192 ANNUAL REPORT OF NEW- YORK 



We might ask how many farms are wisely divided into lots, 

 giving such sized lots as, with a just regard to expense of fencing, 

 the labor of cultivation and the probable returns, will give the 

 best profits ? And we should find that many are now faultless in 

 this respect — so laid out that the team, in cultivating them, can 

 go ahead part of the day, instead of being always wheeled on its 

 center. More men now than fifty years ago, comprehend that 

 they can cultivate ten acres in the form of a square or an oblong 

 with less labor and less manure even than would be required to 

 cultivate as much in half a dozen crooked, unseemly patches, 

 and that the ten acres in one field will i:>roduce considerably more 

 than when dribbled out into half a dozen. It would not be far 

 from the truth to say that it takes as much land to make nine one 

 acre lots as to make one ten acre lot. The reasons why it requires 

 less labor, less manure and less land to grow a given amount of 

 produce in good sized fields, from five to fifty acres, than on 

 patches, are too obvious to dwell upon. 



How many more farmers now than formerly, understand the 

 full benefits of deep plowing and fine tilth. Lands so prepared 

 draw half their manure from the atmosphere; those skimmed 

 over give half of that which you laboriously put upon them to 

 the passing breezes. The deeply cultivated, finely pulverized 

 field resists alike flood and drouth; the scratched surflice suffers 

 from both. Fifty years age, who knew tlfat in most soils, if not 

 all, deep cultivation with subsoiling, where experience shows it 

 to be beneficial, and underdraining, where nature has not per- 

 formed that ofi&ce, was a complete guaranty against injury from 

 drouth? The very teachers of agriculture had not suspected it. 

 Now, half the farmers in the country know it, and the rest are 

 learning it. Then few had any just conception of the profits and 

 pleasures of fruit growing. It had not entered the heads of the 

 best, that the farmer, by a little attention to the smaller and 

 larger, earlier and later fruits, may revel in the purest, innocent- 

 est and sweetest luxuries the world affords, 365 days in the year, 

 and have enough left for sale to meet all the cost. Now it begins 

 to be understood; it begins to be understood also, that mankind 

 will leave off their degrading vices when you will furnish them 

 in abundance tlie pure and harmless luxuries of nature. 



