RADICAL FARMING
Teller, Walter Magnes
Radical Farming OUT OF THE EARTH, by Louis Bromfleld. Harper & Brothers. 300 pp., with photographs. $4. Reviewed by Walter Magnes Teller LOUIS BROMFIELD has gone wholly to grasslanding on his...
...Malabar Farm has reached grass-landing with the aid of the best in organic farming, the wise application of commercial fertilizers, the replacement of the moldboard plow with the proven "rip plow" and farm-sized rotary tillers, as well as long overdue banishment of corn from the dairying economy...
...What Bromfield has done in the past decade must be followed in future by every dairyman who hopes to continue in business...
...Out of the Earth is a series of overwritten, repetitious, but nevertheless provocative essays which cumulatively demonstrate the agricultural, social, economic, recreational, and political reasons why grass-landing will have to be accepted by commercial dairymen sooner or later...
...Grasses and legumes permit of year-round handling as pasture, hay or silage, and allow of management from beginning to end with no more than two-thirds of the labor and expense found in the traditional four or five year corn-grain-grass rotation...
...Indeed, it is...
...Of equal importance to all of us (farmer, consumer, taxpayer), is the fact that modern legume-grass agriculture, with its basis in large areas of permanent cover, inevitably replenishes the land and raises the water tables as it produces increasing yields...
...Too many dairymen still believe that milking cows can be kept at high production only by the feeding of large quantities of corn silage and high-priced concentrates...
...The work of grasslanding is easier, net profits are higher...
...probably one of the most significant books ever to come out of Louis Bromfield's earth, life, or typewriter...
...Agricultural research men have known for five years and more that such is not the case...
...That is the big news in his third book on farming, Out of the Earth, which is principally a record of the approach to grassland dairying and remarks on achievements to date...
...Reviewed by Walter Magnes Teller LOUIS BROMFIELD has gone wholly to grasslanding on his 500 acres in Ohio...
...Now the farmers at Malabar, Bromfield's farm, come along to prove that a 50-cow milking parlor can be profitably maintained with less work and more improvement in the animals, plants and soils, solely by multiple development of grasses and legumes...
...As those who have tried it and stayed with it knew, even before Bromfield publicized the pattern, long-term grasslanding produces better soils and full-feeding crops...
...The cheapest and best feeds for milking cows are grown on the place, and manure, stalks, and roots are regularly returned to the soils that produced them...
...They have completely rejected not only purchased concentrates, but also the production and' feeding of corn...
...The case for what Bromfield calls the New Agriculture, is radical but valid, and his statement of it is what makes Out of the Earth a good and important book...
Vol. 14 • September 1950 • No. 9
