STATUS OF VIRGINIA AGRICULTURE IN 1870. 267 
The economy of farm machinery is illustrated by the reports of the use 
of the horse-planter and horse-hoe in Northfield, Massachusetts. Mr. J. 
Lyman claims to have planted (in nineteen hours) and hoed (in eighty- 
one hours) fifteen acres of corn, worth $1,014, at the cost of $33, or 
little more than 3 per cent. of the value of thecrop. Mr. James Merriman 
planted and hoed six acres, worth $528, at an expense of $17 55; and 
Mr. George I’. Moody planted and cultivated two acres, worth $142, at a 
cost of $3 75. The planting and hoeing, with man and horse, was in 
each case at the rate of 30 cents per hour. In the case of two farms in 
Virginia of equal fertility, one worked by a man and two boys with 
improved machinery, the other by seven nen without labor-saving ma- 
chinery, the former made larger gross returns than the latter. ° 
While stock-growing may be less profitable than in the West, there 
are numerous examples of profitable dairying, the raising of butchers’ 
lambs, and other specialties of stock-farming, to show that there is no 
necessity for the decay of the hill-farms, the transformation of pas- 
tures to ferneries, and the decline of production. The English system 
of husbandry, modified judiciously by local circumstances, has_in- 
creased fertility, production, and profit, wherever introduced into New 
England. it is a fatal error to permit a retrograde; if high farming 
will not pay there, no farming will pay ; if fertility cannot be advanced, 
the capital necessary for improvements employed, the use of labor-saving 
implements increased, it would be better to quit farming entirely and 
grow forests for the use of future manufacturers of wooden-ware. But 
there has been progress in many directions, and may be, we believe will 
be, generally, in the future. It only requires courage, a cold shoulder 
to croakers, energy, skill and application; and when the best lands ot 
the distant West are taken up, as they soon will be, and prices there 
advance, young men of New England may be content to stay at home 
and. enjoy the advantages of markets which fully counterbalance the 
fertility of western lands a thousand miles away from the mouths to be 
fed by their products. : 
STATUS OF VIRGINIA AGRICULTURE IN 1870. 
It is believed that no State of the American Union enjoys greater 
natural advantages for the production of a great variety of the fruits 
of the earth than Virginia. Situated in the most favored parallels of 
the temperate zone, with a wide diversity of soils, and blessed with a 
climate for the most part eminently salubrious, it is capable of meeting 
the requirements of every variety of rural taste, and of sustaining a 
dense population. If farmers, in the history of the past, did not 
accumulate large fortunes, they avere, as a rule, in easy and independent 
circumstances; and though the soil might not in many cases have been 
brought up to the highest state of productiveness by a course of sys- 
tematic tillage, it never failed to respond generously to kind treatment, 
In some sections of the State, where the planting interests predominated, 
the culture was often carried to an oppressive extent, and exhaustion, 
more or less, was the consequence. But good lands were abundant and 
cheap; and, while fresh inroads might have been too often made on the 
primeval forests, the rejected fields, where the soil had not been carried 
oft by washing, immediately sent forth a second growth, under which, in 
the course of one or two generations, they nearly regained their original 
