14 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



farmers to be thus backing down the hill of progress, and flat, 

 ter themselves that they are " getting along." We must hitch 

 on our whole team, — heart, and hand, and mind, — " go ahead," 

 and reach the summit. It will not do to lot our agricultural 

 gondola rot in the back-water of fogyism, and if we can't keep 

 in the current of progress with the old fashioned oars, we must 

 put on steam and propel with the rest of them. Authentic 

 statements, published in the Transactions of this society, and 

 of the Massachusetts Society, show us what can be done 

 by detailing the amount of crops which have been raised on 

 one acre of land, at different times and in different parts of 

 our county. Wheat, thirty-two bushels ; corn, one hundred 

 and seventeen bushels, (at fifty-six pounds to the bushel ;) 

 barley, fifty-two bushels ; potatoes, five hundred and eighteen 

 bushels ; carrots, nine hundred bushels ; beets, seven hundred 

 and eighty-three bushels ; onions, six hundred and fifty-one 

 bushels ; hay, five tons in one season. Now, to use the words 

 of the lamented Colman, " what has been done can be done 

 again, and instead of stopping short at what has already been 

 reached, we should never be satisfied without at least attempt- 

 ing to go further." With these figures and these facts before 

 us, I can but think that it behooves the farmers of Essex to 

 deepen their furrows, to increase their supplies of home-made 

 fertilizers, to sell less hay, to plant new orchards, to keep more 

 calves, and, above all, to raise a generation of working boys 

 and girls, that we may better sustain the agricultural fame of 

 our pleasant homesteads, in which, after all, we have but a 

 " life-estate." 



