THE FARMER'S ERRORS. 347 



THE FARMER'S ERRORS. 



An Address before the Hampshire, Franklin and Hampden Society. 



BY SOLON ROBINSON. 



I propose to commence my address by a confession of my own 

 errors, before I speak of yours. Last spring I wrote a little 

 article, entitled "plant one acre more." It was a modest title, 

 and a simple request ; yet no doubt it increased the crops of the 

 United States one million of acres. A friend wrote me, that if 

 I had written with half the force to "plant one acre less," I 

 should have convinced the whole country of its advantages, and 

 instead of increasing the crops of a single year, I should have 

 increased them in all time to come, and become one of the 

 greatest benefactors of my race ; for I should have taught men 

 that they could grow two blades of grass where only one grew 

 before. My correspondent contended that the great error of 

 American agriculture was, that every body had been straining 

 all his energies to plant one acre more, when with half tlie 

 effort devoted to making one acre more proctuctive, he could 

 have produced more grain from half the number of acres usu- 

 ally planted; and instead of increasing the crop of a single 

 year, whatever the chance production might be of a million 

 of acres extra, hastily planted, the permanent production of the 

 country would be from many millions of acres of land made to 

 produce double their present average yield. 



Now I am not stubborn enough to be proud of my errors, and 

 to stick to them because they were the ways of my great-grand- 

 father ; though I am proud of my ancestors, yet I am not proud 

 of their ignorance or my own. I remember that some of them 

 used a plough, carefully gauged to prevent it from going too 

 deep into the earth, because they looked upon that as fatal to 

 their crops ; and I have heard of the same thing within a mouth. 



