AGRICULTURE 



there is one pen of lambs now there were forty in the first half of the 

 nineteenth century. The fair at the present time is chiefly used for the sale 

 of third-rate Suffolk ram lambs and a few shearling ewes. One salesman has 

 annually held a stall of long-woolled rams for fifty years. 



A few Welsh ponies reach the county, the best animals having been sold 

 on the way. Thirty years ago useful three or four year-old hacks and 

 hunters, as well as younger ones, could have been bought at Ipswich fair. 

 But there never were riding-horse fairs in Suffolk to compare with Barnet 

 Fair, much less that of Horncastle and other large gatherings of undeveloped 

 hunters. Horringer Fair, a great sheep and lamb gathering held 2 miles from 

 Bury St. Edmunds, bears no resemblance to what it was when the then 

 Marquess of Bristol enlivened the scene every year with his beautiful four-in- 

 hand team of pure-bred Shetlands reared in Ickworth Park, a mile from the 

 fair field. This, too, is now not much more than a late sale of ram lambs 

 from the West Suffolk Black-faced breeders. 



The introduction of artificial manures during the last forty years has had 

 a gradually increasing effect on production, more especially that of roots and 

 barley. The digging of coprolite in East Suffolk, where the Crag overlies 

 the London Clay, following the littoral of the sea-coast inland, in some places 

 as far as 12 miles, was quite a business at one time, but the price dwindled 

 down to half what it was in the sixties. It was mostly done by the men on 

 the farm in slack times, and carted by the farm horses. A royalty was paid 

 to the landlords. The writer has known whole fields turned over from 

 twenty to thirty feet in depth with the upper soil deftly left on the surface. 



But the most remarkable deviation from old methods has come through 

 the inventive faculty of the agricultural implement maker. The machinery 

 of the present day has worked a revolution in saving manual and horse labour. 

 The effect has not been so apparent in reducing cost as in supplying the place 

 of hand labour, which has been transferred to other callings. In the sickle, 

 the scythe, the reaper, and the self-binder we have the stages of advancement 

 in harvesting from the earliest times to the present day. 



The substitution of the scythe for the sickle was an immense stride in 

 the saving of labour in harvest-time, and yet the writer remembers having to 

 bribe the men with a shilling an acre to give up the old way. Then came 

 the reaper, whose development into the self-binder is the last triumph in the 

 substitution of machinery for hand labour. The reaper did but half the work. 

 No man can tie up as fast as another can mow ; the self-binder does both. 



There are few living who can remember the use of the hand dibble for 

 wheat planting on large farms. In one parish the writer has known as many 

 as 65 acres planted in this way. The man walked at an angle backwards, 

 made three holes to the foot, 9 in. from row to row, and the wife and children 

 deftly put three grains into each hole. This works out to eleven millions 

 of holes in the 65 acres ! 



Few farmers are now without a drill, but fifty years ago the keeping a 

 drill to let out was as common as letting the steam plough for hire is at the 

 present day. 



Some years ago a useful turnwrest-plough was issued from the Orwell 

 Works, but it did not take widely. In laying down for permanent pasture 

 it acted well : no stetch furrow was left to impede the grass mower. From 

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