216 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



PLYMOUTH, 



From the Report of the Committee. 



A few years since sheep were not exhibited at the exhibitions 

 of this society, and sheep husbandry had become almost 

 unknown. A few sheep were kept in remote corners of the 

 county, mostly known as native sheep, with long legs, and 

 narrow breasts, wool of all varieties on the same carcass, except 

 the finer grades, with straight hair protruding from the more 

 substantial level of the woolly matting. These sheep could run 

 almost like deer, and jump or climb a four-rail fence. The 

 majority of our farmers had been brought up with the idea 

 that stone walls and common fences would not restrain sheep, 

 and they judged rightly of such as were known to them. We 

 have now among us many flocks small in number, which are 

 easily confined by a good wall, or a three-foot fence, close 

 enough to prevent their crawling tlirough. Sheep raised for 

 mutton, as in England — and it is for mutton principally that, 

 they must, in a- series of years, be raised here — sheep raised and 

 kept for mutton chiefly, are quiet, and lazy. 



We must learn that sheep husbandry does not consist in 

 grazing all summer and fall over barren hills, and starving all 

 winter on salt hay, and over-ripe dried meadow grass ; and then 

 we shall abandon the idea that we cannot keep sheep for want 

 of fences. Few English farms are so poorly cultivated as ours, 

 and very few that do not carry sheep. And therefore we find 

 the imported sheep generally shorter-legged, fuller-breasted, 

 more inclined to fat, more thrifty, though perhaps subject to 

 more diseases incident to soil and climate, than here ; and there- 

 fore, also, they will degenerate here, if we farmers do not 

 abandon the old notion that sheep will live anywhere, and on 

 any thing. We would not advise a farmer to purchase a sheep 

 of English blood, if he expects that he is to improve his stock 

 without care on his part. His lambs may be improved, we 

 doubt not, by any infusion of strong, new, or healthy blood ; 

 but his improved flock will degenerate, without the care and 

 the food which are always the conditions of good stock raising. 



We labor under the idea that if we have a Leicester buck or 

 a South Down, an Ayrshire bull or a Jersey, a Morgan stallion 

 or a thoroughbred, that all the rest follows. 



