Camillo Tarello

[3] Camillo Tarello, a native of Lonato del Garda, in the Venetian territories, concerned to see the neglected and dreadful mismanaged state of husbandry in his country, wrote his small, but highly valuable treatise of Agriculture, and presented it to the Senate of Venice under the title of Ricordo es Agricultura.

The Senate, in justice to the excellency of this work and the patriotic intentions of its author, granted him, on 29 September 1566, not only the sole right of vending his book, but also ordered at the same time that all such as adopted his new method of husbandry, should pay to him, and afterwards to his descendants, four marchetti (about three halfpence of the 18th century) for every acre of corn land, and two marchetti for every acre of other land, planted according to his direction.

In the early 19th century, for example, Albrecht Thaer claimed that in Mecklenburg there was complete ignorance of Camillo Tarello's method of not burying the dung until the last sowing, or of even spreading it over the new turf.

In fact, the adoption of this plan, according to which the manure is only applied to the soil as a kind of capital, is perhaps considered to produce too great a diminution in the corn harvests, although the loss in that point will, in the end, be thoroughly compensated by the increased richness of the pasturage, and by the abundance of the produce which will be obtained when the ground is cultivated again.

[7] Thaer further explained: And according to Thaer (1844), the testimony of a great many aged persons goes to prove that a wide extent of land, which had been wholly exhausted by the triennial rotation, has become so much ameliorated by this system of cultivation in the course of one generation, that it is now capable of producing a considerable surplus of corn for exportation, besides affording an abundant pasturage to three times as many cattle as were formerly fed upon it.