THE GENESEE FAEMEB. 



,000,000 dollars on the enlargement of the Capitol; the Patent office will have cost $2,000,000 

 when completed; and the other public buildings at lea&t $7,000,000 more. By the Susquehannah 

 railroads (to be completed in a few months) both Eochester and Buffalo will be thirty miles nearer 

 Baltimore than New York; and only eight miles farther from Washington on tide water, than the 

 great commercial metropolis. 



The heart of this wonderful Republic has been more neglected, in an agiicultural point of view 

 than any other part of it. Baltimore has a population larger by 30,000 than Boston. Washington 

 contains 50,000 souls, to say nothing of the old cities of Georgetown and Alexandria. The best 

 crop grown is hay; and by going from ten to fifteen miles from tlie city, fair grass lands may be 

 bought at from five to twenty dollars an acre. The dairy business is capital ; and potatoes are 

 seldom worth less than $1 a bushel. Nine months in the year there is a great demand for cream 

 in Washington, for making ice creams, and farmers get a dollar a gallon for all they can produce. 

 Eggs and poultry are proportionally high. Men born and reared on tobacco plantations, naturally, 

 and perhaps wisely, abstain from engaging in these thousand and one small matters. They under- 

 stand planting, and it gives them wealth and enjoyment; while the multifareous trade of the 

 northern farmer is to them Greek and Hebrew. 



Labor is not high. The writer owns and cultivates a farm in the District, and gives a good hand 

 $150 a year, who boards himself, but is found a house and firewood. Men who hire by the month 

 or year, and are boarded, get from $75 to $125 per annum. Market gardening and fruit growing 

 pay remarkably well near the city. Wood sells at from $5 to $6 a cord, and many have bought 

 land BO that they make enough on the wood to more than clear the land of all encumbrance. Such 

 bargains are becoming scarce, although some, doubtless, may yet be found up the canal and river. 

 The Chesapeake and Ohio canal is rarely closed a day by ice, and carries a volume of water five 

 feet by fifty ; or it is some 60 per cent. larger than the un-enlarged Erie canal. 



Oyster shells make the cheapest lime for agricultural purposes, and cost only a cent a bushel in 

 Washington. Stable manure is sold at a dollar a load. Night-soil ought to be all consumed as a 

 fertilizer, but it is scarcely used at all. Gypsum costs from $3 to $5 per ton ; it is brought as bal- 

 last from Boston and Nova Scotia. On land properly treated, clover grows finely. Proper treat- 

 ment consists in draining where it is needed, in limeing and tillage, not forgetting to manure if the 

 land happens to be quite poor. Good clover never grows on a soil that is really exhausted, or 

 naturally sterile. 



Excellent crops of wheat 4ind corn have been grown in Montgomery county, north of Washington, 

 m Maryland, and in Fairfax county, in Virginia, during the past season. Corn pays much better 

 than wheat, for the forage obtained in cornstalks, blades and shucks, will sell in market for more 

 than the cost of making the crop. In skillful hands, no other plant is so prolific in food for man 

 and beast as the indigenous Indian corn. The amount of forage that may be raised on an acre is, 

 to the unitiated, almost incredible. Deep subsoil plowing, liberal manuring, and seeding in drills, 

 present an outline of the system of culture for green feed, or hay, to be consumed by dairy cows. 

 Mr. Charles Calvert, President of the Maryland State Agricultural Society, grows some 30,000 

 bushels of turnips a year for his milch kine, which are fed with cut straw, hay and corn fodder- 

 Mr. C. is the principal proprietor of the largest hotel in Washington, which he supplies with milk, 

 cream, and garden vegetables. He is the lineal descendant of the first governor of the province of 

 Maryland, by the name of Calvert, (a near I'elative of Lord Baltimore,) and his estate contains 

 nearly 3000 acres, having a beautiful mill-stream running over four miles through it. Milk and 

 hay are the leading products sold from this magnificent farm. The dairy consists of iniproved 

 Short-horns, with a sprinkling of Ayreshires and Aldorneys. "Riversdale" is on the railroad to 

 Baltimore, and near Bladonsburg. Mr. Calvert will give 200 acres not far from the railroad stop- 

 ping place, for an Agricultural College, provided there is public spirit enough in the country to 

 endow one institution of the kind, in a nation of farmers. Of the $50,000,000 annually paid into 

 the federal treasury by the American people, not over half is really needed for the wise and 

 economical administration of the government. The people know this, and know also that their 

 children greatly need a thorough education; nevertheless, they do not lift a finger to apply the 

 surplus in the treasury to educational purposes. 



"Arlington," on the Virginia side of the Potomac, and opposite Washington, is the residence of 

 George Washington Park Custis, the adopted son of Gen. Washington. The farm contains 1100 

 acres, and its venerable proprietor is one of the Vice Presidents of the United States Agricultural 

 Society, the President of the Alexandria County Society, and the devoted friend of the great farm- 



