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high as thirty bushels per acre, yet, from this very fact, it will be seen 

 that my inexorable average will reduce a great many crops to a produce 

 of less than ten bushels, and some, probably, even as low^ as six bushels 

 to the acre. Now such a produce will not pay for seed, labor, harvest- 

 ing and marketing, and it would have been better for the grower had 

 his seed never come up, than that it should bring forth in such stinted 

 measure. Of course, no man will imagine from this that he is to be 

 held responsible for failures or casualties resulting from severity of 

 the weather, or storms, or other influences coming from a higher source 

 than any agency of ours. 



In Great Britain, a country where there is no such climate as this to 

 ripen grain, and where, when one full average crop in five years is 

 secured, farmers think themselves fortunate, the average amount of 

 wheat grown per acre is twenty-seven bushels, and, I believe, last year 

 it exceeded this, and reached to over thirty bushels per acre. There is, 

 no good reason why you should not have as large an average crop from 

 your wheat fields as this of Great Britain. In climate you have every 

 advantage; and in soil, I doubt if in the whole of Great Britain there 

 are to be found any four counties which possess as much of such super- 

 excellent wheat soil, as that which lies outspread before us. When the 

 great alluvial drift, which geology points out as having at scime period 

 swept over this whole peninsula, was deposited and became the surface, 

 the portion which formed this county was singularly well mixed with 

 calcareous and other matters, forming a soil peculiarly adapted to the 

 growth of wheat. Yet this soil, rich as it is, may be, and I fear too 

 frequently is, misused. Chief among the abuses from which it sufters 

 is shallow plowing; and it is an abuse which calls loudly for reform 

 among a great majority of our farmers. We are often told that many of 

 them are reforming in this respect, but it is certain that no general im- 

 provement can be felt till there is a greater and more general demand 

 for implements that will enable them to stir the soil to a depth yet 

 unreached by the shallow furrows that mark your fields. Ordinarily 

 the plows most in use will not turn a furrow more than six or eight 

 inches in depth, and even at many of our plowing matches, it is with 

 difiiculty that some of them can be made to run deeper than six inches. 

 This is by no means deep enough, especially when we consider that the 

 climate is such that our crops need all the protection the soil is capable 



