440 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



establish its truth. No man can long afford to be a medium 

 farmer. No man would long be contented with three per cent, 

 interest on stocks or money loaned when he could just as well 

 have six per cent, and a better security. Good agricultural 

 economy is that which ends in maximum harvests from minimum 

 expenditures, and nothing short. It boasts not of its great 

 number of acres under cultivation, but of the quantity pro- 

 duced per acre. Quantity and quality relative to the area are 

 its pride, rather than the great number of acres tilled. No 

 man can afford to raise seventy-five bushels of carrots per acre, 

 when the same area, if well tilled, would produce one thou- 

 sand ; nor three bushels of rye per acre, when forty should be 

 produced on the same surface ; nor one-half a ton of hay per 

 acre, when four can be produced ; nor wheat at ten bushels per 

 acre, when sixty may be produced under right culture ; nor corn 

 at fifteen bushels per acre, when the best culture produces one 

 hundred and fifty. 



There are numerous other kindred topics that might be pre- 

 sented for consideration in connection with agricultural econ- 

 omy — such as labor, whether performed by man or by beasts 

 trained for the purpose, or by some other agent of power, as 

 steam ; the planting and cultivating of orchards ; draining and 

 irrigating ; liquid manures as a substitute for those in common 

 use ; the employment of lime, how, when, and where ; the rota- 

 tion of crops ; subsoil-ploughing ; the number of times a field 

 should be stirred with the plough before planting or sowing 

 the seed ; whether fall ploughing shall be abandoned ; the mode 

 of tilling with the hoe or cultivator, or both ; the surest method 

 of destroying noxious weeds ) the best way and time of har- 

 vesting corn and other grains ; when to cut grass to be made 

 into hay, and how to make it so as to render it the most nutri- 

 tious; the cooking of food for swine and other domestic ani- 

 mals ; and, in fine, geognosy, geoscopy, meteorology, botany, 

 zoology, ornithology, and entomology, so far as these relate to 

 the economy of agriculture. But, instead of an essay, these 

 topics would furnish matter, if rightly discussed, — to wit, in 

 the light of " knowledge derived from experience," — sufficient to 

 make volumes. They are all, it will be admitted, intimately 

 related to the topic under consideration ; and the completion 



