DESTRUCTION OF PASTURAGE. 55 



This flattering picture shows what energy and economy of 

 time and labor may accomplish with indifferent materials. The 

 records of the State Agricultural Society, and Legislature of 

 Massachusetts prove with what zeal she has set herself to cor 

 rect her own mistakes. A committee on &quot; exhausted pastures&quot; 

 issues a circular inquiring of the owners of pasture lands if they 

 are exhausted in any degree; what amount of stock they will 

 carry; what amount they carried ten, twenty, and even forty 

 years ago; what have been the results of sheep pasturage, and 

 other questions, the replies to which, published and widely cir 

 culated, make every reading farmer understand how much of 

 his land is taken away in milk; why his cows gnaw at old bones, 

 and what must be done to keep them from gnawing. A recent 

 lecture by Prof. Stockbridge, of the Agricultural College, before 

 the State Board of Agriculture, illustrates the usefulness of such 

 investigations so well that no apology is needed for quoting it 

 here : 



I find we have said to each other, and to the world, that the hay 

 crop is the most valuable of any single crop cultivated; that the hay 

 and grass crop combined is worth in the aggregate, in the United 

 States, somewhere between five and six hundred millions of dollars. 

 This is its money value; and, more than all that, we have said to 

 the farmers of the country, that its value in dollars and cents is as 

 nothing compared with its indirect value, in the influence it has in 

 preserving the fertility of our farms, as being the great source of 

 manurial supply. We have said that no farm can be kept in a high 

 state of fertility, or do otherwise than depreciate, if in its ordinary 

 management, we sell the hay produced upon it; and no man s farm 

 is supporting itself or him, where the grass crop is depreciating. 

 So great is the value of the grass crop of the country, that we can 

 afford to take our best soils up, and to bring our poorer soils to the 

 highest degree of fertility for the production of feed. Now in regard 

 to our pasture lands. The Board of Agriculture have agreed unan 

 imously to this : that there has been a great deterioration in the pro 

 ducing power of our pastures for the last fifty or one hundred years; 

 that the time was when our hill-sides yielded an abundance of sweet, 

 nutritious grasses, which made milk, butter, cheese and beef of 

 splendid quality. Our pastures do this no longer, and the brambles 

 and briars growing in the place of those sweet, natural grasses, do 

 not do it. The cause of the deterioration is apparent; it is because 

 we have been building up animal structures or manufacturing cattle 

 products which have been taken away from the fields which pro 

 duced them, never to return; that when all the products have not 

 been transported to the market, we have taken the milk for the 

 manufacture of butter and cheese; and the manurial qualities that 

 were contained in the milk left at home, have been given to other 

 fields, instead of being- carried back to the pastures which produced 



