About the author of Plowman’s Folly
Edward H. Faulkner (1886-1964) was from Elyria, Ohio who worked as an agricultural agent in the upper Ohio and Erie basins. After witnessing the soil being ‘worn-out’, Faulkner’s concern with a ‘problem vital to Man’s survival on this planet’ led him to search, through observation and experimentation, for ways to care for the soil. Faulkner’s genius was to question the use of the plow. He came up with the remedy of using the ‘disc plow’, which cuts up and incorporates organic matter into the soil, rather than burying them deep in the subsoil, insuring healthy and fertile soil.
Faulkner was one of the first true conservationists. His ideas were considered ‘mad’ and without merit, until after his death when soil experts and scientists began to admit ‘We didn’t pay attention, and we should have’.
The restoration and maintenance of soil fertility has become a universal problem…. The slow poisoning of the life of the soil by artificial manures is one of the greatest calamities which has befallen agriculture and mankind.
About the book
Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognised as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world.
It was on 5 July, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.
Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.
We have equipped our farmers with a greater tonnage of machinery per man than any other nation. Our agricultural population has proceeded to use that machinery to the end of destroying the soil in less time than any other people has been known to do in recorded history.
Abstract
(original published in Nature magazine, 1 April 1944)
WHERE is the folly? Mr. Faulkner declares it to be with ploughmen who bury green manures, weeds and stubbles many inches below the surface. He is of the opinion that ploughing places such material out of reach of crop roots and creates a subsurface “blotter” which interferes with capillary movement of moisture. He advocates the use of the disk-harrow as a means of incorporating such materials into the soil surface. If land is prepared in this way, and not ploughed, Mr. Faulkner is persuaded that crop yield may increase five- or ten-fold. By disking plenty of green manure into the surface he believes crop yields can be secured against the vagaries of the weather. According to his predictions, such crops will not be seriously affected by drought, nor, on the other hand, will they suffer in wet seasons. Land drainage would be not merely unnecessary, it would be detrimental to such crops. They would also be practically immune from the ravages of insect pests. Furthermore, Mr. Faulkner is confident that by using the disk-harrow in place of the plough, weeds could be much more easily controlled, provided this practice is adopted over the whole of a considerable area.
