Rewriting history
“Summerfallow half of your land each year, plow it deep – not less than 12 inches. If you cannot get deep enough with one plow, follow it up with a second plow in the same furrow. Harrow it down until you have a dry dust blanket about three inches deep on top. This blanket will stop evaporation. Every time it rains harrow the rain in and break up the crust. If you consistently do a fallow this way you can grow a good crop even in the very dry seasons.”
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Nutty advice? Believe it or not, this is a direct quote from Saskatchewan’s minister of agriculture, W. R. Motherwell, in 1911, and represented conventional wisdom of the day.
Now that I’m long in the tooth and retired, I get my kicks out of writing citations about giants in the farming industry for the Saskatchewan Agricultural Hall of Fame. It is bemusing at times to look at the portrait of Bill Motherwell and then turn to see the smiling face of soil scientist Don Rennie, who disputes Motherwell’s theory and advocates leaving the land as undisturbed as possible, the no-till system.
After watching the dust storm blackouts of the 1930s, one could see that the advice of 1911 left a good deal to be desired.
We hear a lot these days about the error in setting up Indian residential schools, about whether Louis Riel should have been hanged, and whether we should make ourselves look good today by disassociating ourselves with any number of other deeds once considered appropriate by previous generations. Cannot we take some satisfaction out of learning from the mistakes of the past without trying to rewrite history?
