Experience teaches us all by itself, Tornik, like a schoolmaster. When we plow and sow the same field over and over without giving it any rest, we see that the first year it yields heavily, the next year the yield starts to fall off, and by the third year the field is worn out altogether and gives nothing. Village people have known this from experience for a very long time, and so they use two kinds of means to give exhausted soil its strength back. Either they let the field alone for a few years, so that it rests on its own, gathers strength, and grows rich again, or they dung it, making up for the strength the field has lost, and keep on tilling. That way the field is never left idle. Every year it is plowed and sown and it yields, as long as the farmer knows how to change the seed. Here is what I mean. If he sowed wheat the first year, the next year he must sow grass, or else dung the field and grow garden crops in it. At the end of autumn, once the garden crops have been lifted, he can plow the field and sow wheat, and the following year he gets twice the yield. The town farmers of Van know this way of tilling very well. Our village people, for their part, have great means at hand for giving their fields strength. I will not say they are so ignorant that they do not know, because the example of the town farmers is right in front of their eyes. It is nearer the truth to say that they are lazy and have no love for extra work. And there is one great reason besides, which I mentioned in my earlier lessons. A man holds more land than he can work, and he leaves it unplowed so that it gathers strength by lying fallow, and that is all.
Do you see, Tornik? There is our village in front of your eyes. Look how many ash-heaps are piled into great hills before the door of every house! And never mind the ash-heaps, there are heaps of other refuse too, here and there in the streets, trodden underfoot until they turn back into soil, and our foolish farmers do not know how to use those good, enriching heaps of dung. Is it really so hard, in spring and in autumn, to carry the dung-heaps out to the fields in small carts? Give the soil back the strength it has spent, and the soil renews itself and starts to yield the way it did at first. You know, Tornik, this is a law of nature. The soil has a life of its own, just as a man does. If you keep working it, plowing and sowing without ever feeding its strength, understand that it grows old, it turns barren, and it stops bearing altogether. They say the soils of Europe are worn out with age. But look what that hardworking, ingenious people does. It has found so many ways of giving the soil strength that the old soil turns young again and bears fruit many times over. It astonishes a man to hear that dung is carried by ship all the way from America to Europe. Do you see? Even the dung our own eyes despise has joined the ranks of merchandise, because to a farmer dung is more useful and more precious than a diamond. That noble stone makes a splendid ornament for the nobility, no question. But when a man is starving he sells the diamond and buys bread.
I could weep at our laziness, Tornik, and even more at our stupidity. Our dung does not have to come from America. It stands heaped mountain-high in front of the doors of our own houses, and we are too sluggish to bring ourselves to carry it as far as the field. And it is not only our fields' yield we ought to be thinking about. We ought to be thinking about the cleanness of the village square and the streets as well.
Eh, Tornik, I think I have been talking and judging a little too freely. Can peasant people with no schooling at all have any notion of cleanness, or any taste for it? It is not fair to blame village people who have never been taught, who, on top of their ignorance, are besieged by all the many pains of life, and whose natural minds are chained and bound, on the other side, by deep prejudice. Say to one of them, Brother Kirakos, all that dung is heaped up in front of your door, why not carry it out and spread it on your fields? "Eh," he answers, "that is more work. A few fields a year are enough for me. I plow them, I sow them, and the rest I leave. Let them lie fallow and gather strength on their own. Our forefathers tilled without dung, and did they not earn their bread? And for proof I call on all the everlasting ash-heaps, which have been piling up since our forefathers' day. It was certainly not we who piled them." There is your peasant's argument. Thinking that way and talking that way, he stays where he is, under the siege of his own mind, and the ash-heap stays where it is too. So we have to wait for time and schooling to move the peasant people's mind toward progress. Then he will see for himself what dung is good for, and the dung-heaps standing in the village today will all be carried off and spread on their fields, with people fighting over them and snatching them out of one another's hands. It will be enough for them to see the yield once, by trial, and be convinced how much, how very much, a field gains from dung. Now I need to talk about preparing the dung, how it should be gathered and made ready so that it does the most good.
If the dung each village house produces is just thrown down wherever it lands and left there, the way it is now, and each pile becomes a mound of earth, it does no good at all. First, the sun's heat draws the sap and strength out of the dung. Second, when the rains come down in torrents they wash over the dung-place and carry off the sap and strength that were in it, and the dung-heap, drained of its sap and strength, turns worthless and unprofitable. So each house in the village must prepare its own dung-pit, separately, wherever it suits. Knowing beforehand how much dung a year brings in, they should dig long square pits to match that quantity, each at least two cubits deep, so that neither rainwater nor the water of the melting snows can ever run out of the dung-pits. It also matters to know what materials go into the dung-pit, and how many different things dung is made of. There is the ash of the tonir,1 the sweepings of the privies, rotted straw and grass, the leavings of the house, the coarse refuse-straw taken up off the threshing-floor, which the animals will not eat, the scraps left in the mangers, and the rest. All of these are material for the dung-pit. And I had forgotten the spoiled zhazhik2 from pots gone bad, and things like it, which are all dung-pit material too. Mixed together in one place, they rot, they ferment, they sour, and they turn into a powerful substance for enriching the earth.
Now for the right season to dung the fields. The beginning of spring and the end of autumn are both proper times. The kitchen-gardens are usually dunged at the spring sowing-time, and so are the fields of spring-sown seed, whether wheat or barley or other grain. But it is far better, and far more profitable, to dung in autumn the fields that were plowed in autumn and will go under the light plow, the haror, again in spring for the sowing. Do you know, Tornik, how much is gained, and how well a field yields, when it is dunged in autumn and the dung is spread evenly over its face? I have tried it myself. First the rain comes and then the snow, and the strength of the dung soaks right through into the soil, and by spring the soil has grown rich with it. Spring dung does not work on the soil the same way, because if the rain is scant, the sun's heat draws the dung's gaseous strength up and out of it, and the dunged field does not yield as well. And besides all that, a farmer has more time in autumn to cart dung out to the field than in spring, when the days are taken up with sowing and other work. Even in the winter days, while the snow and the cold are not yet blocking the way, a brisk, hardworking farmer can cart dung out to the field and spread it right away.
That is all I will say about what dung is good for. The rest I leave to you, Tornik. Test it in your own work, learn its yield and its profit for yourself, and do not let a single thing that could serve as dung go to waste.