins in the mass. These proteins carry on their work in a cellulose framework made up of cells protected by an outer integument and supported by a set of structures known as the vascular bundles, which also conduct the sap from the roots to the leaves, and distribute the food manufactured there to the various centres of growth. The whole of the plant structures are kept turgid by means of water.

The green leaf, with its chlorophyll battery, is therefore a perfectly adapted agency for continuing life. It is, speaking plainly, the only agency that can do this, and is unique. Its efficiency is of supreme importance. Because animals, including man, feed eventually on green vegetation, either directly or through the bodies of other animals, it is ultimately our sole and final source of nutriment.

There is no alternative supply. Without sunlight and the capacity of the earth’s green carpet to intercept its energy for us, our industries, our trade, and our possessions would soon be useless. It follows, therefore, that everything on this planet must depend on the way mankind makes use of this green carpet; in other words, on its efficiency.

The green leaf does not, however, work by itself. It is only a part of the plant. It is curious how easy it is to forget that normally we see only half of each flowering plant, shrub, or tree — the rest is buried in the ground. Yet the dying down of the visible growth of many plants in the winter, and their quick reappearance in the spring, should teach us how an essential and important portion of all vegetation lives out of our sight; it is evident that the root system, buried in the ground, also holds the life of the plant in its grasp. It is therefore not surprising to find that leaves and roots work together, forming a partnership which must be put into fresh working order each season if the plant is to live and grow.

If the function of the green leaf armed with its chlorophyll is to manufacture the food the plant needs, the purpose of the roots is to obtain the water and most of the raw materials required — the sap of the plant being the medium by which these raw materials (collected from the soil by the roots) are moved to the leaf. The work of the leaf we found to be intricate: that of the roots is just as complex.

What is surprising is to discover the two quite distinct ways in which the roots set about collecting the materials which it is their business to supply to the leaf; these two methods are carried on simultaneously. We can make a very shrewd guess at the master principle which has put the second method alongside the first: it is again the principle of providing a reserve — this time of the vital proteins.

None of the materials that reach the green leaf by whatever method is food: it is only the raw stuff from which food is to be manufactured.

By the first method, which is the most obvious one, the root hairs search out and pass into the transpiration current of the plant dissolved substances which they find in the thin films of water spread between and around each particle of earth; this film is known as the soil solution. The substances dissolved in it include gases (mainly carbon dioxide and oxygen) and a series of other substances known as chemical salts such as nitrates, compounds of potassium and phosphorus, and so forth — all obtained by the breaking down of organic matter or from the destruction of the mineral components of the soil. In this breaking down of organic matter, we see in operation the reverse of the constructive process which takes place in the leaf.

Organic matter is continuously reverting to the inorganic state: it becomes mineralised: nitrates are one form of the outcome. It is the business of the root hairs to absorb these substances from the soil solution and to pass them into the sap, so that the new life-building process can start up again.

In a soil in good health, the soil solution will be well supplied with these salts. Incidentally we may note that it has been the proved existence of these mineral chemical constituents in the soil which, since the time of Liebig, has focused attention on soil chemistry, and has emphasised the passage of chemical food materials from soil to plant, to the neglect of other considerations.

But the earth’s green carpet is not confined merely to its remarkable power of transforming the inert nitrates and mineral contents of the soil into an active organic phase.

Plants also establish for themselves a direct connection, a kind of living bridge, between themselves and the living portion of the soil. This is the second method by which plants feed themselves. ...