VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 27 



AN ANIMAL TO THE ACRE. 



I wish to state as briefly as possible how the very desirable 

 condition of soil production can be secured so that an animal may 

 be kept for each acre of land cultivated. In doing- this I shall 

 be confined largely to my own experience upon our own farm. 



For a long time the keeping of cows had been something 

 of a specialty upon the farm, but no particlar efforts were made 

 to increase its stock carrying capacity. The farm was kept 

 good by keeping back the bushes in the pastures and by small 

 purchases of hard-wood ashes to apply when seeding the land 

 to grass. The summer pasture consisted of a fifty acre upland 

 lot, which in the early history of the farm had all been cultivated, 

 but which was then trying hard to return to its natural condition, 

 with clumps of pine seedlings continually appearing. The tillage 

 land consisted of thirty-five acres of intervale, of a somewhat 

 heavy clay soil. The intervale was devoted to the raising of 

 hay, oats and hoed crops, the cows running in summer in the 

 upland pasture, which was supplemented with grain and soil- 

 ing crops, the young cattle being pastured away from the farm. 

 Under this management, from ten to fifteen head of cattle and 

 the farm team, were kept. This continued till about the year 1880. 

 At this time efforts were made to increase the stock carrying 

 capacity of the farm and to make it, in reality, a dairy farm. 

 The pasture pines were rapidly increasing, its feeding ground 

 was as rapidly decreasing, and this pasture problem appeared to 

 be the first one that would have to be met and mastered. This 

 problem was finally solved, as many of the worries of life may 

 be disposed of, by abandoning it, giving it back to nature, whose 

 hand, ever busy, has in the years since past, grown some sturdy 

 pines, which I expect to live to see. grow to the full size for a 

 harvest, and which today make the land worth more per acre, than 

 any other section of the farm, transforming what was formerly 

 an eyesore and a nuisance into an object of beauty as well as of 

 value. I may say, in passing, that possibly this may have a les- 

 son for some Vermont farmer who may be using heroic but not 

 wise efforts to keep some rocky hillside, or distant section of the 

 farm, in pasture, instead of allowing, or possibly assisting, nature 



