130 THE NEW AGRICULTURE. 



trenched lands, and compare results, year in and year out, and if 

 it is not found to pay immeasurably better than any farming he 

 has ever done, our five acres are growing lies. 



Not a day passes but there comes to our place the farmer, the 

 fruit grower, the gardener, the greenhouse man, each in turn look- 

 ing over our grounds, and are filled with amazement at results, and 

 yet they still ask, will it pay ? All agree that it will pay us to ex- 

 pend five hundred dollars in fitting an acre to perfection, and yet 

 question whether it will pay other people, costing no more than 

 from fifty to an hundred dollars an acre according to conditions of 

 soil and original lay of the land. We went to work four years ago 

 on one of the most unpromising spots possible to imagine, and did 

 next to nothing with the team, plow, scraper, or anything else in- 

 deed but the pick, spade, hoe, potatoe digger and rake; our hard 

 clay and gravelly hillside abounded in stone, with little of surface 

 soil, and we were at an expense twice as great as that to which the 

 horticulturist would be ordinarily subjected. 



"When it comes to agriculture, the same amount of work could 

 be done in most instances at from a third to a fifth of the cost, fit- 

 ting lands in a way to grow two, and probably three perfect crops 

 of grass of from three to four tons each annually to the acre, from 

 five hundred to a thousand bushels of potatoes; from an hundred 

 to an hundred and twenty-five bushels of oats; an hundred bushels 

 of shelled corn on an average, and other crops in proportion. 



A perpetual green of grasses can be realized in regions of 

 the North where snows fall deeply, and lie on the ground during 

 the winter, since the water in the trenches constructed under 

 our system are dropped beneath the frost line, and such is 

 their effect upon soils, as to prevent freezing, and the hardier 

 varieties of plants are made to grow greenly beneath the snows. 

 Thie regions in which this can be most economically, readily and 



