Abstract
ALTHOUGH at the moment many agricultural /i. regions are more concerned with the profitable marketing of their surplus produce than with methods designed to increase crop-production, nevertheless there are important exceptions to this general rule. In India, for example, the food supply of the villages, some 500,000 in number, is markedly deficient in amount, while the low quality is considered by many medical authorities on the spot to be one of the chief factors responsible for the poor general health and want of resistance to disease on the part of the population. In other parts of the tropics the maintenance of the food supply of the people is always one of the major anxieties of the authorities. In such circumstances any practicable method, by which the local food crops can be improved and to some extent ensured, will at once command attention. Such a method has recently been worked out at the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore in Central India. The earlier results were published by Messrs. Howard and Wad in 1931 as “The Waste Products of Agriculture” which was reviewed in NATURE of November 21, 1931. In the February number of the Indian Medical Gazette of the present year, Messrs. Jackson and Wad have successfully applied the Indore method of manufacturing humus from agricultural wastes to the conversion of night soil and town refuse into a valuable compost*.
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Conversion of Municipal and Village Wastes into Humus. Nature 133, 954–955 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/133954b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/133954b0