11 



class, give value to the counti'y and the cities, aud create the opportu- 

 nities for the profitable investment of capital everywhere. Laws to 

 facilitate and reduce the expense of securing money loaned in the coun, 

 try would prove beneficial. 



DIVERSIFIED AGRICULTURE. 



Probabl} 7 no equal portion of the earth's surface is so well calculated, 

 from its great variety of soils and climate, to sustain a diversified, and 

 hence, profitable agriculture, as California. All the products of the tem- 

 perate and man}' of those of the tropical climates, flourish here with 

 equal luxuriance. Nature seems to have marked out this country as the 

 special paradise of the agriculturalists, and yet the great curse of our 

 agriculture and the State is the sameness of production — the over pro- 

 duction of a few agricultural products. It is a stigma upon the intelli- 

 gence and enterprise of our farmers, that very many of the common 

 necessaries of life, and those, too, for the production of which our State 

 is most peculiarly adapted, and which would yield the greatest profit to 

 the producer, are constantly imported. The very money received by 

 our farmers for their grain, sold at a low figure in consequence of over 

 production, is, much of it, exported from the States to pay for these same 

 necessaries consumed by themselves. It is a shameful and deplorable 

 fact, that many of the naturally best grain-producing portions of our 

 State have been cropped every year for from ten to fifteen years in suc- 

 cession, with grain, and in many cases with one single unvaried crop — 

 wheat. The result has proved just what the farmers have time and 

 again been told it would bring about, a complete exhaustion of the soil. 

 In many localities, where once the land yielded from forty to sixty 

 bushels of wheat per acre, it now yields scarcely enough to pay for the 

 labor of sowing and harvesting. What is -still worse, many of these 

 improvident grain farmers are disposing of their exhausted lands and 

 moving to other sections to find a virgin soil, which they, in turn, will 

 in like manner exhaust. This practice of constant cropping with a 

 single product, and thus exhausting much of the best soil in the State, 

 cannot be too severely discountenanced. It is more suicidal and vicious, 

 if possible, in its effects upon the prosperity and good name of the State, 

 than that half civilized vandalism which would recklessly and uselessly 

 destroy the growing timber on our public lands, and thus lay waste 

 the greatest redeeming feature of our climate. The exhaustion of the 

 soil is not the only evil resulting from this pernicious and unnatural 

 practice of farming — we cannot dignify it by the name of husbandry. 



Like all great violations of the laws of nature, it recoils, in its effects, 

 upon those guilty of the violation, but not upon those alone, for its evil 

 effects are felt by our whole population. In planting, harvesting and 

 marketing a single crop of grain, not over one-half of the year is neces- 

 sarily consumed by our farmers. Thus, throughout our great agricul- 

 tural districts, there is a season of active labor for all and a season of 

 idleness for all. As a result of this mismanagement of the agricultural 

 industry of the State, there is lost to these districts, and to the State at 

 large, each year, the profits of nearly half the agricultural labor of the 

 State. As another result, all that large class of persons who depend for 

 a livelihood on daily labor upon our farms are, during all this idle season, 

 thrown out of employment, and are consequently deprived of the means 

 of subsistence, and to compensate them for this idle season, they are 

 compelled to demand of their employers proportionately high wages 



