No. 4.] EASTERN AND WESTERN FARMING. 171 



it, it would be Ishmaelile in character. I suppose these 

 claims represent in some respect the belief that we have 

 taught ourselves as an apology for our passiveness in farm- 

 ing. Now, at the expiration of several months of uncertain 

 workers on the farm, I have six regular men ; and I doubt 

 not, if we are honest with ourselves and honest with history, 

 that we shall acknowledge these men to be the match of the 

 wonderfully good laborers in sentiment that the old hands 

 employed in the good old times. It is a simple proposition 

 with us : a comfortable home for man and wife, fair pay and 

 reasonable hours of labor, and work for three hundred and 

 thirteen days of the year. 



But it is said that we cannot carry on extensive farming 

 as in the west, because we have not its fertility of soil. Is 

 this statement true ? Really have we not an advantage over 

 them in some regards? Can we not carry on not only 

 extensive farming but extensive intensive farming, thereby 

 exhiljiting the true genius of man in agriculture? To make 

 it extensive, it is true we must clear the fields of rocks and 

 make use of all the available pasture ground ; and to make it 

 intensive we must fat it all, incUiding that portion which we 

 cannot plough, by feeding it until it becomes the match of 

 western pastures. "With more labor, more and cheaper 

 capital than the west commands, there is no trouble at all in 

 fitting the fields for machinery ; no trouble about the profit 

 of it, provided we can furnish the fertility. Here is the rub ; 

 and here is the pivotal spot where we must look in detail 

 and with some care. 



Let us take the corn crop as an illustration. Can we grow 

 the forty acres of corn that our western contemporary can, 

 so far as furnishing the plant food is involved in the scheme ? 

 Let us look. Fifty bushels of corn and its fodder contain 

 in round numbers thirty-one pounds of phosphoric acid, 

 sixty-four pounds of nitrogen and some seventy pounds of 

 potash. As it is quite satisfactorily shown that only one- 

 half of the nitrogen needs to l)e supi)lied, the cost of these 

 materials, rating nitrogen at fifteen cents, potash at four and 

 one-half cents and phosphoric acid at seven cents per pound, 

 will l)e $1.06, or twenty cents a bushel. While not all the 

 chemicals applied are returned in the first crop, they are so 



