The Agricultural Journal of India March 1921

This pushing out of the back of the nest is one of the last portions of the work and the female may be seen going in and out to try the fit over and over again. [...] It has been brought home to us all by the increased prices of food grains and of cotton cloth due partly to the extensive failure of crops in 1918 and partly to the exposure by the realities of war of the artificial nature of the value attached to the precious metals in which contracts other than those relating to agriculture are usually discharged. [...] Agriculture is indeed one of the oldest of the arts and if we extend the meaning of the word to include the whole art of reaping Nature's harvest of food it is the oldest art of all. [...] For being based on an inherited tradition almost amounting to instinct of the uses of the natural resources of each locality for the production of food and on a compelling interest in the bare maintenance of life the art of merely producing food can be carried on with the minimum of material equipment and with the greatest possible economy by an indigenous agricultural population on the borde [...] In a country of labouring cultivators we are therefore confronted with the initial problem that the greater the skill of the cultivator and the better his practice in the matter of using good seed manure and implements the more difficult it is to make agriculture pay for the application of outside intelligence and the more immediately costly becomes any indulgence of the natural desire of man