Peter Kropotkin Archive
Written: 1898
Source: Published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1898
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
A few words on this method which now claims the attention of the experimental stations may perhaps not be useless.
In Japan, rice is always treated in this way. It is treated as our gardeners treat lettuce and cabbage – that is, it is let first to germinate; then it is sown in special warm corners, well inundated with water and protected from the birds by strings drawn over the ground. Thirty-five to fifty-five days later, the young plants, now fully developed and possessed of a thick network of rootlets, are replanted in the open ground. In this way the Japanese obtain from twenty to thirty-two bushels of dressed rice to the acre in the poor provinces, forty bushels in the better ones, and from sixty to sixty-seven bushels on the best lands. The average, in six rice-growing states of North America, is at the same time only nine and a half bushels.*
* Dr. M. Fesca, Beitrage zur Kenntniss der Japanesischen Landwirthschaft, Part ii., p. 33 (Berlin, 1893). The economy in seeds is also considerable. While in Italy 250 kilograms to the hectare are sown, and 160 kilograms in South Carolina, the Japanese use only sixty kilograms for the same area, (Semler, Tropische Agrikultur, Bd. Iii., pp. 20-28.)
In China, replanting is also in general use, and consequently the idea has been circulated in France by M. Eugene Simon and the late M. Toubeau, that replanted wheat could be made a powerful means of increasing the crops in Western Europe.#
# Eugene Simon, La cite chinoise (translated into English); Toubeau, La repartition metrique des impots, 2 vols., Paris (Guillaumin), 1880.
So far as I know, the idea has not yet been submitted to a practical test; but when one thinks of the remarkable results obtained by Hallet’s method of planting; of what the market-gardeners obtain by replanting once and even twice; and of how rapidly the work of planting is done by market-gardeners in Jersey, one must agree that in replanted wheat we have a new opening worthy of the most careful consideration. Experiments have not yet been made in this direction; but Prof. Grandeau, whose opinion I have asked on this subject, wrote to me that he believes the method must have a great future. Practical market-gardeners (Paris maraicher) whose opinion I have asked, see, of course, nothing extravagant in that idea.
With plants yielding 1,000 grains each – and in the Capelle experiment they yielded and average of 600 grains – the yearly wheat-food of one individual man (5*65 bushels, or 265 lbs.), which is represented by from 5,000,000 to 5,500,000 grains, could be grown on a space of 250 square yards; while for an experienced hand replanting would represent no more than ten to twelve hours’ work. With a proper machine-tool, the work could probably be very much reduced. In Japan, two men and two women plant with rice three-quarters of an acre in one day (Ronna, Les Irrigations, vol. iii., 1890, p. 67 seq.). That means (Fesca, Japanesische Landwirthschaft, p. 33) from 33,000 to 66,000 plants, or, let us say, a minimum of 8,250 plants a day for one person. The Jersey gardeners plant from 600 (inexperienced) to 1,000 plants per hour (experienced).