Chapter 11:
Synopsis
Starts off by mentioning that by the process of farming, many people could be fed and they could settle down. They had created farms in New England with items such as cattle, pigs, and dairy cows, wheat and corn. The people would burn the brush to clear out forests so they could make hunting easier. Now in present day Massachusetts, white pine trees have come back from where it used to be farmland. Part 2 of the chapter talks about England and how it used to be farmland and many forests. And now today Britain and Ireland have literally none of their original forests. It then tells how John Bennet Lawes inherited the Rothamsted estate which is 300 acres of land made some advances and left behind some clues in relation to agriculture. He and other farmers for centuries noticed that white chalky powder would be dug up and that it would soften the soil. Justus von Liebig concocted some sort of fertilizer but hadn’t patented it so Lawes did and made his estate into a factory. So he and his partner John Henry Gilbert started testing fertilizers with nitrates and then later on, advanced fertilizers with manure. The partners bottled all their tests and if aliens were to come and find the samples, they would see that the pH levels dropped. Some of the samples are also deadly. In part 3 of the chapter it is basically about the effects of the fertilizers and the chemicals we have used that we didn’t know were harmful. Dr. Steven McGrath said that even if humans were to disappear, the metals we left in the ground would be there for a very long time. He has done tests on some of the crops of Rothamsted and says that metals could last up to 70,000 years in the soil. And that the fertilizers that used nitrates, will take a long time for that soil to recover. Part 4 of the chapter has to do with modifying and inserting different genes and hormones into plants and animals. Some modifications we have made include extending the shelf life of tomatoes, and making cows give more milk. Some say as the animals and plants that have modified genes evolve; the genes may be lost because they can’t compete with the other genes. Part 5 of the chapter talks more about the Rothamsted property and how Lawes and Gilbert had stopped tending two of the fields, and over the years up into the 20th century, different plant life and trees that had been there originally started to come back on its own. But since the soils had been tested previously with harsh chemicals, only some stronger plants are coming back. One employee predicts that after about a century with no humans, the fields will go back to “their unfarmed origins.”
and here is a link to the research farm started in the 1800's
http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/Content.php ... ge=Origins