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The history of the middle ages abounds with complaints of the lubricity, gluttony, and drunkenness of the monks, vices which are described as being their ruin, in the fallowing pithy distich: "Sunt tria nigrorum quæ vestant res monachorum, Renes et venter et pocula sumpta frequenter." "Three things to ruin monks combine Venery, gluttony, and wine."
As these every year spring up from seeds, it is a very difficult matter for the farmer to prevent their increase, especially since the practice of fallowing land has become almost obsolete.
"'The Dakota wheat-growers are mostly fallowing. They can't quite figure how they would get eighty cents for the dollar's worth of seeding this year. Milling very quiet in Winnipeg. No inquiries from Europe coming in, and Manitoba dealers, generally, find little demand for harrows or seeders this year.
If you grow a summer crop on the summer-fallowed upland, you lose the chief advantage of summer fallowing, which is the storing of moisture for the following year's crop. A cultivated crop would waste less moisture than a broadcast crop, surely, but on uplands without irrigation it would take out all the moisture available and not act in the line of a summer fallow.
And I will show you by another reason that it can do as much. You know that there are in the year fifty-two weeks. Now take away eight weeks for holy days and other hindrances, then are there forty-four working weeks left. And in all that time the plough shall only have to plough for fallow or for spring or winter sowing three roods and a half daily, and for second fallowing an acre.
It contains directions for draining, clearing, and inclosing a farm, and for enriching the soil and reducing it to tillage. Fallowing before wheat was practised, and when a field was exhausted by grain it was allowed to rest. Hollingshed estimated the usual return as 16 to 20 bushels of wheat per acre; prices varied very greatly, and famine was of frequent recurrence.
In the very earliest days of my occupation the weather was so dry for the time of year October and November that fallowing operations, generally only possible in summer, could be successfully carried on, a very unusual circumstance on such wet and heavy land. Meeting the Vicar, a genial soul with a pleasant word for everyone, the latter remarked that it was "rare weather for the new farmers."
A new land law had been passed which had a strong influence on the agricultural development of the West. It doubled the size of homesteads to 320 acres. This would bring farmers and families for permanent building. It would give them more pasture and plenty of land to carry on the fallowing method.
The real physical causes of this phenomenon would be an interesting inquiry, since, like the effects of fallowing land, and of a rotation of crops, it is far from being sufficiently understood.
"By getting as much summer fallowing as possible done on the second quarter-section. The first has been growing wheat for some time; I'll sew part of that with timothy. There's one bit of stiff land I might put in flax. I've thought of trying corn for the silo." "Timothy and a silo?" commented Grant. "You're going in for stock, then? It means laying out money, and a slow return." "I'm afraid so.
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