394 AGRICULTURE. 



afford to pay for all the labor necessary for the high farming you ad 

 vocate." Are you quite sure of that assertion ? We suspect if you 

 were to enter carefully into the calculation, as your neighbor, the 

 merchant, enters into the calculation of his profit and loss in his 

 system of trade, you would find that the difference in value between 

 one crop of 12 bushels and another of 30 bushels of wheat to the 

 acre, would leave a handsome profit to that farmer who would pursue 

 with method and energy, the practice of never taking an atom of 

 food for plants from the soil in the shape of a crop, without, in some 

 natural way, replacing it again. For, it must be remembered, that 

 needful as the soil is, every plant gathers a large part of its food 

 from the air, and the excrement of animals fed upon crops, will 

 restore to the soil all the needful elements taken from it by those 

 crops. 



The principle has been demonstrated over and over again, but 

 the difficulty is to get the farmers to believe it. Because they can 

 get crops, such as they are, from a given soil, year after year, with- 

 out manure, they think it is only necessary for them to plant Pro- 

 vidence will take care of the harvest. But it is in the pursuit of 

 this very system, that vast plains of the old world, once as fertile 

 as Michigan or Ohio, have become desert wastes, and it is perfectly 

 certain, that when we reach the goal of a hundred millions of peo- 

 ple, we shall reach a famine soon afterwards, if some new and more 

 enlightened system of agriculture than our national " skinning " sys- 

 tem, does not beforehand spring up and extend itself over the 

 country. 



And such a system can only be extensively disseminated and 

 put in practice by raising the intelligence of farmers generally. We 

 have, in common with the Agricultural Journals, again and again 

 pointed out that this is mainly to be hoped for through & practical 

 agricultural education. And yet the legislatures of our great agri- 

 cultural States vote down, year after year, every bill reported by the 

 friends of agriculture to establish schools. Not one such school, 

 efficient and useful as it might be, if started with sufficient aid from 

 the State, exists in a nation of more than twenty millions of farmer's. 

 " What matters it," say the wise men of our State legislatures, " if 

 the lands of the Atlantic States are worn out by bad farming ? Is not 



