Sir John Bennet Lawes 1814–1900

Lawes is known chiefly as the founder of Rothamsted Experimental Station and for the contribution he made to agricultural science with his colleague Sir JosephHenry Gilbert. The Broadbalk experiment brought the realization of the importance of nitrogen in the nutrition of cereals and the Drain Gauges the first recognition of the roles of mobile and immobile water in solute transport, but there was much more besides, several other field experiments and some notable work on animal nutrition. Lawes was also an entrepreneur, founding with little capital one of the first fertilizer businesses in the world and running it profitably for 30 years, before selling it and using one-third of the profits to set up the Lawes Agricultural Trust to maintain the experiments. He became in his later years a father figure in British agriculture, providing sound guidance in difficult times and looking ahead to future problems. Parish magazines of the era record him as a popular figure, and often benefactor, in Harpenden. Lawes was also a man with a social conscience, a model employer. He set aside land for allotments for workers on the estate, so that they could grow their own vegetables, and started a pig club. He also built a club-house by the allotments where those who toiled could buy a pint of beer more cheaply than elsewhere and were under no pressure to buy more than they wanted. Lawes and the clubhouse were celebrated by the novelist Charles Dickens in ‘The poor man and his beer’, an article published in All the Year Round magazine in April 1859

Culled from:

Arnold Finck (2006). Soil Nutrient Management for Plant Growth. In: Warkentin, B.P. (Ed) (2006). Footprints in the soil, people and ideas in soil history. Amsterdan: Elsevier.