NATIONAL IGxNORANCE OF THE AGRICULTURAL INTEREST. 



to yield their thirt}' or forty bushels of wheat to the acre. Hence, the ever full tide 

 of fanners or farmers sons, always sets Avestward, and the lands at home are left 

 in a comparatively exhausted and barren state, and hence, too, the slow progress of 

 farming as an honest art, where every body practices it is like a highway robber. 



There are, doubtless, many superficial thinkers, who consider these western soils 

 exkaustless — "prairies where crop after crop can be taken, by generation after gene- 

 ration." There was never a greater fallacy. Thei-e are acres and acres of land in the 

 counties bordering the Hudson — such counties as Dutchess and Albany — from 

 which the early settlers reaped their thirty to forty bushels of wheat to the acre, as 

 easily as their great grand-children do now in the most fertile fields of the valley of the 

 the Mississippi. Yet these very acres now yield only twelve or fourteen bushels each, 

 and the average yield of the county of Dutchess — one of the most fertile and best 

 managed on the Hudson, is at the present moment only six bushels of wheat to the 

 acre ! One of our cleverest agricultural writers has made the estimate, that of the 

 twelve millions of acres of cultivated land in the state of New-York, eight millions 

 are in the hands of the " skinners," who take away everything from the soil, and put 

 nothing back ; three millions in the hands of farmers who manage them so as to make 

 the lands barely hold their own, while only one million of acres are well farmed, 

 so as to maintain a high and productive state of fertility. And as New-York is con- 

 fessedly one of the most substantial of all the older states, in point of agriculture, 

 this estimate is too flattei'ing to be applied to the older states. Even Ohio — newly 

 settled as she is, begins to fall oflF per acre, in her annual wheat crop, and before fifty 

 years will, if the present system continues, be considered a worn out soil. 



The evil at the bottom of all this false system of husbandry, is no mystery. A rich 

 soil contains only a given quantity of vegetable and mineral food for plants. Every 

 crop grown upon a fertile soil, takes from it a certain amount of these substances, so 

 essential to the growth of another crop. If these crops, like most of our grain crops, 

 are sent away and consumed in other counties, or other parts of the counties — as in 

 the great cities, and 7ione of their essential elements in the way of vegetable matter, 

 lime, potash, &c., restoi-ed to the soil, it follows as a matter of course, that eventually 

 the soil must become barren, or miserably unprofitable. And such is, unfortunately, 

 the fact. Instead of maintaining as many animals as possible upon the farm, and care- 

 fully restoring to the soil in the shape of animal and mineral manure, all those ele- 

 ments needful to the growth of future vegetables, our farmers send nearly all their 

 crops for sale in cities — and allow all the valuable animal and mineral products of these 

 crops to go to waste in those cities.* 



" Oh ! but," the farmer upon worn out land will say, "we cannot afford to pay for 

 all the labor necessary for the high farming you advocate." Are you quite sure of 

 that assertion ? We suspect if you were to enter carefully into the calculation, as your 

 neighbor, the merchant, enters into the calculation of his profit and loss in his system 

 of trade, you would find that the difference in value between one crop of 12 bushels and 



Belgium — the most productive country in the world, the urinary excrements of each cow arc sold for 

 are regularly applied to the land, and poudrette is valued as gold itself. 



