202 BOAED OF AGRICULTUEE. 



culture have agreed unanimously to this : that there has been 

 a great deterioration in the producing power of our pastures 

 during the last fifty or one hundred years ; that the time was 

 when the hillsides of Massachusetts, those fields that are now 

 our pasture-lands, yielded large quantities of sweet, nutritious 

 grasses, — grasses which made butter, which made milk, which 

 made cheese, — grasses which made beef of splendid quality. 

 But, gentlemen, you may rest assured that the Board of 

 Agriculture are right when they tell you that you cannot 

 make either good milk, good butter, good beef, or good 

 cheese, out of these brambles and briers that are so frequently 

 found on our pasture, and that the richness and value of these 

 lands depend very largely upon the fact that they produce 

 fine, sweet, nutritious grasses, as they did in those early days, 

 in large quantities ; but they have gradually deteriorated. 

 And to this opinion w^e gave our unanimous assent. They 

 will not carry the stock of former years ; the quality of 

 the grasses is not so good, and they will not produce so good 

 cattle, or butter, or milk. 



Another thing. We have all agreed on saying that the 

 cause of this deterioration is perfectly clear and apparent ; 

 that it is because we have been building up animal struct- 

 ures, or manufacturing cattle products which have been taken 

 away from the fields that produced them, never to return; 

 that where all the products have not been transported to 

 the market, we have taken the milk for the manufacture 

 of butter and cheese, and the manurial qualities that were 

 contained in the milk left at home, have been given to other 

 fields instead of being carried back to the pastures that pro- 

 duced them ; and that we have been sending away Aens of 

 hundreds of tons annually from these New England pastures, 

 in the form of phosphates and sulphates in the bones of ani- 

 mals, and nitrogen in their muscles and tissues ; it has gone in 

 one sweeping current down to our great cities ; and then, 

 owing to the most abominable and wasteful system of sewerage 

 which has been adopted, it has been carried to the sea and 

 been lost. We have agreed that this is the cause of the 

 deterioration of our pastures. 



Again, gentlemen, we have said to the world that from one- 

 third to one-fourth of all these pasture-lands should never 



