Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/229/en

In the nineteenth century, natural science and technology gradually took over direction of the agriculture that had become estranged from its spiritual impulses. At the very outset, one agricultural faculty after another was founded. The central question was what had been called the «old force of the soil», and from this the question of manuring. The aim was to understand what had given the soils their enduring fertility across the ages. The wholeness of the organism of agriculture and the interworking of its members had been lost from view, and the search was on for individual factors. The importance of humus as a bearer of fertility was recognised. To investigate this question of enduring soil fertility experimentally, the long-term manuring trial at Rothamsted was set up in 1853 in Kent, England. In one plot with farmyard manure dressing, this was discontinued after some time, and after fifty years the aftereffects of this former manuring were still to be observed. This — together with long-term trials carried out elsewhere at a later date — confirmed that the «old force» is owed in essence to the keeping of cattle within the organism of agriculture.