The quantities of early potatoes exported varied during the years 1901 to 1910 from 47,530 tons to 77,800 tons, and their value from £233,289 to £475,889.
As to the fertility of the soil, it is still worse advocacy, because there is no area in the United Kingdom of equal size which would be manured to such an extent as the area of Jersey and Guernsey is by means of artificial manure. In the seventeenth century, as may be seen from the first edition of Falle’s Jersey, published in 1694, the island “did not produce that quantity as is necessary for the use of the inhabitants, who must be supplied from England in time of peace, or from Dantzic in Poland.” In The Groans of the Inhabitants of Jersey, published in London in 1709, we find the same complaint. And Quayle, who wrote in 1812 and quoted the two works just mentioned, in his turn complained in these terms: “The quantity at this day raised is quite inadequate to their sustenance, apart from the garrison” (General View of the Agriculture and the Present State of the Islands on the Coast of Normandy, London, 1815, p. 77.) And he added: “After making all allowance, the truth must be told; the grain crops are here foul, in some instances execrably so.” And when we consult the modern writer, Ansted, Latham, and Nicolle, we learn that the soil is by no means rich. It is decomposed granite, and easily cultivable, but “it contains no organic matter besides what man has put into it.”
This is certainly the opinion anyone will come to if he only visits thoroughly the island and looks attentively to its soil — to say nothing of the Quenvais where, in Quayle’s time, there was, “an Arabian desert” of sands and hillocks covering about seventy acres (p. 24), with a little better but still very poor soil in the north and west of it. The Fertility of the soil has entirely been made, first, by the vraic (sea-weeds), upon which the inhabitants have maintained communal rights; later on, by considerable shipments of manure, in addition to the manure of the very considerable