During twenty or more days this green nitrogenous organic matter is permitted to lie fermenting in contact with the fine soil particles of the ooze with which it had been charged.  This is a remarkable practice in that it is a very old, intensive application of an important fundamental principle only recently understood and added to the science of agriculture, namely, the power of organic matter, decaying rapidly in contact with soil, to liberate from it soluble plant food; and so it would be a great mistake to say that these laborious practices are the result of ignorance, of a lack of capacity for accurate thinking or of power to grasp and utilize.  If the agricultural lands of the United States are ever called upon to feed even 1200 millions of people, a number proportionately less than one-half that being fed in Japan today, very different practices from those we are now following will have been adopted.  We can believe they will require less human bodily effort and be more efficient.  But the knowledge which can make them so is not yet in the possession of our farmers, much less the conviction that plant feeding and more persistent and better directed soil management are necessary to such yields as will then be required.

Later, just before the time for transplanting rice, we returned to the same district to observe the manner of applying this compost to the field, and Fig. 105 is prepared from photographs taken then, illustrating the activities of one family, as seen during the morning of May 28th.  Their home was in a near-by village and their holding was divided into four nearly rectangular paddies, graded to water level, separated by raised rims, and having an area of nearly two acres.  Three of these little fields are partly shown in the illustration, and the fourth in Fig. 160.  In the background of the upper section of Fig. 105, and under the thatched shelter, was a native Chinese cow, blindfolded and hitched to the power-wheel of a large wooden-chain pump, lifting water from the canal and flooding the field in the foreground, to soften the soil for plowing.  Riding on the power-wheel was a girl of some twelve years, another of seven and a baby.  They were there for entertainment and to see that the cow kept at work.  The ground had been sufficiently softened so that the father had begun plowing, the cow sinking to her knees as she walked.  In the same paddy, but shown in the section below, a boy was spreading the clover compost with his hands, taking care that it was finely divided and evenly scattered.  He had been once around before the plowing began.  This compost had been brought from a stack by the side of a canal, and two other men were busy still bringing the material to one of the other paddies, one of whom, with his baskets on the carrying pole appears in the third section.  Between these two paddies was the one seen at the bottom of the illustration, which had matured a crop of rape that had been pulled and was lying in swaths ready to be moved.  Two other men were busy here, gathering the rape into large bundles and carrying it to the village home, where the women were threshing out the seed, taking care not to break the stems which, after threshing, were tied into bundles for fuel.  The seed would be ground and from it an oil expressed, while the cake would be used as a fertilizer.