CHAPTER VIII. 

 NEW PRACTICE 



BY NEW practice in agriculture we mean those methods 

 of farm management which have within recent years 

 been introduced and found to be both practicable and profit- 

 able. So far as rural life is concerned, those ways of doing 

 things which have been introduced during this generation are 

 new. A practice which can be made profitable and which 

 should be engaged in by the many, though not now found 

 upon more than half of the farms of the country, is new. 

 A long-established practice which may have come to be looked 

 upon as sensible and even indispensable in certain communi- 

 ties, if unknown or disregarded at present by all but a few 

 of the most advanced farmers of a state or a section, is cer- 

 tainly new in those localities. It is with such practice that 

 the present chapter deals. The use of electricity in stimulat- 

 ing the growth of plants will be explained, though this is a 

 theory rather than a practice. The use of machinery in farm- 

 ing might also be discussed here, but this will find place in 

 the succeeding chapter. 



With the coming of the new knowledge into other depart- 

 ments of human activity, it was inevitable that the general 

 methods of American agriculture should be invaded here and 

 there, looking to its complete revolution later on. The phe- 

 nomenal growth of our great centers of population, congest- 

 ing millions of consumers within the limits of a few square 

 miles under conditions tending to stimulate and multiply their 

 desires and their demands ; the wonderful development of 



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