Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 Excerpt: ...farm giving to the eye the most uniform area of soil possible, and, on harvesting, any disturbing factor that might have come to light during the growing season, and which it was thought might have modified the returns on any plot, was reported to the Office. In the face of all these precautions, however, one must recognise the possible entrance of factors which are liable, in cases, to result in what, in the final returns, might appear as abnormalities. There is, for instance, the impossibility of securing a soil sample absolutely representative of the soil of the whole field--more especially on Australian soils not long under cultivation, where the irregular burning off of the original timber is apt to leave considerably larger ash residues on certain portions of the farm than on others. There are also the material differences in yield sometimes found on the various unmanured plots of an apparently uniform field--differences which, where the general crop runs into high figures, might reach three or four hundred pounds to the acre, and in extreme cases might even exceed these figures. Such differences may be due themselves, in part, to the irregular distribution of the ash of the burnt timber already referred to, or they may be caused by irregularities in the subsoil which do not appear on the surface. At any rate, such differences in yield do at times occur on the most uniform soil of the ordinary farm, and it is a mere accident that the returns from a number of unmanured plots in the same field give figures even approximately similar. The difference of two or three hundred pounds in the return of a hay crop is hardly one to constitute any serious consideration from the point of view of practical farming, but, in regarding the figures of the various plots...
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