This manure had been collected, loaded and carried fifteen miles by water; it had been unloaded upon the bank and saturated with canal mud; the field had been fitted for clover the previous fall and seeded; the pits had been dug in the fields; the winter compost had been carried and placed in the pits; the clover was to be cut, carried by the men on their shoulders, stacked layer by layer and saturated with mud dipped from the canal; the whole would later be distributed over the field and finally the earth removed from the pits would be returned to them, that the service of no ground upon which a crop might grow should be lost.
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Fig. 101.—Providing for the building of a mud-and-clover compost stack.
Such are the tasks to which Chinese farmers hold
themselves, because they are convinced desired results will
follow, because their holdings are so small and their families
so large. These practices are so extensive in China and
so fundamental in the part they play in the maintenance
of high productive power in their soils that we made
special effort to follow them through different phases. In Fig.
101 we saw the preparation being made to build one of
the clover compost stacks saturated with canal mud. On
the left the thin mud had been dipped from the canal;
way-farers in the center were crossing the foot-bridge of the
