MANAGEMENT OP PASTURES. 



79 



repeat, put no more stock in your pasture than it will feed well. 

 Would you say it would be good policy to put twenty head of 

 cattle in your barn if the feed you had in, it wouldn't carry but 

 fifteen ? For every animal tli'at you put in your pasture more than 

 it will feed well you sustain a loss, not only in the growth of the 

 animal but in the quantity of your dairy products, for the extra 

 animals do not begin to pay for the extra work they make. 



Thus, gentlemen, I would attempt to improve the pasture lands 

 of New England. I know it is a slow process, but if we would 

 raise fine cattle and give the products of the dairy in profusion, 

 we can only do it by restoring to our pastures the fine, succulent 

 grasses that alone will produce them. In improving my pasture 

 1 would like to select my stock. There must be some stock and 

 there must be somebody to raise it. I would like to let somebody 

 else manufacture the animal carcass and let me have it to fatten. 

 Then the animal will only take away from my farm carbon, which 

 I can afford to have him do. So I will reach out to New York or 

 to the West, and buy cattle from somebody whom I don't know 

 and whose farm I shall never see. I will let him furnish these 

 other elements and I will furnish the carbon. But if I cannot 

 fatten cattle to advantage I must come to the next best thing, and 

 here 1 don't know what to do. Next to fat the best product that 

 was ever carried from a pasture is butter, for in selling butter I 

 sell nothing but carbon, and this depletes the soil less than any- 

 thing I can sell. But in selling butter I am stealing from Peter 

 to pay Paul, and that I don't like to do. While I am selling from 

 the farm only carbon, I am taking the elements of fertility from 

 my pasture and putting them on my field ; but let me be honest, 

 and if I can do no more I can at least top-dress all my pasture 

 lands every other year. 



In conclusion, gentlemen, I will say that I believe that, taking 

 these two classes of pasture land, clearing and top-dressing the 

 one, and plowing, tilling, manuring and seeding the other, and by 

 care of the ground and the stock we put on it, being sure to 

 return what we have taken from them, I am very sure that we 

 shall yet see the grass grow in the pastures of New England 

 which our fathers grew there a hundred or more years ago. 



