PROFITS OF FISH BREEDING. 155 



cellar under it. If that is the case — if one-quarter of the hay 

 that is stacked is wasted — farmers can afford to build larger 

 barns. We want them to shelter our crops and animals and to 

 facilitate the making of manures. When farmers will provide 

 these improved barns and buildings farming will be more profit- 

 able tlian it is now. 



I might say a few words upon farming on the water as well 

 as on tlie land. We are coming to this — the raising of fish in 

 our brooks — and I think it will be one of the most profitable 

 branches of our husbandry. At present these waters are bar- 

 ren, or nearly so ; but almost every New England farm — every 

 hill farm, certainly — has its trout-brook, in which these delicious 

 fish can be reared at very small expense, and the farmer not 

 only supply his own table but the village or city market with 

 these choice fish. Trout are now worth one dollar a pound, 

 and sometimes they are as high as one dollar and twenty-five 

 cents. All that can be sent to the city market will bring that 

 price, because so few are engaged in the business. I do not 

 know that there is anybody engaged in it. The dealers depend 

 upon the supply that comes from what are called wild brooks, 

 so that no man is regularly supplied with these fish. The 

 enterprise has been started, and successfully started. I was re- 

 cently at Dr. J. H. Slack's, in Bloomsbury, N. J., who has 

 trout-ponds which have been going since a year ago last Septem- 

 ber. In one of these ponds he has, as the result of his last 

 year's operations, 10,000 young trout turned out of his hatch- 

 ing-boxes. The fish are now about six inches long. He has in 

 the next pond about two hundred that are two years old, and in 

 another pond two hundred and fifty fish that were on hand 

 when he began his operations. When I saw him, a few days 

 since, he told me he had taken off 47,000 eggs, which he has in 

 his hatching-box, and they are doing very well. He has not 

 lost one per cent, of them, and calculates that when his estab- 

 lishment is fully going he can raise every year, in that little 

 yard, perhaps about four times the size of this room, 50,000 

 pounds of trout, worth, at wholesale prices, not less than" 

 $30,000. It may, perhaps, cost him two or three thousand dol- 

 lars to carry it on. He feels entire confidence in the success of 

 the undertaking ; and when those young men at the Agricul-' 

 tural College know how to go out and instruct our farmers how 



