Explore "An Agricultural Testament" by Albert Howard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
What is this soil fertility? What exactly does it mean? How does it affect the soil, the crop, and the animal? How can we best investigate it? An attempt will be made in this chapter to answer these questions and to show why soil fertility must be the basis of any permanent system of agriculture.
The nature of soil fertility can only be understood if it is considered in relation to Nature's round. In this study we must at the outset emancipate ourselves from the conventional approach to agricultural problems by means of the separate sciences and above all from the statistical consideration of the evidence afforded by the ordinary field experiment. Instead of breaking up the subject into fragments and studying agriculture in piecemeal fashion by the analytical methods of science, appropriate only to the discovery of new facts, we must adopt a synthetic approach and look at the wheel of life as one great subject and not as if it were a patchwork of unrelated things.