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worse for wheat culture. It is mainly for want of a suitable rotation of cHeps, 
of a more careful husbandry of resources of fertilization, of a more thorough and 
careful culture. 
A fourth aspect of the case presents a no less ruinous feature. A false sys-- 
tem of political economy is fostered. In the northwest wheat culture is a 
parody upon the cotton culture of years past. It is running one production 
into excess, and ignoring all others. Northwestern cultivators are scarcely 
farmers, they are wheat growers. Cattle are high in price, horses very high, 
milk is scarce and butter sometimes unknown, while straw stacks are burning 
and the wheat at the mercy of speculators and the railroads, and bringing high 
prices only under the curse of God upon foreign wheat fields, and when foreign 
nations are in danger of famine, and even then but a moiety of the supply comes 
from this country. Exchanged for a thousand other needed things at exorbi- 
tant prices, the wheat brings little, so improvements are ignored and wheat 
fields extended, until by and by, the soil exhausted or given up to weeds, they 
will share the fate of cotton fields, leaving the land poor, the owner poorer, and 
a pioneer in some more distant west. 
A dependence on grain growing for exportation has ever been a fallacy in 
this country and ever will be; has ever proved and ever will a curse to our 
agriculture. We want more grain and we want it all eaten in this country ; 
we want the wheat-eaters among the wheat-growers; we want cloth-makers 
among wool-growers; we want in the west tenfold greater variety in agricul- 
tural, manufacturing and mechanical industry; then twenty-five bushels per 
acre will bring two dollars per bushel, and the railroads will be employed in 
more profitable business than carrying wheat for shipment to Europe. 
A more blind, senseless, and suicidal system of agriculture was never in- 
vented than that pictured above, and we ask wheat growers if they do not re- 
cognize the picture as altogether too real to pass as a caricature. 
EXTRACTS FROM CORRESPONDENCE. 
LARGE INCREASE OF WHEAT. 
The correspondent of the department in Albemarle county, North Carolina, 
Dr. F. J. Kron, reports a remarkable instance of thin seeding, at the rate of 
less than four quarts to the acre, with a result exceeding the average yield of 
the entire country : 
“'The Boughton (Tappahannock) wheat, (two quarts,) sent to Albemarle in 
November last, could not be put in the ground until the last of the month. 
Sowed on high, dry land, a gravelly clay slate, without manure, it made seven 
bushels (120 quarts to one) on a little over half an acre of ground, and this not- 
withstanding the scab and much wet after harvest. The wheat weighed 624 
pounds to the bushel. No wheat ever grown here was known to tiller so much ; 
as many as fifty heads sprang from oneseed. 'The straw was taller and stronger 
and the heads much larger than common; some heads yielded upwards of sixty 
grains. ‘This section of country will be greatly indebted to the department for 
the distribution of choice cereals.” 
Apprehensive that there might be a mistake in the figures, a letter of inquiry 
was sent to the experimenter for the purpose of drawing forth an explanation, 
in answer to which the following was received: “ Your query in relation to the 
Boughton wheat, experimented with in Albemarle, has just come to hand, and 
IT hasten to reply that our reason for sowing the wheat so sparsely (two quarts 
to a little over half an acre of ground) was precisely as you suggested; the 
ground was no object, but the wheat was so fine that we wanted to give it a 
