90 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The original cost of the fences in the State is something 

 enormous, estimated as well as may be at about $23,000,000. 

 The censvis of 1880 estimates the cost of building and repair- 

 ing the fences in this State for the year 1879 at $618,503. 



I think the amount of fencing is now being annually much 

 reduced. Fences on the highways which have rotted down 

 are to a o^reat extent not renewed, and interior fences on the 

 farms are being removed. There is no reason why fences 

 dividing fields should be allowed to cumber the land, except 

 that it is of course necessary to shut off the arable from the 

 pasture lands ; but there is no necessity for separating the 

 mowing from the tillage land, for no good farmer should 

 allow his cattle to run on his meadow, and there is no reason 

 why they should be on the cropped land. Removing the 

 fences gives the farmer an opportunity to cultivate clear out 

 to the edge of his piece, and if at any time early or late in 

 the season he wishes to go from one field to another, he can 

 do so without going far around, or letting down bars or open- 

 ins; o;ates. 



. The waste, however, is not confined to the building and 

 everlasting repairs of fences, but is largely in the ground 

 they occupy. On an oblong field of two acres the fencing 

 will be seventy-six rods. A Virginia or worm fence, or an 

 old-fashioned stone wall, one or the other of which makes 

 the principal fence of the country, will certainly take four 

 feet in width (a very small allowance), using up a quarter oi 

 an acre of land. A ten-acre lot will use, under the same 

 fence, an acre and a quarter, and the twenty-three million 

 rods of fencing in this Commonwealth would have under it 

 thirty-one thousand two hundred and fifty acres of land, 

 untilled and unoccupied, and worse, a resort for all kinds 

 of vermin, and a rich and unmolested seeding place for all 

 manner of abominable w^eeds. 



In travelling through any part of Massachusetts by rail, 

 one has a good opportunity to see much of the extent of this 

 hindrance to our success, as on every elevated point of the 

 road he looks over the fields near, and stretching off on the 

 distant hills he sees long lines of zigzag fence or gray stone 

 walls, crooked, irregular and ragged, crossing the farms in 

 every direction, cutting them into lots of all sizes and forms, 



