Explore "An Agricultural Testament" by Albert Howard on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A want of relation between the conventional methods of investigation and the nature of disease in plants and animals has been shown to exist. The vast fabric of agricultural research must now be examined in order to determine whether effective contact has been maintained with the problems of farming. This is the theme of the present chapter.
The application of science to agriculture is a comparatively modern development, which began in 1834 when Boussingault laid the foundations of agricultural chemistry. Previously all the improvements in farming practice resulted from the labours of a few exceptional men, whose innovations were afterwards copied by their neighbours. Progress took place by imitation. After 1834 the scientific investigator became a factor in discovery. The first notable advance by this new agency occurred in 1840, when Liebig's classical monograph on agricultural chemistry appeared. This at once attracted the attention of agriculturists. Liebig was a great personality, an investigator of genius endowed with imagination, initiative, and leadership and was exceptionally well qualified for the scientific side of his task--the application of chemistry to agriculture. He soon discovered two important things: (1) that the ashes of plants gave useful information as to the requirements of crops, and (2) that a watery extract of humus gave little or no residue on evaporation. As the carbon of the plant was obtained from the atmosphere by assimilation in the green leaf, everything seemed to point to the supreme importance of the soil and the soil solution in the raising of crops. It was only necessary to analyse the ashes of plants, then the soil, and to apply to the latter the necessary salts to obtain full crops. To establish the new point of view the humus theory, which then held the field, had to be demolished. According to this theory the plant fed on humus. Liebig believed he had shown that this view was untenable; humus was insoluble in water and therefore could not influence the soil solution.