80 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



generation may have been the right ways for them, but they 

 do not meet the needs of to-day. Western competition has 

 worked great changes in Eastern agriculture. Our business 

 is to supply our local markets with such articles as they re- 

 quire, and for which they are willing to pay a fair price. 

 Our soils, by unscientific management, have become impov- 

 erished, and in order to make farming remunerative we must 

 restore them to their former productiveness. Now, if you 

 would retain the boys at home, enter upon a series of experi- 

 ments similar to those I have described, and learn by them 

 the special needs of the soil of each of your farms, and with 

 the knowledge so gained you can, at a comparatively small 

 cost, restore them to their original productiveness and retain 

 them there ; and the boys, already interested in the farm by 

 watching the experiments and a study of their lessons, as 

 well as the increased profits of the farm, will be only too 

 glad to remain on the paternal acres. 



The Chaikman. Gentlemen, you have listened attentively 

 to this elaborate and well-written paper, and many of you, 

 no doubt, have questions to ask relative to the tojjics dis- 

 cussed in it. Mr. Pierce will be ready to answer any ques- 

 tions which you may wish to ask. 



Mr. Spaulding of Tewksbury. I should like to know 

 the extent of the lecturer's farming ; I should like to know 

 the profit he makes yearly on his farming by using; fertilizers. 



Mr. Pierce. I have been farming, with the exception of 

 two or three years, all my lifetime. I was born and brought 

 up on a farm until I was twenty-one, when I left it and went 

 to the city, hoping to get rich faster and easier. After subject- 

 ing myself to various vicissitudes, I returned to the farm 

 with broken health, poorer in pocket than I left it, but with 

 the firm conviction that I could restore my health, enjoy 

 myself, and make as much or more money on the farm than 

 I could in the city, and, commencing in that way on a run- 

 down farm, which my father, who was in a feeble condition, 

 — almost a cripple with rheumatism, — had neglected, sell- 

 ing only hay, I have made that farm suj^port two families 

 instead of one; and, if I have not got iimnev in the bank 

 to-day, I can safely say that I am making farming pay, and 



