Farming for self sufficiency

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When the crop is ripe it is harvested. The husbandman must now plough or dig the land up again, to bury the weeds that have grown (and there will be some), to make the land soft enough again to get his drill coulters into it, or the points of his harrow if he intends to broadcast his seed, and to aerate the soil, for this stimulates the aerobic bacteria which benignly break down the waste vegetable matter and turn it back into plant nutrients again. He will also cultivate or harrow. The cultivator is like a giant harrow; it has long teeth that go deep into the soil and take much more power to pull them than a harrow, which has a lot of little spikes sticking down out of a framework. A thorn bush will do, and I have used one.

The husbandman must wage constant war against weeds. When he does not have a crop on the land he attacks weeds by allowing the weeds to grow and—before they seed—ploughing them in or otherwise killing them. Then, if he has time, he will let another crop of weeds grow and treat them the same. If a field gets too 'foul', that is grows too many weeds, then he may 'bare fallow' it, that is leave it for a summer without growing a crop on it. During this summer he constantly lets a crop of weeds grow, then ploughs them in or drags them out with the cultivator, and then repeats the process. The modern husbandman cannot abandon land when it becomes too weedy and move on and plough up the wilderness. His husbandry must be a self-regenerating process.

Also the husbandman must put back nutrients into the soil. You cannot keep taking large quantities of nutrients out of a piece of land and put nothing back for ever. The land will get poorer and poorer and eventually become sterile. In a primitive economy what is taken out of the land is put back again. This happened in England until sewage started to be dumped into the sea. Now we make up what we lose by dumping sewage by importing potash and phosphates from mineral deposits in various parts of the world and extracting nitrogen from the air by electricity. It is perfectly easy to treat sewage in such a manner that it can be put back on the land again, and does not have to be dumped into the sea. A big capital investment is needed to do this, but the money is got back after not many years in the sale of fertilizer.

Every civilization that the world has so far seen has been founded on corn, by which I mean crops of the grass family. The Mesopotamian and Indus Valley civilizations, the Egyptian civilization, the North China civilization, were founded on wheat. The south Indian, Sinhalese, Bengali and South Chinese and Indonesian civilizations were founded on rice. As Europe, belatedly, was occupied by civilized people they brought wheat with them. Classical Greek civilization was founded on wheat until the Greeks ruined their topsoil, whereupon they had to grow subsoil crops like the vine and the olive, and become a trading and ship-building nation and get their wheat from other places. The Roman Empire was founded on wheat. When the Romans too, ruined their topsoil, and turned the wheatlands of North Africa into a desert, their civilization collapsed in ruins. It is hard to think of any other food that would give sufficient security from famine, and energy, to a people to allow them to develop that fragile thing, a civilization, excepting one of the graminae. True, potatoes have been the foundation of rather inferior civilizations in South America, but I don't think the Parthenon could ever have risen up from a diet of spuds.

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