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New York AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 39 
also be too high for good clover, since clover is usually seeded with 
the wheat. These high and rough lands are not so frequently 
plowed as lower and flat lands and, therefore, they are not cleaned, 
do not receive the benefit of rotation and they are likely gradually 
to deteriorate in physical condition. There has also been great 
change in market demands. Beef raising has gone out of the East. 
It was a simple thing to grow the beef and to raise the milk in the 
old time, but it requires a high type of skill to grow and market a 
modern steer and to tend a modern dairy herd. With relatively few 
cattle, there is insufficient enrichment of the land. The farmer on 
these hills is likely to practice direct sales ; that is, he sells his timothy 
hay and other products direct, removing thereby a large amount of 
fertilizing value and saving nothing of the crop except the roots and 
stubble to return to the land. This primitive mode of general 
farming allows a man to make a profit only on a single sale. The 
manufacturer tries to turn his property over more than once, each 
time expecting to realize a profit. When the farmer is able to 
market his forage largely in the shape of animal produce, he will 
not only save fertility, but should make a profit on both the crop 
and the animal. The selling of baled hay rather than pork and 
beef and milk and eggs, cannot be expected to yield much profit 
or satisfaction to the average farmer or to keep his land in living 
condition. Taking it by and large, no agriculture is successful with- 
out an animal husbandry. 
The popular mind pictures these so-called abandoned lands as 
exhausted in their plant-food, but this is probably not often the 
case. Very many of them are potentially as productive as ever, 
but they are not able to satisfy a man who lives in the twentieth 
century. Human wants have increased. What would have made 
a good and comfortable living twenty-five or one hundred years ago, 
would not support him in the way in which he ought to live to-day, 
nor would it attract his boys to remain on the land. 
All these and other causes of the decline of individual farms 
can be expressed as a lack of adaptation to the natural surround- 
ing conditions. It is a biological fact that animals and plants can- 
not thrive unless they are well adapted to the conditions in which 
they live; and if they are wholly unadapted, they perish. Now, 
farming is not yet adapted to the natural conditions of soil and 
climate and market and other environmental factors. In fact, we 
really do not yet know what the soil factors are, if, indeed, we 
know to any degree of accuracy what any local factors are. If 
