Ploughman's Folly Ploughman's Folly - EcoPort

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 already had 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 tramped in. Then the
soil from the adjacent strip was thrown onto these leaves as the next trench was spaded. 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 diigging and not establish such a layer gain. 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 11, 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 into 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 -- something 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 14, 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 flinty zone above the organic matter is so elementary that I should be