ADDRESS 



19 



of books and papers and addresses, will not have to be 

 reminded that the great burden of their whole song is 

 Manure! Manure! ! Manure! ! And as I run over the 

 journeyings of a summer spent among the best farmers 

 of the United Kingdom ; as I note the successes of the 

 shrewdest and most thorough of the cultivators of our 

 own soils ; as I trace back the files of the old Genesee 

 Farmer, the Cultivator and the Country Gentleman, in 

 which I have an interest, personal or hereditary, extend- 

 ing back for more than thirty years, I find that what 

 observation in England and Scotland teaches us abroad 

 is equally true on this side the Atlantic — that the care 

 and quantity of manure made may fairly be taken 

 as a measure of the profits obtained, — that with this as 

 the first object sought, all other objects are in turn 

 accomplished, — in a word, that the farmer's first and 

 most important crop is that which comes out of his 

 barn yard ! 



And beyond this, my friends, it is the fundamental 

 verity and weight of this great fact, which first led the 

 English breeder to those improvements in cattle and 

 sheep which we have just been discussing, and of which 

 you have had examples on your show grounds to-day, 

 in the several breeds there exhibited, more than three 

 thousand miles from the place of their origin. To raise 

 crops for the food of man, stock must be fed and crops 

 for their especial consumption produced; and the 

 problem of securing that stock which might be fed to 

 the greatest profit, reaching its importance out of the 

 primal necessity experienced by the English farmer 

 for more manure, provoked those efforts on the part of 

 Bake well and the Collings and Elman and Webb, and 

 their compeers, which render the names of these leading 



