54 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



this basin, is fast making imperative some more sensible and 

 systematic plan. 



Not much longer will a cleanly and a thrifty people suffer 

 what Dr. Bowditch most justly terms, " such wide-spread 

 recklessness of spendthrift prodigality as this throwing away 

 of such vast amounts of excellent manure is." Then this 

 wonderfully effective servant will be enlisted in the service of 

 the market-gardeners, and the whole "garden sauce" of the 

 city will be manufactured, as it were, on the cheapest possible 

 terms from the refuse which is now thrown away as an un- 

 manageable nuisance. Then consider another important prod- 

 uct — milk. The farmer of the future, hereabouts, will be 

 forced to regard similar circumstances if he hopes to live by 

 the milk business. To be sure, his market will be handy, and 

 his customers many ; but where can he pasture his cows? On 

 land which is assessed at one thousand dollars per acre, and 

 taxed fifteen or twenty dollars a year? I should like to see 

 him compete with railroad milk upon those terms. No, — he 

 must feed scientifically. Just reversing the system to which 

 he has been accustomed, he must keep his cows in the barn 

 all summer; cut and eat his grass crop before it is ripe, and 

 buy every pound of hay he feeds in winter. His most telling 

 economy will be retrenchment of land, and his most essential 

 saving a reduction of rent. The cost of his hay-fields would 

 render it far less costly to buy than to make his hay. 



For the same reason, he will forbear to breed his own stock. 

 The wide ranges and breezy pasture of a stock-farm would 

 make his own cows too expensive for profit. As fast as cows 

 cease to average eight or nine quarts per day yearly, they 

 must be fatted and sold, to be replaced by fresh ones. But, 

 as I have tried to recall the traditional farm of the past, let 

 me also endeavor to sketch the impending farm of our future. 



And first of all, you must assume with me that our farmer 

 has obtained a compact tract of land, of about fifty or sixty 

 acres of good, plain, arable land, within ten miles, by the 

 highway, from city hall ; that neither fences, hedges, 

 ditches nor trees interrupt the free course of the plough from 

 one bounding-wall to the other. It is within easy reach of a 

 railroad, by means of a short track on one side, and has for 

 a neighbor on the other, a brewery, cheaply accessible by a 



