SHEEP HUSBANDRY IN THE SOUTH. 



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ten bushels to the acre; twenty-five acres- of corn averaged 

 twenty bushels to the acre ; the rest of the farm, pastured two 

 horses, four oxen, and one cow. The land was so poor that 

 it would not raise red clover. By using sheep as the pro- 

 ducers and manufacturers of manure, he made this worn-out 

 farm so productive that its crops would be satisfactory even 

 in Ohio. The product, in 1866, was 600 tons of hay; 40 

 acres of Indian corn, yielding 50 bushels to the acre ; 30 

 acres of wheat, averaging 15 bushels ; 30 acres of oats, 

 8 acres of roots, and the pasturage of 300 sheep, and of the 

 teams, cows, &c., necessary to carry on the farm and to sup- 

 ply the families on it with milk and butter. 



Mr. Chamberlain's plan, when he first commenced making 

 manure by using sheep, was to spread it thinly, so as to go 

 over all the surface he could, and make clover grass ; and he 

 said that, when he had brought his land to where it would 

 produce clover, improvement henceforth was easy and rapid. 

 The sheep not only gave the first impulse, but were all the 

 time depended upon as the great manure-producing power. 



Now all this can be done by sheep at the South. By their 

 use, even red clover, the grand ameliorator of land (which it 

 was once declared could not be grown at the South), can be 

 made to have the same regenerating influence which it has 

 at the North. Even in Mississippi, as Dr. Phares has asserted 

 and proved, red clover may be grown as promptly and as 

 luxuriantly, and yield as heavy crops of forage, as in any 

 portion of America. 



Many of the most intelligent men of the South believe 

 that the exclusive cultivation of cotton has been a scourge, 

 instead of a blessing, to their country : that, with a crop of 

 over 500,000 bales of cotton, worth, at 15 cents a pound, 

 $75 per bale, in one State, Georgia, its agricultural popula- 

 tion, as a whole, were poorer at the end than at the beginning 

 of the year : that labor on a cotton plantation where a fall 

 crop is planted is without intermission ; and that it is excessive 

 in the quantity required, often exceeding in cost the whole 

 salable value of the plantation : that such is the demand 

 for labor in those sections in which exclusive cotton culture 



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