FAEMING AS A BUSINESS. 13 



This would give me about 500 tons of well-rotted manure. I 

 should want 200 tons of this for the mangels and turnips, and the 

 300 tons I should want to top-dress 20 acres of grass land intended 

 for corn and potatoes the next year. My pile of manure, there- 

 fore, is all used up on 25 to 30 acres of land. In other words, I use 

 the unsold produce of 10 acres to manure one. Is this " high 

 farming ? " I think in my circumstances it is good farming, but it 

 is not high farming. It gives me large crops per acre, but I have 

 comparatively few acres in crops that are sold from the farm. 



"High farming," if the term is to have any definite meaning at 

 all, should only be used to express the idea of a farm so managed 

 that the soil is rich enough to produce maximum crops every year. 

 If you adopt the system of rotation quite general in this section 

 say, 1st year, corn on sod; 2d, barley or oats; 3d, wheat; 4th, 

 clover for hay and afterwards for seed ; 5th, timothy and clover 

 for hay ; and then the 6th year plowed up for corn again it would 

 be necessary to make the land rich enough to produce say 100 

 bushels shelled corn, 50 bushels of barley, 40 bushels of wheat, 3 

 tons clover-hay, and 5 bushels of clover-seed, and 3 tons clover and 

 timothy-hay per acre. This would be moderate high farming. If 

 we introduced lucern, Italian rye-grass, corn-fodder, and mangel- 

 wurzel into the rotation, we should need still richer land to produce 

 a maximum growth of these crops. In other words, we should 

 need more manure. 



The point I am endeavoring to get at, is this : Where you want 

 a farm to be self-supporting where you depend solely on the pro- 

 duce of the farm to supply manure it is a sheer impossibility to 

 adopt high farming on the whole of your land. I want to raise just 

 as large crops per acre as the high farmers, but there is no way of 

 doing this, unless we go outside the farm for manure, without 

 raising a smaller area of such crops as are sold from the farm. 



I do not wish any one to suppose that I am opposed to high farm- 

 ing. There is occasionally a farm where it may be practised with 

 advantage, but it seems perfectly clear to my mind that as long as 

 there is such an unlimited supply of land, and such a limited sup- 

 ply of fertilizers, most of us will find it more profitable to develop 

 the latent stores of plant-food lying dormant in the soil rather than 

 to buy manures. And it is certain that you can not adopt high 

 farming without either buying manure directly, or buying food to 

 feed to animals that shall make manure on the farm. 



And you must recollect that high farming requires an increased 



