6 ideas
Howard holds up the forest as a model farmer: it grows mixed plants and animals together, returns leaves and droppings to the ground, and builds humus that sustains its fertility. He uses this cycle as a standard for comparison and argues that farming should imitate it as closely as it can.
Vegetable wastes, animal dung and urine-soaked earth are laid in alternating layers in pits or heaps. A base such as wood ash or lime is added to neutralise acidity. The heaps are kept moist and aerated and are turned at set intervals, so fungi and bacteria convert the mixed wastes into finished humus in about three months, at a scale ordinary cultivators can run with their own labour and materials.
Soil fertility can only be kept up if everything taken from the land comes back to it: crop residues, animal manures and human wastes. Farming that exports harvests to cities and sends the wastes into sewers and rivers is mining the soil, not farming it. Its apparent productivity is borrowed capital that will eventually run out.
Howard treats pests and fungal diseases as nature's censors. On his view, they mainly attack plants and animals already weakened by factors such as humus-poor soil, unsuitable varieties, poor soil aeration or faulty management. Spraying, in his view, treats the symptom rather than the cause. He reports that his humus-fed crops stayed healthy and that his work oxen stayed free of foot-and-mouth disease without chemical protection or segregation.
Fungi living in and around roots digest humus and pass its products directly into the plant. This forms a living link that soluble artificial fertilisers bypass and can weaken. On this view, the quality of a crop depends on this fungal partnership as much as on the quantity of N, P and K supplied.
Howard took the Indian cultivator's centuries-old practices seriously as the results of long field trials. These included mixed cropping, careful return of wastes and keeping cattle alongside crops. He criticised laboratory specialists who break farming into fragmented plot experiments and lose sight of the whole system, and he argued that research should start from the working farm and be tested by what happens on it.