AGRICULTURE 



is near enough for two deliveries in the day, or the railway to London 

 within easy reach, the dairies are doing pretty well. 



The heavy-land farmer is less fortunately placed. Cereals were his great 

 mainstay, but prices have been against him. He, too, is in the milk trade, 

 and the little stations on the line speak, to the general extension of cow- 

 keeping. Artificial manures have done much for the heavy lands. Sheep- 

 farming has been little help, except in a small way, where upland meadows 

 are at hand when the weather is too wet for the sheep on the arable fields. 

 High farming, artificial manures, bullock grazing, and the London milk 

 trade, are made the most of. Much of this soil produces abundant crops of 

 barley in a favourable season ; and when wheat brought 40J. a quarter, the 

 corn-grower was ready to lend his skill and his capital to grow it; but wheat 

 at 28.C a quarter can scarcely be grown at a profit. The landlord has there- 

 fore to make things as easy as his means will allow, and takes every means to 

 keep the tenant on the holding. He knows too well the vacant farm ends 

 in derelict, and when once a poor heavy-land farm gets out of condition it 

 is hopeless to find a tenant. 



The fen-lands are treated precisely similar to those in Cambridgeshire 

 and Lincolnshire — that feature in the English landscape so fascinating to 

 the eye of a Kingsley, but so trying to the man whose success depends upon 

 an occupation which is so often the sport of the weather. The crops he 

 depends upon are oats and wheat among the cereals ; potatoes for the 

 London market, not of the very best quality, unless the season is dry ; cole 

 seed (colza) and rye-grass, grown for seed. 



The actual preparation for corn crops in Suffolk differs little from the 

 practice adopted in other counties. A firm, well-rolled earth for wheat, the 

 earlier ploughed the better, and sowing over in October is the general rule. 



The County Breeds of Animals. — First among these stands the Suffolk 

 horse. In the year 1880 the Suffolk Horse Society issued a large work under 

 the title of The Suffolk Horse : a History and Stud Book. In illustration, research, 

 and publication the cost to the Society was some £600. It has now reached 

 its fifteenth volume. The history revealed some extremely interesting facts 

 in connexion with the development of the breed. Although repeated 

 attempts have been made to infuse other blood, every particular of which 

 has been given in the first volume, they have all died out, and there is not 

 a single animal of the breed now extant which does not trace its lineal descent 

 in an unbroken line from a horse foaled about the year 1760. The descrip- 

 tion of this animal taken from printed records in the county paper of the day, 

 has much in it to remind one of the horse of the early decades of the seven- 

 teenth-century. But the introduction of the smarter type advertised as be- 

 longing to a certain Mr. Blake of Hoo, went far to modify the unsightly 

 outline of the original stock. But although this infusion of a more comelv 

 strain — an advertisement of one representative on a flimsy fly-sheet dated 1783, 

 is now before the writer — was widely patronized, curiously enough the 

 blood completely died out in the male line, and the old breed again asserted 

 its lasting influence. To those interested in animal development and the 

 theories enunciated by the school of Darwin, we can hopefully refer to the 

 Suffolk Horse Society's first volume. The searching investigation of the 

 Society revealed the fact that the popular idea that much of the character of 



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