An American Rothamsted

Abstract

HALF a century has elapsed since Sir John Lawes commenced at Rothamsted Park, in Hertfordshire, the unique series of experiments the results of which have produced so salutary an effect on agricultural practice. The inquiries were at the outset restricted to determining the influences of various kinds of manures, and these led to the institution, in the year 1843, of systematic field experiments which are still in progress. Wheat and barley have been grown on the same land for forty-one consecutive years, oats for twelve years, turnips for thirty years, potatoes for nine years, meadow herbage for twenty-eight years, while beans, clover, sugar-beets, and mangel-wurzel have likewise been grown more or less continuously, and all under the varied influences of the different manurial agents. The influence of soils and manures on the composition of crops, the relations of botanical characteristics to the soil and to manures, the physical and chemical properties of the soils themselves, the transpiration of water by plants, the question as to whether plants assimilate free nitrogen, the composition of rain and drainage waters,—these are some of the chief problems which have been the subjects of research. Not less noteworthy are the experiments which have been made with animals, such as the determination of the relation of quantity and kind of food consumed to increase in live weight, the proportion and relative development of the different organs of farm animals, the composition of the animals in different conditions as to age and fatness, the composition of the solid and liquid excreta in relation to that of the food consumed, and the composition of the ash of animals in different conditions and variously fed.