Crop (organ)

“ When old pastures are broken up, and made arable, not only has the soil been enriched by the death and slow decay of the plants which have left soluble matters in the soil; but the leaves and roots of the grasses living at the time, and occupying so large a part of the surface, afford saccharine, mucilaginous, and extractive matters, which become immediately the food of the crop, and the gradual decomposition affords a supply for successive years. ”

“ We have already seen that the soil contains within itself some available plant food. We can determine by chemical analysis the exact amounts of the various plant foods—nitrogen, phosphoric acid, potash, etc.—which a crop of any vegetable will remove from the soil. ”

“ If nature has set limits to the produce of this grain to the acre, and if our farmers have come up to that limit, there is no use in their trying to do any better. But if their crop is four fold behind what it ought to be, they will feel courage to reach out for a better mode of cultivation. Vegetables collect food from the atmosphere, and from the soil; and different plants select different articles of food from the soil, just as different birds, beasts, insects, etc., require different food. One class of plants draws potash largely from the soil, as turnips, potatoes, the stalk of corn, etc. ”

“ The plant is a laboratory where life converts into nutritive matter the manure from [76] our stables and poultry-yards. A cart-load of dung becomes at the farmer’s pleasure, after passing through one sort of plant or another, a crop of peas or beans, a basket of fruit, or a loaf of bread. Hence this fertilizer is a very precious thing which nothing can replace and which must be utilized to the very utmost. The nourishment of us all depends on it. Enriched with this fertilizer, the soil produces, we will say, a first harvest of wheat. ”

“ Under a good system of crop rotation with all grain sold from the farm it is possible to return to the soil more than one-third of the phosphorus and more than one-half of the organic matter contained in the crops, and even as much nitrogen as all of the crops remove from the land in the grain sold. ”

“ Suppose, then, that we grow Cabbage, or Cauliflower, or Broccoli, on the same plot of ground, one crop following the other for a long series of years, and never refresh the soil with manure, it must be evident that we shall, some day or other, find the crop fail through the exhaustion of the soil of its available sulphur, phosphates, lime, or potash. ”

“ For when instead of fruiting, it is desired that the crop should produce the largest possible amount of vegetable substance, as in the case of forage crops, a larger amount of water will usually be serviceable. ”

“ Where the soil is [Pg 62] favourable, the roots can send up into the straw every thing which the healthy plant requires; when it is poorly supplied with some of those inorganic constituents which the plant desires, life may be prolonged, a stunted or unhealthy crop may be raised, in which the kind, and perhaps the quantity, of ash left in burning will necessarily be different from that left by the same species of plant grown under more favouring circumstances. ”

“ Let it ever be remembered, particularly in respect to soils that are of poor or of moderate fertility, that all these crops will remove their full share of plant-food from the land that we have already appropriated to another object, and that the main crop which we desire to draw its sustenance from the earth for a long series of years may thus be robbed of its proper nourishment. ”

“ Now, the whole matter which forms the stems, leaves, roots, cobs, and seeds of corn, where the crop is 100 bushels per acre, is not part and parcel of the soil. A harvest equal to fifty bushels per acre can be obtained without consuming over ten per cent, of earth, as compared with the weight of the crop. No plant can imbibe more of the substance of the soil in which it grows, than is dissolved in water, or rendered gaseous by the decomposition of mould. ”

“ Most of the inorganic matter, therefore, which is withdrawn from the soil in a crop of corn is returned to it again, by the skilful husbandman, in the fermented straw,—in the same way as nature, in causing the trees periodically to shed their leaves, returns with them to the soil a very large portion of the soluble inorganic substances which had been drawn from it by the roots during the season of growth. ”

“ Many of the plants found most useful for green manuring send down their roots to a considerable depth; and when they are ploughed in, all the substances which they have brought up are of course deposited in the upper few inches of the soil. Vegetable matter when ploughed in in the fresh state, also decomposes rapidly, and is therefore able immediately to improve the subsequent crop ”

“ The cultivated grass grows luxuriantly, and produces a heavy crop of small, white, flinty seeds, which under the microscope very closely resemble ordinary rice. When ripe, it is carefully harvested, and carried by the workers, chaff and all, into the granary cells, where it is divested of the chaff and packed away. The chaff is taken out and thrown beyond the limits of the paved area. ”

“ Thus peas, beans, clover, or potatoes, could be cultivated with success on land which would no longer sustain a crop of grain, and these plants came into use in place of the naked fallow under the name of fallow crops. ”

“ The greatest Difference of having an equal Crop from a small Number of strong Plants, and from a great Number of weak ones, is, that the Soil is vastly less exhausted by the former than by the latter, not only from the latter’s exhausting more in proportion to their Number when young, and whilst each of them consumes as much Nourishment as each of the small Number ”

“ In any case some allowance should be made for the amount of nitrogen collected by the legumes. When corn, cotton or some other crops are grown in the orchard, fertilizing may simply consist in distributing an additional amount of the crop fertilizer for the benefit of the trees. ”

“ A marked exception is found in the oat crop, which does not bear the application of much nitrogen, and often fares well on the remains of the manure that fed the corn, if some phosphoric acid is added.
Maintaining Fertility.—A heavy clover sod gives assurance that a good crop of corn or potatoes can be grown. If the amount of plant-food in the sod is not excessive, a heavy crop of wheat can be produced. The condition of the soil favors many crops. ”

“ It makes a green forage or hay that is rich in protein. Usually it is grown with oats, giving a hay nearly as nutritious as that of clover. The crop is adapted to cold latitudes, and the planting should be made as early in the spring as possible. ”

“ In the production of a heavy crop the amount of minerals and elaborated food materials such as proteins, carbohydrates, and fats removed from a tree is very large. If the trees do not carry a large healthy leaf area at the time of harvest or if there is a killing frost at that time, the leaves have no opportunity to elaborate more carbohydrates and other materials to replace those removed in the crop, and as a result the trees do not develop maximum hardiness. ”

“ For the Eye to make a Companion betwixt a sown Crop and such a ho’d Crop, it ought, when ’tis half grown, to look on the ho’d Crop across the Rows; because in the other it does so, in Effect, which way soever it looks; but whatever Appearance the ho’d Crop of Vegetables (of as large a Species as Wheat) makes when young, it surely, if well managed, appears more beautiful at Harvest than a sown Crop. ”

“ No man who grows corn or wheat ever raises either crop extremely successfully unless he has an intimate knowledge of the soil, the seed, the details of fertilization and culture. He has learned how good soils look, how bad soils look ”

“ Heat, to make them grow; and such as have not these, will lie in the Ground, and retain their vegetative Virtue for Ages; and the common usual Plowings, not being sufficient to make them all, or the greatest Part, grow, almost every Crop that ripens increases the Stock of Seed, until it make a considerable Part of the Staple of such Land as is sown without good Tillage and Fallowing. ”

“ As the germ is always growing warm, the moisture, pumped up through the roots, and helped by the attraction of heat, draws a proper amount of nourishment from the soil, and distributes it to the stem, to the bark, to the husk, to the seed itself and to the beards with which it is armed. It is owing to these successive accretions that each plant attains its natural development, as well corn as vegetables, herbs or brushwood. A single plant, a blade of grass is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in the contemplation of the skill which produced it. ”

“ The cultivation of our crops has ultimately no other object than the production of a maximum of those substances which are adapted for assimilation and respiration, in the smallest possible space. Grain and other nutritious vegetables yield us, not only in starch, sugar, and gum, the carbon which protects our organs from the action of oxygen, and produces in the organism the heat which is essential to life, but also in the form of vegetable fibrine, albumen, and caseine, our blood, from which the other parts of our body are developed. ”

“ Not until synthetical research as to the nutrition of plants made upon living specimens could it be determined on the side of the plant what elements taken up from the soil serve for food, what of the material taken up is used for other purposes, and what is merely neutral. Thus agricultural chemistry, under the influence of plant physiology, has become transformed into agricultural physiology, which to-day is to be counted one of the most important studies that contribute to practical life. ”

“ Very many of the lands that are said to be exhausted of plant-food still contain enough potash, phosphoric acid, and lime, and other fertilizing elements, to produce good crops; but they have been greatly injured in their physical condition by long-continued cropping, injudicious tillage, and the withholding of vegetable matter. ”

“ Such, then, is the laboratory of the leaf, the place where certain inorganic, lifeless substances such as water, lime, sulphur, potash, and phosphorus are transformed and converted into living and organic vegetable matter, and from which this is sent forth to build up every part of the tree from deepest root to topmost sprig. It is in the leaves also that all the food of man and all other animals is prepared, for if any do not feed upon vegetable substances directly but upon flesh, that flesh nevertheless has been made only as vegetable food has been eaten to form it. ”

“ Both begin in a seminal point but the seed is not analogous; both develop—but not by an analogous growth; both require food, but the selection, the digestion and the assimilation are different. The mineral kingdom is the lowest. Out of it, by help of the sun and air, the vegetable procures its materials of growth; in turn the vegetable kingdom is the magazine from which the animal kingdom is sustained; to each, thus the soil contains the original elements; the vegetable is the chemical manipulator, and the animal, the final recipient of its products. ”

“ Do we desire, without particular regard to economy, the most nutricious food for animals? The grass should ripen and only the upper part of the stem and the head should be fed out; for, while the buts will be hard and juiceless, the grain and husk and neighboring parts will have received, in a concentrated form, the height of the plant’s juices. Chemistry has recently shown that plants prepare in themselves, the fatty matter which is afterward laid on the bones of the cattle. This fatty substance lies not in the grain, but the husk. ”

“ When wheat is cut down, the quantity of straw left in the field, in the form of stubble and roots, is sometimes greater than the quantity carried off in the sheaf. Upon a grass field two or three tons of hay may be reaped from an acre; and if we suppose only a tenth part of this quantity to die every year in the form of roots or parts of roots, or of excretions from roots, we can easily understand how the vegetable matter in the soil thus gradually accumulating, should at length become very considerable in quantity. ”

“ The Flesh and Force-producers are most abundant in those plants which yield the substantive food of man. These plants belong principally to the group of cereal grasses, as wheat, oats, barley, &c., and leguminous plants, as peas, beans, lentils, &c. Of these the most important is wheat. At the western end of the gallery are shown samples of many cultivated varieties of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, in the straw, and in grain.
The Flesh and Force-producers exist also in large quantities in milk, and in the flesh of vertebrate animals, divided into mammals, birds, fishes, and reptiles. ”

“ Do they not live on us, eat us, consume our superfluity? We are vegetables—that root in the soil, and the tradesmen and artizans nibble and browse on us. The richer our leaf, the more succulent our juices, the more nutriment we supply to them. When they have eaten us down to the soil, they move off to other pastures and nibble and browse there. When we have recovered, and send up fresh shoots, back they come, munch, munch, munch. If one supply fails, others open. ”

“ Now, note this: the Horse makes up its waste by feeding, and its food is grass or oats, or perhaps other vegetable products; therefore, in the long run, the source of all this complex machinery lies in the vegetable kingdom. But where does the grass, or the oat, or any other plant, obtain this nourishing food-producing material? At first it is a little seed, which soon begins to draw into itself from the earth and the surrounding air matters which in themselves contain no vital properties whatever; it absorbs into its own substance water, an inorganic body ”