NEW ENGLAND FARMING. 33 



that equipoise, where we are to draw the line between a well 

 advised adherence to established systems, as being the offspring of 

 long practice founded upon immutable laws, on the one hand, and 

 a senseless clinging to the past on the other, simply because it is 

 the past. At the present time wheat is brought from the Valley 

 of the Mississippi to feed the farmers of Massachusetts, and hams 

 from Cincinnati to supply the breakfast tables of Boston and 

 Worcester. Under the competition of our great western coun- 

 try, with its exuberant and almost costless production, English 

 farmers, too, are discussing the propriety of reducing their 

 extent of grain land, modifying their system of cultivation, and 

 grazing still larger quantities of stock, since we have not yet 

 discovered any way of sending them beeves and wethers fattened 

 for the butcher. Great Britain also furnished a striking 

 example within her own limits of the appropriation of the land 

 throughout whole counties mainly to some leading branch of 

 agriculture. Norfolk and the Lothians are thus wholly devoted 

 to tillage ; Cheshire and Ayrshire are chiefly dairy counties ; 

 Northumberland and Aberdeenshire excel in grazing and 

 breeding. I have been on farms of hundreds of acres in Nor- 

 folk that did not keep a milch cow for the supply of the table, 

 nor raise a calf the season through, so rigidly is a particular 

 combination of grain culture and the feeding of animals for the 

 shambles there carried out. French hens lay the eggs for all 

 England, and many of them are eaten too, with bacon or ham 

 packed in Ohio and Illinois. 



Thus it is her natural conformation, as well as the competi- 

 tion of the West, that has turned the general farming of Massa- 

 chusetts (that in the vicinity of cities, and in some river valleys, 

 being for the moment excluded) mainly in the direction of 

 breeding, grazing and feeding, dairying. In a word, it is 

 grass farming and not grain farming, which constitutes your 

 chief interest. 



A careful examination of the Census returns for 1850 and 

 18G0, to which I have devoted some time, together with your 

 State Reports upon the Industry of Massachusetts for 1845 and 

 1855, seems to show that no very great changes have taken 

 place in your farming during the past ten years, — those which 

 have occurred being mainly of the following kind : 



5 



