ABOUT FRUITS, FLOWERS AND FARMING. 39 



SINGLE-CROP FARMING. 



IT is extensively the practice of large farmers, to put 

 their whole force upon one staple article ; a style of farm- 

 ing as full of risk, as it would be to invest a whole fortune 

 in one kind of property. At the South, we have cotton 

 plantations ; nothing but cotton is raised. If the market 

 and the season happen to be propitious, enormous profits 

 are made. If markets, or the planting or picking season 

 are adverse, the year is lost ; for it was staked on one 

 article ; all the risks of the year, instead of being distributed, 

 were concentrated. Another plantation cultivates sugar 

 exclusively ; and the ambitious planter has his pockets full 

 or empty, according to chances which he cannot foresee, 

 calculate, or overrule. 



At the Nprth, some farmers put in nothing but wheat ; 

 others, nothing but corn. One relies on the hay crop ; 

 another makes or loses a year's profits on cattle. In each 

 case, if the staple raised happens to hit, in every respect 

 profits roll in like a flood. But such operations leave no 

 margin for those casualties, and annual changes, which are 

 inevitable. 



Ireland, relying upon the potato as a support for a large 

 mass of its poverty-stricken people, is visited with famine 

 if this crop is shaken. The failure of the grain crop, in Eng- 

 land, strikes panic into the whole nation. 



A perfect system of agriculture should have in itself, a 

 balancing power. There should be such a distribution of 

 crops that a farmer may have four or five chances instead 

 of one. To be sure, a farmer cannot drive so large a bus- 

 iness cut such a swath where five small or moderate 

 operations take the place of a single great one. Five years 

 of moderate profits are better than one gaining year, and 

 four years to eat it up. A farmer has 160 acres sixty are 

 in wood : of the one hundred cleared acres, say twenty are 

 used for home lots, pasture, corn, etc., and eighty are in 



