IN strict honesty, the heading of this chapter must be enclosed in quotation marks, for I am not a research worker in the conventional sense of that phrase. The work that originated the theories of this book is called research only for lack of a better name. It did, however, give the necessary direction to my thinking, and that is a chief function of any research.
It all began as an attempt to grow vegetables in soil which, as I discovered too late, was better suited to brickmaking. Thousands of people have made equally futile attempts, but they have had sense enough to quit when their maize stalks refused to exceed the diameter of a lead pencil or the height of a man's knee. I could not quit, for to quit would have left us with two thousand square feet of our back garden without grass and full of weeds, with no easy means of getting it back into lawn again.
It had been our custom always to have a vegetable garden. When we bought our home, it soon became apparent that the grass in our garden was largely yellow dock. That fact gave excuse for digging up this section of the lawn, growing vegetables in it for a few years while we got rid of the weeds, and then either continuing the vegetable garden or putting the area back to grass. What actually happened was something far different.
A man was hired to do the necessary digging, while I went about my commercial business. When I returned later and paid him off, I discovered that what had been exposed in the digging was nothing but the toughest of white clay. The clods, when dry, were as sharp and firm to the touch as so much broken stone. I had had experience with several widely different kinds of soil, but this was an extreme condition which I had never before seen. Eventually the story came out, but not before we had tried for a year or two to grow something edible from that pure clay.
Our house, it appeared, had been the last one constructed on our street. The site had been low—some three or four feet lower in places than the general level to which the surrounding lots had been graded. The owner had invited the contractors to dump on this lot. So, above the original soil that had been there, lay three to four feet of plain clay of the heavy character that prevails in this former lake bed. It was just " cellar dirt," with no discernible sand, silt, or organic matter to relieve its harshness. It was so hard when dry that I could put my full weight on a sharp spade without making any perceptible impression on it. Ordinary highway traffic could have traversed it without leaving a track; though when wet it would cling to my shoes in clods as big as I could carry.
Mellowness in such a soil is unknown. It is either too wet or too dry for stirring, with only half an hour or so between the two conditions when it may be cultivated with impunity. Ordinary soils never get into such a condition, because usually there are some fragments of organic matter in them, and these greatly alleviate what would otherwise develop into a tight structure. This mass of clay had been excavated from levels far beneath the usual depth to which roots penetrate; so it had no supply of organic matter. In the language of American experiment station men, it was " an organic matter check plot." Its use for growing crops would show what might be expected of land in which there was no organic matter.
In the beginning I was not concerned about soil theories, but wished only to produce vegetables for home use. However, it soon became evident that I must concern myself somewhat with fundamentals of soil management or I should not get anything for my work. About this time I recalled that a quarter of a century earlier, as county agent of Whitley County, Kentucky, I had tried unsuccessfully to show farmers how to improve their very poor, sandy soils by ploughing down tall rye. All the early county agents probably tried this; and all of them learned, as I did, that it would not work. At that time I had decided that, if the opportunity presented itself, I would try to solve the problem.
The problem really was simple—apparently. Its essence was to find a way to put large quantities of organic matter into a very unproductive soil without ruining temporarily its ability to grow crops. It seemed that so simple a problem might be solved easily. The opportunity I was looking for (in an experiment station) never came. Instead, after having been out of professional agriculture for several years, I now had the identical problem dumped rudely into my lap - without the appropriate surroundings usually considered essential.
Such was the beginning of what proved later to be the solution of that original tantalizing problem. I tackled it without definite plan, not realizing fully for several years that I was at work on the problem first presented to me in Kentucky. It is clear, therefore, that to call this research without proper explanation and qualification would be to debase the high meaning of real research work. Such work is always preceded by carefully organized plans and pursued by accepted methods.
The elements of accident and coincidence are important in this project. It was purely accidental that of the half a dozen properties we had inspected before buying, we should have selected this one. In fact, only the night before we concluded its purchase, we had decided to buy another on the next street; but, upon notifying the owner, we found that it had been sold the previous evening to friends of ours who had suddenly made up their minds to buy. It was a coincidence that ours should have been the newest house on a street where none was very old. It was the merest coincidence that the site had been depression.
More than this, the combination of circumstances in my own earlier life had favoured and prepared me for just this thing. The farm on which I grew up was " bottom land " of the river flood plain, almost entirely surrounded by hills. The hills were then in process of being cleared for agriculture after having been lumbered off. I had seen the same fields pass through several alternate periods of cultivation and neglect, and had noted that the mere growth of weeds and briars had renewed productivity on such land. The bottom land we owned was farthest from the stream, the highest of the entire bottom-land area; consequently the flood water that covered it once a year did not remain long, and, therefore, not very much sediment settled out from the river water to improve the soil. This fact had resulted in the abandonment of this higher ground in favour of land nearer the stream; and, since our portion had been considered worn out by the standards of 1883, my father paid little for it. This land had declined in productivity to such an extent that its production would not exceed twenty-five bushels of corn per acre, a yield considered no longer worth the effort when there was near-by land that would grow one hundred bushels without manure, fertilizers, or any other amendment.
We owned, therefore, the poorest land in the floor of the valley; and my father was pitied by the neighbours when he bought it. I have since seen one-hundred-bushel crops of corn on this same land, and from its productiveness three of my brothers and sisters and I were educated through college, and two others were educated as far as they wanted to go. For many years the strip of land we owned stood out as the greenest part of all the bottoms, even though, as time passed, it no longer had the benefit of the decomposable material which the river water at one time brought. The neighbours meantime viewed with critical eyes the strange things my father was doing on that land. He hauled in manure from a nearby town, also ashes from a tannery when he could get them, and he bought a car-load of fertilizers each spring, part of which he resold to any neigh-bours who were willing to take a chance on such stuff. And, while he was doing this, the neighbours continued to depend upon the decreasing increment of flood debris from up-river. The sons of those neighbours now manage the land. They decided that my father's methods were worth trying. And now, after several years of the younger generation's management, that old contrast has almost disappeared, for all the bottom land has come under better management. And, incidentally, it may be said that farmers the country over are now being paid to do for their land what my father did for his throughout his lifetime. He read farmers' papers regularly. He tried the methods that seemed reasonable to him. He adopted what proved to be profitable. And he had the luck to be engaged in a business which, in that district paid the highest return for liberal treatment of the land. He received good prices for staple market garden crops sold in the nearby town in the heart of what was then a coal-mining area. General farming, of course, would not have repaid the costs of such treatment, either then or now; but that does not invalidate the fact that my father, starting with poor land, had made it productive. He did so at high cost. I believed it could be done at lower cost. And, the important point - by far the most important point—was my absolute confidence that the poorest of land anywhere could be made highly productive, since the undisturbed natural landscape is always highly productive in virtue of its continued year-after-year production.
With this background of home training, my general knowledge of scientific agriculture, and a decade of experience in professional agriculture in two states, it seemed to be a strange chance that I should buy the particular spot where the stage had already been set to force me into solving the old organic matter problem.
Starting with the original digging in 1930, some organic matter was put in each season. In general, the quantity was increased as time went on. Eventually, a system of introducing leaves was developed which was very like ploughing, but in quite exaggerated form. A trench was made to the full depth of the spade blade. This trench was filled with leaves, sometimes dry and bulky, sometimes wet, compact, and heavy. These were cramped in. Then the soil from the adjacent strip was thrown on to these leaves as the next trench was dug. Repetition of this process resulted in creating virtually an organic matter subsoil beneath the surface soil. By 1937 I decided that the organic matter profile (OMP) thus created was in effect simply a magnification of the sandwich OMP produced by ploughing; also, that the layer of organic matter that varied in thickness from nothing to as much as four inches became an irresistible magnet for any water in the soil, as truly as if that organic matter had been blotting-paper. Once that decision was reached, it became obvious that the way to determine whether such was the situation would be to remove the leaf layer at the next digging and not establish such a layer again. So, in the autumn of 1937, the area was dug without putting in additional leaves. Care was taken to remove the entire mass of leaves from spade depth, mixing these in with the upper layers of soil.
In 1938 the soil surface was as different as possible from its condition in any previous year. Each spring before 1938 it had been necessary, in order to enable small seeds to germinate in the stiff clay, to cover them with fine sand instead of the clay. By such tactics I had been able to grow parsnips in this heavy soil. In 1938 it was so plainly evident that nothing of the kind would be necessary that parsnip seeds, carrots, lettuce, and all the small seeds were planted without any covering other than the granulated clay that was everywhere. The whole soil surface in 1938 was as granular as sugar, and it could be raked about just as easily as if it had been sand. So changed was this condition that I planted garden peas on March 11th, a week earlier than the local gardeners on sandy land were able to plant them. Every crop planted in 1938 thrived, whereas, prior to 1938 no crop could be depended upon except under special conditions.
One especially fine bit of evidence was the behaviour of head lettuce on this soil in 1938. A gardener friend of mine, with whom I was discussing the fine condition of the soil, challenged the possibility of growing head lettuce on it. He was so sure of it that he agreed to furnish the plants. Since the area was small I took only six plants. These were set in the soil, and once they had started nothing whatever was done for them except to keep the weeds down. No fertilizer was used, and no other treatment—not even water. Late in June this gardener came at my invitation to see how his lettuce plants were doing. They had reached almost the same size as his own, and were well headed - some-thing, he knew would not have happened in his sandy soil unless plenty of fertilizer and manure had been used. Any gardener will recognize this behaviour of lettuce as unusual; indeed, most gardeners will refuse to believe it could have been true under the conditions I have described.
On July 14th, 1938, by special arrangement with the Soil Conservation Service, representatives of that agency visited this project to check the soil conditions I had claimed existed. For purposes of this test, during the soil preparation in the autumn a strip about six feet wide had been prepared as a check plot, as experiment station men would call it. This strip had been dug without removing the leaves that already underlay it, and had received an additional supply, just as the entire area had been receiving for five or six years. The purpose of this strip was to illustrate the marked difference in soil texture as between the check strip and the rest of the garden.
Using a soil auger, these men followed instructions I had previously prepared, to insure that the point would be properly demonstrated. They bored into the soil in many places outside the check strip, finding that the soil was mellow to about one foot in depth, and with moisture uniformly distributed from top to bottom. There was no concentration of water at any level, and no dry, hard layer of soil anywhere. Moreover, there was no layer of leaves to be found.
In the check strip conditions were different. The initial turn of the auger flaked up the flinty hard soil from just under the surface mulch of cultivated soil. The upper eight or ten inches of soil were quite similar to this subsurface crust. It was excessively dry, whereas elsewhere in the garden there was no excessive dryness. Beneath this thick layer was the organic matter, moist, but not noticeably wet. Just under the organic matter was the moisture which should have been well distributed throughout the entire depth of soil. This check strip showed plainly one reason why crops cannot grow immediately in a soil where a great deal of organic matter has-recently been ploughed in. There was no moisture whatever in the subsurface layer; and without moisture to dissolve plant food and carry it into the roots no growth can occur. The reason for the absence of moisture was that it had been absorbed by the underlying layer of leaves—even though the leaves did not seem moist. Their apparent innocence of moisture resulted from the fact that organic matter, as before stated, holds water within itself - just as a sponge does.
The reasoning that accounts for the Hinty zone above the organic matter is so elementary that I should be embarrassed to admit that years were required for me to reach that simple conclusion. It is based upon facts so well established as to be known even to uneducated people. Yet one more illustration may help to make clearer the way this happens.
The water had been pulled downward in obedience to two forces: the blotting ability of the organic matter, and the force of gravity. Everybody knows that a bushel basket of corn cobs, if dry, could be carried by a small child, but when wet would be a load for a man. And, if they are exposed to contact with water, the wetting of cobs is automatic. To a degree, that is exactly what had happened to the water supply of the soil above the leaves. Within three or four days after the very heaviest rainfall, the excess water from the upper layers of soil would have been pulled away from the plant roots and into the underlying leaves. This produced noticeable effects. Immediately after rain, all crops were stimulated, and made rapid growth. By the end of three or four days, this stopped short, and no further growth could be observed until after the next rain.
It was with pleasure that I had set about planning the demon-stration which had been inspected by Soil Conservation Service representatives. These men, not knowing the background of experience upon which I based my conclusions, could not agree with me that my check plot illustrated the normal effects of ploughing—in exaggerated form. The soil dryness, recognized as common following the ploughing in of great quantities of organic matter, was not caused by that ploughing, they were sure. They did not agree with my conclusions. Neither did their superiors in Washington. We had correspondence following their report, as a result of which I was eventually informed that my project had " so exaggerated the effects of a bad practice " that it could scarcely be considered of value. The letter that carried this bit of unintended self-contradiction, dated November 10th, 1938, was written by a man who had spent some forty years in the service of the United States Department of Agriculture and was to retire the following week. When I replied to this letter, the answer received from Washington informed me of his retirement, and gave the obvious information that he could not reply officially.
The refusal of authorities to accept and profit by the perfect demonstration I had made of the harm wrought by ploughing was deeply disappointing. It had been clearly shown that the cause of the drying out of land, where considerable organic matter has been ploughed in, is that organic matter. There could be no doubt of it. Stung by this flouting of an obvious point which should have been accepted gracefully, I decided that a further demonstration on field scale must be made. The story of this work appears in the following chapter. However, had I known it, this second demonstration was not needed; for, without indicating that he was interested in the matter at all, one leading agronomist of the United States Department of Agriculture had taken me seriously enough to set up a demonstration. Perhaps the intent was to disprove my theories; on the contrary, the outcome of the tests completely confirmed them. (I have been informed by this agronomist that he had nothing to do with initiating this test work. However, the fact remains that no surface-incorporation work of any kind had ever been done by any government agency prior to 1937 when I began nudging the department to do so.)
The results of this official experiment proved that, by working organic matter into the surface instead of ploughing it in, the resulting grain yield could be as much as 50 per cent. greater. The very first year of this trial showed such a result. So unexpected was this outcome that a report of it was published in the November, 1939, issue of Country Gentleman, under the title, " Right Side Up Farming." (1) Such publication was a radical departure from traditional practice. Usually a result must be confirmed by several years of follow-up work before the public is permitted to know of it, especially in a popular magazine. This unusual advance publication of first-year results seems to indicate a conviction among officials regarding the significance of what had happened that first year.
No special acumen was required for this " research." The only " facts " uncovered were so old they had been previously overlooked as of no possible application. The direction of the pull of gravity, and the affinity of blotting-paper for liquids, could scarcely be pointed out as research discoveries; and those were the only discoveries involved. Their effects were amplified by the large quantities of organic matter employed, which accounted for their discovery. Thus, the combined effects of downward capillarity and gravity are seen to be much more powerful forces than the wishful thinking, which previously has been depended upon to keep the soil moist above a heavy green manure crop that has been ploughed in.
To have demonstrated the fact that such fundamental forces could be involved —which had remained undetected through a century of active scientific effort to improve soils—may be of consequence.
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