32 SHEEP HUSBANDRY IN THE SOUTH. 



trict, are kept up only by the constant use of bone dust. 

 Sheep, on the other hand, through the peculiar nutritiousness 

 of their manure, and the facility with which it is distributed, 

 are found to be the most economical and certain means of 

 constantly renewing the productiveness of the land. By the 

 combination of sheep husbandry with wheat-culture, lands in 

 England, which, in the time of Elizabeth, produced, on an 

 average, six and a half bushels of wheat per acre, produce 

 now over thirty bushels. For these reasons, the recent prac- 

 tical writers in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society 

 of England, pronounce that, while there is no profit in grow- 

 ing sheep in England simply for their mutton and wool, sheep 

 husbandry is still an indispensable necessity, as the sole means 

 of keeping up the land. 



Experience in the United States leads to similar conclu- 

 sions. Mr. Stilson, of Wisconsin, by keeping sheep, is able 

 to raise his twenty-four bushels of wheat to the acre, while 

 the average yield of wheat in Wisconsin is but ten bushels. 

 There are cases in Vermont where sheep-farmers have been 

 compelled to abandon one farm after another, as they became 

 too fertile for profitable sheep-growing. Mr. George Geddes, 

 whom Horace Greeley used to regard as the highest authority 

 on agricultural matters in the State of New York, and who 

 has raised sheep for many years in connection with wheat, 

 says that, with one sheep to the acre of cultivated land, pas- 

 ture and meadows, he raises more bushels of grain, on the 

 average, than he did when he had no sheep to manufacture 

 his coarse forage into manure, arid to enrich his pastures to 

 prepare them for the grain crop ; that the land is constantly 

 improving, and the crop increasing in quantity ; and that, 

 while producing crops on less acres and at less cost than he 

 did before he kept sheep, he has, in addition, the wool and the 

 mutton produced by the sheep. 



Mr. William Chamberlain, of Red Hook, Dutchess County, 

 New York, celebrated as a grower of Silesian sheep, purchased 

 in 1840 a farm in that place of 380 acres, which had been 

 used so long for selling hay that it was worn out. The hay 

 crop, in 1841, was seventeen loads ; forty acres of rye gave 



