CROPS. In face of the immense variety of crops throughout the world, it is surprising how uniform are the cultivated farms of Europe. Flying across the country you look down on a suc cession of rough rectangles of ground, some of permanent grass, some sown with one of the four cereals, some with rotation grasses or leguminous crops and with roots. This trim mosaic, as it seems from above, is broken chiefly by woodland, and by vineyards, some cut out of the riverside hills, as along the Rhine and Moselle, some covering spacious plains, as the valley of the Garonne; and on a smaller scale by orchards of fruit and hops.
A similar flight over tropical or semi-tropical countries reveals a very different pattern. The variety of crops may be greater, but at the same time very wide areas may be covered by one crop —by sugar, tea, cocoa, coffee or cotton. In some places, as in a famous view in Honolulu from the Pali heights, rice and pine apples, though more vivid in hue, resemble the trim familiar fields of temperate climes.
When we take an historical view of the cultivated crops we shall see a steady increase in variety due to discovery, to selection, of late years to hybridization, and to inventions that enable man to extract the essential virtues from plants, as linen from flax, sugar from cane and beetroot, opium from poppies, cotton from a seed covering, fibre from cocoanut ; to the discovery of the qualities of dried or infused parts of plants, such as the coffee bean or tea leaf or tobacco leaf. But this multiplication of plants found useful for cultivation involves from time to time the rejec tion of others, driven out by discovery of better substitutes or a change of taste.
Lord Ernle, in his admirable history of "English Farming past and present," wrote on this head.
"As the linen trade became more concentrated in particular localities, flax was more rarely cultivated. The hemp-yards which were once attached to many cottages and farmhouses were similarly abandoned. The use of teasels by clothiers was displaced by machinery, and the crop no longer cultivated. Woad, madder, and saffron found cheaper substitutes. Liquorice disappeared from Nottinghamshire, camomile from Derbyshire, canary seed from Kent, caraway from Essex." New Crops.—But with a few exceptions the history of practi cal agriculture is divided into chapters by the discovery of the value of additional crops. Potatoes, sainfoin and lucerne, turnips and sugar-beet, have all produced crucial changes on the farms of Europe. In British official statistics of the loth century the crops are now grouped together under the following heads (not perfectly accurate linguistically). The two largest divisions are: corn crops, so called, and green crops. Under corn crops are in cluded: wheat, burley, oats, rye, beans and peas. Under green crops : potatoes, swedes and turnips, mangolds, cabbage, kohl-rabi and rape, carrots, vetches or tares and lucerne, beetroot, sugar beet. After these two great divisions come clover, sainfoin and artificial grasses. Then pasture grasses, and finally a miscellane ous group consisting of hops, flax and small fruit.
The turnip, introduced chiefly through Sir Richard Weston in 165o, introduced a crucial change in British farming. At a later date few if any crops have made so much difference to the agri culture of a continent, as the sugar-beet, which owed its early vogue largely to Napoleon. Throughout Europe the standard farm relies on some rotation of grain, clovers and roots ; and this need has been forced upon farmers even in the most exclusively grain-bearing districts, such as the Prairie Provinces of Canada, by the need of clearing ground of weeds. The intervention of a root crop is almost as useful for clearing the ground as for increasing its production. In no country have the relative pro portions of the different crops been so nearly standardized as in Denmark. A characteristic small farm in the dairying districts of that country, which is of all countries the most vitally de pendent on its farm crops, consists of a small patch of permanent grass, a rather bigger patch of lucerne and a root and grain crop. The essential virtue of the famous Norfolk rotation prevails: roots, barley, clover, wheat. With many additions and qualifica tions and substitutes of like genera, these remain the master crops of the farms of temperate climes. Only in wide pastoral coun tries, given up to great ranches or stations, such as some South American Republics or Queensland or the more northern parts of Western Australia, is the percentage of grass to arable bigger.
The relative importance of the crops of a country cannot, of course, be gauged merely by area. The distinction between in tensive and extensive crops, though not everywhere applicable, holds good in general. Permanent grass is the thinnest and most extensive and scarcely deserves the name of crop, compared with the production of hops on which as much as Li so an acre may be spent in a year with prospects of a good profit, or of the garden of a French market gardener who may sell f 5oo or £600 worth a year from a single acre.
Even more intensive than such so-called French gardens as are found near Paris or at Rouen, or the Dutch gardens that multiply round Delft and The Hague, are the crops grown under glass—in Guernsey for example, or on the edge of London. No less than £900 worth of tomatoes and cucumbers has been sold from an acre of glass in Essex. Many examples of such a movement may be found ; but contrary tendencies are not less obvious.