Soil and Health A Study of Organic Agriculture

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About the Book The earth's green carpet is the sole source of the food consumed by livestock and mankind. It also furnishes many of the raw materials needed by our factories. The consequence of abusing one of our greatest possessions is disease. This is the punishment meted out by Mother Earth for adopting methods of agriculture which are not in accordance with Nature's law of return. We can begin to reverse this adverse verdict and transform disease into health by the proper use of the green carpet-by the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes.

The purpose of this book is threefold: to emphasize the importance of solar energy and the vegetable kingdom in human affairs; to record author's own observations and reflections, which have accumulated during some forty-five years, on the occurrence and prevention of disease; to establish the thesis that most of this disease can be traced to an impoverished soil, which then leads to imperfectly synthesized protein in the green leaf and finally to the breakdown of those protective arrangements which Nature has designed for us.

About the Author Sir Albert Howard was a principal figure in the early organic movement. He studied Natural Sciences and Agriculture at University of Cambridge. Howard was Director of the Institute of Plant Industry, Indore, and agricultural adviser to states in Central India and Rajputana. He is the author of many books on Agriculture, including An Agricultural Testament and The Waste Products of Agriculture, also published by Dev.

Preface The earth's green carpet is the sole source of the food consumed by livestock and mankind. It also furnishes many of the raw materials needed by our factories. The consequence of abusing one of our greatest possessions is disease. This is the punishment meted out by Mother Earth for adopting methods of agriculture which are not in accordance with Nature's law of return. We can begin to reverse this adverse verdict and transform disease into health by the proper use of the green carpet-by the faithful return to the soil of all available vegetable, animal, and human wastes.

Introduction My first post was a somewhat unusual one. It included the conventional investigation of plant diseases, but combined these duties with work on general agriculture; officially I was described as Mycologist and Agricultural Lecturer to the Imperial Department of Agriculture for the West Indies. The headquarters of the department were at Barbados. While I was here provided with a laboratory for investigating the fungous diseases of crops (mycology) and was given special facilities for the study of the sugarcane, in the Windward and Leeward Islands my main work was much more general the delivery of lectures on agricultural science to groups of school masters to help them to take up nature study and to make the fullest use of school gardens.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages