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I passed in a single afternoon as many as three farms, where the cattle ■were 

 fed in the public highway. The loss of such a miserable course is constant 

 and large. The highway is rendered filthy, and in the night time dangerous, 

 and the farmers lose all the advantages of yarding cattle on their own land. 

 I should not, however, call them farmers, for they will never be farmers, and 

 never own farms, till such a suicidal policy is abandoned. Justice requires 

 me to say, that in other parts of the State there are men who understand this 

 subject so much better, that they yard their sheep in hurdles on different parts 

 of their fields each night, in order to secure and extend the whole fertilizing 

 effect. All organic substances as well as barn yard manure should be covered 

 and if possible protected by sheds, till wanted for distribution. A large 

 share of the vitality of all manures is washed away by showers, or evapora- 

 ted by the heat of the sun. Constant attention to these facts will make one 

 man rich, while constant defiance of them will make another poor. The IT' 

 S. Patent Report for 1850, estimates the annual impoverishment by neglect, of 

 one hundred millions of acres of land in the United States, at ten cents only 

 per acre, to be ten millions of dollars. You may start two young men in life 

 with farms of equal size, and equal fertility. One shall save and restore all 

 organic matter to his land. He shall not waste, burn, destroy, nor throw into 

 the running stream any of the elements which enter the composition of ani- 

 mal and vegetable life. The other shall take no heed of this great preserva- 

 tive principle. He shall crop the soil till his crops fail. He shall give it 

 rest, and plough deeper and crop again. He may alternate with exhausting 

 crops, but still the process of deterioration goes on. At the end of thirty 

 years, the farm of the one will bloom with fertility, his annual crops not di- 

 minished, and the owner a prosperous man. The farm of the other will be 

 barren, exhausted, and cheerless, himself as exhausted as his soil. 



The assumption is sometimes made that this bottom land, or that prairie is 

 so constituted as to need no manure, no renovation. There may be fortunate 

 vallies, where, from the surrounding hills a periodical deposit is made in such 

 happy proportions as to insure perpetual crops. Such facts are full of in- 

 struction, warning men to do elsewhere, what is providentially perfonued in 

 such singular positions by the operations of nature. On the western side of 

 Prairie Ronde in the county of Kalamazoo, Michigan, there are now remnants of 

 heaps of manure, hauled into the woods by the first settlers, because the prairie 

 land was assumed to be too rich already. In other instances barns have 

 been moved away from the manure, instead of the manure from the bams. 

 Yet barn-yard manure contains a dozen elements promotive of, or essential 

 to the production of crops. Plaster, lime, ashes, salt, bones, are valuable 

 manures. Bones make phosphoric acid. Phosphoric acid in an almost inap- 

 preciable quantity is as indispensable to the production of wheat as any 

 other ingredient. Did the farmers of Prairie Ronde who carried off the ma- 

 nure and wasted doubtless all the bones, and dead animals and offal, know 

 from a superficial observation of the soil, whether it was or was not destitute 

 of phosphoric acid or some equally subtle or necessary ingredient? The 

 Hon. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, purchased an exhausted fann. He had 



