132 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



It is no doubt the coming realizing sense of the deficiencies of 

 our methods, and an increasing dissatisfaction with them, that 

 is leading of late years, to awaking of thought, and that of a 

 more thorough kind, upon agricultural matters, and the founda- 

 tion, first, of agricultural societies, and then of farmers' col- 

 leges. Had the science with the practice of agriculture been 

 better understood and pursued a century since, there would 

 have been less of that urgency for agricultural education that 

 we discover to-day in the writings of all patrons of husbandry. 

 There would have been less of this urgency, for then we had 

 stood less in need of it. The problem would not then be, either 

 abandonment of New England soil to brush and wild growth, or 

 sterility, or more knowledge and a wiser husbandry. 



Not only the cultivation of more fertile lands west, and the 

 competition of the produce of these lands — cheap land and 

 cheap crop — forces the New England farmer, if he is to prosper, 

 to adopt the very best means to any given end. It may be said 

 our farming is becoming a sort of horticulture — a gardening of 

 the land. Our husbandry is in a transition stage, and passing 

 forward to the superior, shall we call it English, or garden farm- 

 ing ; and in doing so, if we are not thoughtful, in the quiet 

 pursuing of the old way, many will be left stranded, as it were, 

 by the wayside, and will bemoan the hapless times. And when 

 we no longer attempt the raising of crops that may be cheaper 

 produced a thousand* miles away, and laid down at our doors, 

 there will then, as now, be need of the greatest energy and en- 

 lightenment in agricultural matters — since the profits of the 

 .■shops will cause, then as now, farm labor to be high-priced and 

 scarce. 



Our agricultural societies, then, are the offspring of the agri- 

 cultural situation. In their foundation, agricultural societies 

 may be considered as protests against existing practices and 

 methods. The Middlesex South Agricultural Society is no ex- 

 ception to the rule. The district over which it presides being 

 older and the soil longer cultivated, and more exhausted than 

 in some places, there is, perhaps, a stronger reason for the exist- 

 ence of the society than in some other districts. Not that our 

 agriculture is wholly vicious, or is less reasonably conducted 

 than elsewhere, but simply because our farmers have inherited 

 .a soil largely abstracted by past generations of cultivators of its 



