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THE GENESEE FABMER. "- ' ^' 



is clearly understood by the farmer. The extreme reluctance with which cultivators 

 study the elements of fertility in their soils ; investigate the chemical changes wrought 

 in the surface of the earth by the operations of plowing, harrowing, and hoeing ; and 

 consider the food of their living, growing crops, as actually consumed ; compels us to view 

 with some alarm the agriculture of the country. Our present system often takes one 

 hundred times more of the precious atoms that form wheat and corn, tobacco and cotton, 

 out of the surface of the earth, than is restored to it again. But our western friends 

 will not now consider the damage that may be done to their newly improved farms ; 

 and therefore we need not waste time in writing, nor room in our journal, by urging 

 them to husband ammonia, bone-earth, potash, soda, chlorine, magnesia, and gypsum, 

 as the ingredients Avhich nature has stored up in their virgin soils, not to be wasted by 

 the two or three first generations that may chance to till them. Conceding what is not 

 true, that wheat-growers have a moral right to exhaust the land of its elements of bread 

 and meat, for exportation, we tell them that the free use of lime will render the natural 

 resources of arated land more available to wheat plants. On all fields in which calca- 

 reous matter does not abound, and the phosphates and sulphates of iron and alumina 

 do, lime may be used with decided advantage. In such cases, lime abstracts both phos- 

 phoric and sulphuric acids from iron or alumina, forming the phosphate of lime and 

 gypsum, both of which improve the soil. To keep up the fertility of wheat farms, no 

 practice has been so successful as the culture of clover, peas, corn, roots, and grass, in 

 rotation with wheat ; taking care to return in manure, or green herbage, the elements 

 contained in these renovating crops. 



Too much wheat is grown in the United States, and the price of this great staple is 

 too low for the public good. Millions of bushels are raised every year, and sold for a 

 sum of money that will no more than purchase, in any market, the raw material con- 

 sumed and lost in making the grain. The business would be universally abandoned at 

 present prices, but for the fact that the intrinsic value of the things in the land, which 

 contribute so largely to form the harvest, is rarely estimated by the husbandman. To 

 prevent the slow but unceasing impoverishment of the soil, more manure must be made, 

 and what is made must be better husbanded, and used with greater skill. No arbitrary 

 rules can be given that will apply to all climates, and all conditions of land ; but much 

 must be left to the sound judgment of the cultivator after he has been taught the true 

 principles of his profession. Wool-growing and meat-making may be associated with 

 wheat-culture with decided advantage. In producing a needful supply of manure, by 

 the consumption of grass, hay, coarse grains, roots, and oilcake, so necessary to enrich 

 all tilled land, the farmer may realize a fair income from his sheep. In short, our west- 

 ern friends should combine legitimate husbandry, i. e., stock-raising and wool-growing, 

 with tillage, or agriculture proper. 



Nor should the hidden resources of the subsoil be forgotten in this brief survey of the 

 art of producing wheat at a profit. If the elements of bread which a good Providence 

 has placed in the subsoil are to be dug out over millions of acres, and sent by railways, 

 canals, rivers, lakes, and the ocean, to distant cities, and there wasted, we prefer to say 

 nothing of deeper plowing — nothing that will compel the next generation to give twice 

 as much hard work for a bushel of wheat or corn as the people of Illinois now give. 

 Posterity has done us no harm ; and we will never knowingly aid in the unjust work 

 of desolating one cultivated field from which those that are to come after us may wish 

 to draw their indispensable food and raiment. They shall have the arable lands of all 

 the grain and cotton-growing States of this Republic as rich in every respect as God 

 made them, so far as our humble pen and tongue can secure that consummation. 



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