156 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



banking' or manufacturing companies, in railroads or steamships, 

 or mining, lumbering, or perhaps some fancy scheme which 

 promises large dividends with but little labor. Every where, they 

 have diverted their capital from its true purposes to invest it in 

 one or all of these pursuits, and thus vast sums — the earnings of 

 their patient and honest toil — have passed into the hands of 

 speculators and drones, and are lost to them forever, or become so 

 entangled in the intricacies of a business they do not understand, 

 as to be a perpetual source of vexation and loss. This is an evil of 

 such magnitude, that, until it is in a great measure corrected, I 

 cannot hope for that enlightened progress which ought to dis- 

 tinguish us as an agricultural people. 



The average interest of stocks in New England probably does 

 not exceed six per cent., and many of them are so fluctuating and 

 unsafe, as to justify anxious apprehensions in the minds of those 

 who hold them, and are not intimately acquainted with the stock 

 market. Thousands of fields remain unimproved, and yield no 

 more profit than they did under the dimmer light of a former age ; 

 generation after generation plow and mow around the same rocks ; 

 sour grasses readily usurp the places of those more valuable, for 

 the want of proper drainage ; old buildings, inconvenient and 

 unsafe, and farm implements, awkward and unprofitable, are kept 

 in use, because capital is forced from its natural channel. So 

 large tracts of the best lands are abandoned to a luxuriant growth 

 of water brush, reptiles, and the generation of poisonous exhala- 

 tions. A portion of this capital — rightly directed — would increase 

 the productive power of impoverished pasture lands to many 

 times their present fertility. Capital is power, and the fact must 

 be enforced upon the mind of the farmer, that its employment is as 

 proper and necessary in agricultural pursuits as in mercantile or 

 mechanical, and that its use will prove as lucrative in farming as 

 in any other business. 



In England, great attention has been given to the cultivation of 

 root crops, and farmers are enabled to double the amount of stock 

 heretofore kept on the same acres, because so much more nutri- 

 ment can be raised from the same land, than when appropriated to 

 grass alone. The cultivation of the turnip, of the beet, the 

 parsnip and carrot, as winter food for stock, will eventually work 

 important changes in the economy of the farm. 



A passage in the New Edinboro' Encyclopedia, says : " The 

 introduction of tiirnips into the husbandry of Bi'itain, occasioned 



