WHEAT IN NEW ENGLAND. 9 



what lias been obtained by many practical farmers in tbe State. 

 Thirty years ago, two gentlemen in Dorchester, where I then 

 resided, raised thirty-five bushels to the acre without special 

 cultivation, and in the ordinary rotation of crops then beginning 

 to prevail. In both these instances the wheat followed potatoes, 

 highly cultivated. Thirty miles from here, on the line of this 

 railroad, Daniel Williams, a blacksmith, raised sixty-three 

 bushels and three pecks of Black Sea wheat from an acre of 

 ground, which went upon record, and was published in the 

 " New England Farmer " of that day. In that case, also, the 

 wheat followed potatoes, the potatoes yielding 300 bushels to 

 the acre — then a good crop, but not an extraordinary one. 

 And up among the hills of Berkshire it is the commonest thing 

 to have crops of corn reaching 100 bushels to the acre ; they 

 do not think anything of it, it is so common. Showing that in 

 Massachusetts the soil and climate, with intelligent cultivation, 

 are capable of producing as much as any other part of the 

 country, and that our agriculture is the main interest, and may 

 be made a very profitable interest. 



In the great North-West, the sole purpose of the pioneer and 

 the new settler, (as they may all be called, for that is a new 

 country,) is to get as large a crop as possible without much 

 expense. He continues to crop that fertile land, therefore, in 

 the cheapest possible way, exhausting the soil. We have gone 

 through with that process. We have exhausted the land of 

 Massachusetts, and we can only restore it to proper fertility by 

 intelligent cultivation, by rotation of crops, by skilful applica- 

 tion of manure and all the arts of husbandry, now so much 

 better understood than ever before. 



I said agriculture was an intellectual pursuit ; and if any 

 proof of that were wanted to-day, we find it in European the 

 older countries — where the exigencies of the case have com- 

 pelled them to apply science, skill, intellect, to their farming 

 that they may succeed. A writer in the " Revue des Deux 

 Mondes," in Paris, contrasting Germany with France, states 

 that up to 1833 farming in Europe was as it had been from the 

 time of Charlemagne — a rotation of two years in cereals and 

 one in fallow ; that since then there seems to have been, in 

 Germany, a change of system — two years of cereals alternating 

 with one year of potatoes, turuips, carrots and beets, and one 



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