1853. 



NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



107 



population of those fertile regions and our own, 

 we should find little reason to envy their position. 

 I have somewhere seen an anecdote, which illus- 

 trates, iir-a few words, tlie peculiar advantages of 

 the southern mode of agriculture. A planter was 

 speaking of the large quantity of corn, and the 

 nuinber of swine annually raised on his plantation. 

 i'You must grow rich very rapidly," remarked a 

 bystander, "at that rate." "Yes," said he, "I 

 should, were it not for one or two circumstances ; 

 but the fact is, every winter my slaves eat all the 

 corn, and my slaves eat all my swine, and in the 

 spring I have nothing but the slaves left." 



W'HEAT CROP REDUCED FROM FORTY TO FIFTEEN BUSH- 

 ELS AN ACRE. 



New England soil may now, perhaps, be proper- 

 ly denommated poor, and this is partly its natural 

 state, and partly induced by an exhausting course 

 ot husbandry. The great and ruinous mistake of 

 American husbandry thus far, has been that of 

 taking icithout giving— o? rohhing the soil of the 

 elements of fertility, and returning nothing to it. 

 1 his course has been pursued everywhere throuo-h 

 our country, under the false though specious ide°a, 

 ot developing (he resources of (he comUrif. 



Railroads and canals have been opened. Wheat 

 was developed in New England, until the lands 

 which a century ago, produced abundant crops 

 now produce no crop whatever. It has been de- 

 veloped in the fertile lands of New York, till the 

 average product of whole countries has been re- 

 duced from 40 to 15 bushels to the acre. The re- 

 sources of the soil of Virginia have been developed 

 m the shape of tobacco, till the lands were abso- 

 lutely barren, under their old system of treatment, 

 and Yankee enterprise, with improved cultivation 

 IS just now^ restoring them to fertility, making New 

 ^ngland homes where, as John Randolph said 

 Virginia aristocracy was fairly starved out. 



THE SAME SYSTEM WILL BRING THE SAME RESULTS IN 

 THE SOUTH AND WEST. 



Such a robbery of the soil, of the very marrow 

 ot Its system, such a development of the resources 

 ot tlie land, as freights whole rivers and canals 

 arid railways with potash and phosphoric acid, and 

 the other essential elements of growth, in the form 

 ot wlieat, and corn, and cattle, carrying them to 

 large cities, to be there consumed, or shipped 

 abroad and making no return to the soil, will soon 

 bring to a level the fertile lands of the West and 

 bouth, and the hills of New England. 

 ^ The difference is diminishing every day, and the 

 time IS not far distant, when everywhere in the 

 bouth, the West, and the North, the truth will be 

 torced upon us, that we can receive from the soil 

 no more than by intelligent culture we in some 

 way cause to be returned to it, and it depends up- 

 on ourselves whether we shall pursue a ruinous 

 course of husbandry, till our lands are cursed with 

 barrenness, like the tobacco lands of Virginia or 

 whether we shall clothe our hills with traces' of 

 beauty and fiU our valleys with fertility. 



NEW ENGLAND ENJOYS AN UNSURPASSED CIVIL AND 

 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 



Yes, New England soil, compared with that of 

 portions of the West, is poor and hard to till, but 

 yet compared with most portions of the cultivated 

 countries of the earth, it yields a fair return for la- 

 bor. Indeed, it yields already, as I have said 



enough and to spare of the necessaries of life • 

 and if we sit down and soberly make up the ac- 

 count, remembering that no other land on which 

 the sun in his course looks down, enjoys at this 

 moment so much of true civil freedom and "free- 

 dom to worship God" as this New England,— that 

 in no other land are life and property so secure- 

 in no other land is education so generally diffused 

 —remembering too, that God has so ordered it, 

 that pure morality, and brave and honest hearts 

 should ever thrive best upon a rugged soil re- 

 membering too, that here are the graves of our 

 flithers, and here the happy homes of our child- 

 hood. If we consider all thesi? things, we shall 

 still take courage and thank our Maker that our 

 lives have flillen in pleasant places, and that we 

 have, indeed, a goodly heritage. 



AGRICULTURAL SCHOOLS. 



The want of Agricultural Schools, and of the 

 opportunities for obtaining an accurate scientific 

 knowledge of the true principles and practice of 

 husbandry, is in New England at the present day 

 a singular circumstance to be named as a difficulty 

 in such pursuits. 



It would seem that we regarded agricultural skill 

 as an instinct of our nature, that we supposed this 

 to be an exception to the general rule, that knowl- 

 edge IS found by studious search for it, and that, 

 like the birds of the air, which a thousand years 

 ago built their nests as skilfully as now, we had 

 by nature implanted in us, as much of a sort of 

 gift of cultivating the earth as would ever be of 

 any advantage to us. 



_ Men begin, however, to regard this matter in a 

 different aspect, and are getting light enough to 

 make the darkness visible. They begin to feel, 

 that from the fact that farmers live apart from 

 each other, and have not like merchants, and law- 

 yers, and manufacturers, occasion to meet and 

 compare results, and form systematic arrangements 

 for future action, they lose the great advantages 

 of mutual experience. 



They begin to feel, that to learn from Nature 

 a,lone is a slow and toilsome process— that human 

 life is too short for e;ich individual to work out for 

 himself every experiment important to be tried— 

 that some Board of Agriculture, some Department 

 of Government — some central point somewhere 

 must be established, whereby the results of care- 

 ful and continued observations may be collected, 

 and compared and published to the world. 



LITTLE PROGRESS IN TW^O THOUSAND YEARS. 



It is lamenlable to observe, how entirely almost 

 for centuries agricultural experience has been 

 wasted, how little progress has been made, even 

 in 2000 years, in many branches of husbandry. 

 The Greeks and Romans understood, almost as 

 well as we do, the uses of various kinds of ma- 

 nures. We read now-a-days in the Agricultural 

 Reports and journals of the importance of mixino- 

 soils — clay with sand — as if it were some grand 

 discovery of modern times ; yet Theophastus re- 

 commended the same thing twenty centuries ago. 

 Farmers talk about feeding down their winter grain 

 in autumn as a thing worth trying; a practice of 

 which Virgil speaks, as familiar among the Ro- 

 mans. 



The science of chemistry has indeed opened in 

 modern times a book of Nature's operations before 

 entirely sealed, giving us, if not yet, an accurate 



