PROGRESS OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. " 225 



it is the most advantageous method of manufacturing manure. Box feeding 

 affords one more instance of the antiquity of many modern agricultural prac- 

 tices. In Sir John Sinclair's " Statistical Survey of Scotland," published 

 1795, we read that in the Shetland Island of Unst, " The method of preserv- 

 ing manure is by leaving it to accumulate in the beast-house under the cattle, 

 mixed with layers of grass and short heather, till the beasts cannot enter. 

 When the house is full, the dung is spread over the fields." Doubtless the 

 islanders of Unst found, in their damp climate, that dung collected out of 

 doors lost all of its fertilizing value. At Ockley farm, wilh the assistance of 

 the grass land, from one hundred to one hundred and twenty of the best class 

 of Sussex, or Devons, or Scots, are fattened every year in boxes, built cheaply 

 enough of the timber from the condemned hedgegrows, interlaced with furze 

 and plastered with Sussex mud. Though not very sumptuous externally, they 

 are warm and well ventilated. Twenty Alderney cows eat up what the fat 

 cattle leave on the pastures, (each cow being tethered,) and supply first class 

 butter for Brighton — a market which requires the best description of farm 

 produce. In manufacturing districts quantity pays the grazier or dairyman 

 the best ; in fashionable quarters, quality. Eight hundred fat Down sheep 

 and Iambs, and about eighty pigs, which are sold off cheaply in the shape of 

 what is popularly called " dairy-fed pork," complete the animal results oa 

 this Weald of Sussex farm. 



On four hundred and fifty acres devoted to arable cultivation, wheat is 

 grown every alternate year, at the rate of from forty to forty-eight bushels 

 per acre. The sheep and lambs, which get fat on the clover or other seeds, 

 assisted by cake, prepare the soil for the alternate corn crops, and have 

 doubled the original produce. The roots fatten the cattle in boxes, and while 

 they are growing ripe for the butcher they manufacture the long straw man- 

 ure, winch both enriches the tenacious soil, and by its fermentation assists to 

 break it up. Space, light and air have been gained by clearing away huge 

 fences, which, besides their other evils, harbored hundreds of corn-consuming 

 vermin. By these and such like methods, all novelties in Sussex, the produce 

 of the farm has in ten years been trebled, and the condition of the soil incal- 

 culably improved ; and all would have been vain, and much of it impossible, 

 without the adoption of deep, thorough gridiron drainage. This has done in 

 the Weald of Sussex clay what sheep-feeding and drill-husbandry did for the 

 warrens of Norfolk, the sands of Bedford, and the Downs of Wiltshire and 

 Dorsetshire. The result, however, is not so satisfactory in a profitable point 

 of view as in light land counties, because, asTalpa has shown in his " Chron- 

 icles of a Clay Farm," it is almost impossible on a retentive soil, with any 

 paying number of horses, to get through more than one third of the plowing 

 before winter sets in with its rain and snow. The cultivators of the farms 

 which from their natural fertility in dry seasons were in favor for centuries, 

 while what are now our finest corn growing districts were Moorland deserts, 

 are often beaten by time, prevented as they are by the wet from getting on 

 the land, and obliged to work slowly with three or four horses. Yet on 

 autumnal cultivation depends the security of the root crops — and the root 

 crops are like the agricultural " Tortoise " of Indian mythology, the basis on 

 which rests the rent-paying corn crop. Much, therefore, as deep drainage has 

 done for advanced farmers, on retentive clays, it has not done enough, and 

 they look anxiously forward for the time when a perfect steam cuUivalor will 

 make them independent of animal power, and enable them, if needful, to 

 work night as well as day during every hour of dry weather. 



We have not thought it necessary to dwell upon any of those profitless ag- 

 ricultural miracles which are from time to time performed, to the great amaze- 

 ment of the class with whom turnips are only associated with boiled legs of 

 mutton, and mangold-wurzel with salad. As little have we cared to describe 

 liquid manure farms, netted over with iron pipes, irrigated by hose and jet, 

 and a perpetually pumping steam engine, for the simple reason that, while 



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