222 PROGRESS OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 



2600/. to 3000/. a year. Seven or eight wagon loads of farmyard manure are 

 plowed in on land intended for roots, besides above 30s. worth per acre of 

 Buperpliosphate of lime drilled in with the turnip seed ; while wheat has a 

 top-dressing of 1 cwt. of guano, -i cwt. nitrate of soda, and 2 cwt. of salt, 

 mixed with earth and ashes. No weeds are grown. The turnips are taken up 

 in November, and a troop of " boys and girls," under the care of an experi- 

 enced man, traverse the ground, forking out and burning every particle of 

 twitch or thistle. The same " troop " is called in during tlie progress ot the 

 root crop, whenever occasion requires, and immediately after harvest they go 

 over the stubbles with their little three-pronged forks, exterminating the slight- 

 eat vestige of a weed. The expenses of cleaning are thus kept down to Is. an 

 acre, a price which excited the admiration and doubts of that aduiirahle agri- 

 cultural essayist, the late Mr. Thomas Gisburne, and which proves that, by 

 stopping the evil at its source, and never allowing the enemy to get ahead, 

 land may be kept wholly weeded more cheaply than half weeded. Lord Ber- 

 ners mentioned, as recently as 1355, that he found in Leicestershire hundreds 

 of acres netted over with twitch as thick as a Lif'eguardsman's cane, and stud- 

 ded with clumps of thistles like bushes. Such neglected land required aa 

 expenditure of 5/. to G/. an acre to put it in heart. The farmer wlio saw a 

 thief daily stealing from his dung-heap would soon call in the aid of a police- 

 man. The weeds are an army of scattered thieves, and it the pilferings of 

 each are small in amount, the aggregate is immense. Tne wise and thrifty 

 farmer, therefore, keeps his constabulary to take up the offender, and consign 

 him as quickly as possible to death. He who allows himself to be daily robbed 

 of his crop, and the community to the same extent of f)od, and all the while 

 looks helplessly on, is not only a bad farmer, but in effect, though not in de- 

 sign, a bad citizen also. 



Mr. J. Thomas, of Lidlington Park, our second example, farms about 800 

 acres of a mixed character, under the Duke of Bedford, of whom it is the high- 

 est praise to say that ho is a landlord worthy of such tenants, consisting in 

 part of clay, which has been rendered profitable for arable cultivation by deep 

 drainage, and in part of what is locally called sand, whicli has been reduced 

 from rabbit-warrens to cornfields by the Norfolk system. Ttiis intelligent cul- 

 tivator read a paper some time since to the Central Farmers' Club, in which he 

 stated, with the assent of his tenant audience, that, under very high farming, 

 it was not only possible, but advisable to reduce the fertility of the soil by the 

 more frequent growth of grain — as, for instance, by taking barley after wheat, 

 and returning to the once fatal system of two white crops in succession. He 

 said that, under the four or five course he began to find his " turnips subject 

 to strange, inexplicable diseases ; his barley (where a large crop of swedes had 

 been fed on the ground by sheep, with the addition of cake and corn,) laid 

 flat on the ground by its own weight, and in a wet harvest sprouted, thus ren- 

 dering the grain unfit for the maltster, the straw valueless as fodder, while 

 the young clover was stifled and killed by the lodgment of the barley crop." 

 Thus, while Roman agriculturists, with all their garden-like care, were tor- 

 mented by a decreasing produce on an exhausted soil, we, after ages of cropping, 

 have arrived at the point of an over-abundant fertility — an evil to be cured, 

 not by any fixed rule, but " by permitting the diligent and intelligent tenant 

 farmer a freer exercise of judgment." In this speaker we have another speci- 

 men of the invaluable class of men by whom, during the Ust ten years, on 

 tens of thousands of acres, the produce of meat and corn has been doubled. 



At Lidlington, where tiiere is strong clay to deal with, an J more good grass 

 land than exists at Castle Acre, it is not necessary to purchase so much food 

 to keep live stock for manure. But there are about one hundred and fifty 

 beasts and one thousand sheep sold fat, besides a choice breeding flock of four 

 hundred Downs, the result of twenty years' care. By these sheep the light 

 land is consolidated and enriclied. If they are store sheep, they are allowed 

 to gnaw the turnips on the ground apart of tlie year ; if they are young and 



