116 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



about by the circumstances and interests which gather around 

 other and different kinds of industries, the demands for special 

 products have led our farmers rather to give their attention 

 and confine their labor to one or two leading products rather 

 than to a mixed method of farming, and the consequence has 

 been that when a failure has occurred in the special crop, or 

 the market has been overstocked by the special product, the 

 result has been disastrous, for not only has it involved great 

 losses, but other and great disadvantages. 



All things taken into the account, our mixed farming has 

 been altogether the most successful as well as the most profit- 

 able, and when the intimate connection existing between the 

 different industrial interests, as well as the advanced agricult- 

 ural condition, which has created a material change in agri- 

 cultural circumstances and interests, are duly considered, and 

 the mutual relations which bind them all together are rightly 

 appreciated, there can hardly be a doubt but that a propor- 

 tionally mixed method will more profitably lead to the accom- 

 plishment of the highest success in every department of farm 

 husbandry; but at any rate, if our. farmers will adopt and 

 confine their labors to specialties, among them let this of 

 sheep-culture be far more prominent. 



In regard to the profitableness of sheep-culture, those who 

 have been practically and intelligently engaged in it for a 

 series of years bear ample testimony to its lucrativeness, 

 indirectly in the benefit to the land, and directly in the profits 

 arising from the lambs and wool. A very intelligent writer 

 upon this subject says : " Sheep are the most profitable of all 

 our domestic animals, in not only depasturing the cheap, 

 light, thin lands of the country, but they are justly beginning 

 to be considered an absolute necessity of good farming on 

 our choice grain-growing soils." M On the thin-soiled farms 

 sheep will enrich such lands far more rapidly than neat-stock, 

 and will clear them from those briery vines and pests of 

 which such lands are so prolific, while also exerting an observ- 

 able influence in banishing the coarse, wild, poor grasses, and 

 bringing in the sweeter and more nutritious ones. It was a 

 proverb of the Spaniard, "Wherever the foot of the sheep 

 touches, the land is turned into gold," the truth of which 

 all experience has most fully justified. 



