270 Missouri Agricultural Report. 



average farm was not giving over from $500.00 to $700.00 income 

 out of which all expenses of labor, grain, teams, taxes, repairs 

 and living must come. 



This was the history of back farms in New England, where 

 mine was located, and was the history for large areas, but not 

 always true of locations near cities. I dropped a good salary as a 

 College President and staked the family fortunes, where others 

 had lost, on the belief that first, by combining intelligently science 

 with art ; secondly, the sacrificing of the present to the future, both 

 in the interest of the latter days of life and the future life of the 

 family; and thirdly, a deeper and broader farming, or in intensive 

 and extensive farming, would justify T;he change. Your secretary 

 asked me to tell the story of the farm. As some good can come out 

 of it to you, I will do so with little reserve. 



I have already generalized on one and two, and in a measure 

 on three. The trouble with our New Hampshire farming was that 

 it lacked volume enough to secure the living of the hour, and was 

 hopeless without more output. I do not plead for large farms, but 

 the large use of farms. Volume must be had by either depth or 

 breadth; the former should precede the latter, and the latter ex- 

 pand to the full size of the man and no further. 



The New England farmer will not average to hold more than 

 thirty or forty acres of field land out of a farm of one hundred to 

 one hundred and fifty acres. His is narrow farming, without depth 

 or intensity. Your farming is broad in acres of tillage, but of 

 small volume, through lack of intensity. It is broad on soil spolia- 

 tion, of natural fertility, which you too unthinkingly cream. 



Returning to the new agriculture, based upon the union of the 

 extensive with the intensive, what might a New England farmer 

 hope for? Let us suppose, by the clearing of the better parts of 

 his rocky pastures and woods, his forty acres of tillage is extended 

 to eighty acres, and that these are intensively handled to the last 

 acre, that the farmer, in the language of Carlyle, gives "the utmost 

 that is in thee," and to the end that the economic utmost in each 

 acre is secured. What, then, can be realized? 



I use a rotation of eight years in which every tillable acre 

 is manured every year, and all the acres together are on the up- 

 grade each year. 



On the second round of a farm in fair condition at the start 

 (my farm was exhausted, economically speaking), the crops should 

 be as follows : 



