Proceedixgs of the Farmees' Club. 491 



ings of this club of last week that I am called the champion of shal- 

 low plowing. This is not strictly correct. , As a practical farmer I 

 have tried both deep and shallow tillage, and I have seen many others 

 try both. 



Some years ago, when so much was written abont aiibsoiling and 

 trenching, I supposed that we were on the very borders of a great 

 advance of agricnltnre ; that onr lands were soon to be made doubly 

 productive by deeper tillage. But my own experience, careful 

 "observations of the experiments of others, and especially the testi- 

 mony of the farms and farmers of Salem county, New Jei*sey, have 

 caused me greatly to change that opinion. I have often seen natur- 

 ally better lands than the uplands of Salem county. My own native 

 hills of the Brandywine are decidedly better. The Miami lands of 

 Ohio, the blue grass lands of Kentucky, and in Pennsylvania much 

 of Lancaster, Berks and Lehigh counties are better ; much of the Cum- 

 berland valley, &c. The same ma}- be said of a great deal of !New 

 York and all the western States. Lifty years ago these lands of 

 Salem county had become greatly impoverished or worn out by the 

 old style of farming ; while, in many parts of our country", lands sub- 

 jected to similar hard usage remained uninjured. 



Two years ago a committee from this club reported that they had 

 seen, in a ride of thirty or thirty -fire miles in Salem county, about 

 seventy corn fields, and they and the gentlemen they traveled with 

 estimated the average crop of shelled corn per acre of these seventy 

 fields at between seventy and eiglity bushels. That was in August. 

 The clover at this time Avas so rank that the stubble where wheat had 

 been gathered a few weeks beibre could not be seen. Other indica- 

 tions of first-class agriculture were constantly manifest. 



I have traveled, more or less, in nearly all of the United States, 

 and I have a passion for watching the agriculture everywhere. I 

 have seen good farms and good farmers often ; but that community of 

 farmers in the several townships bordering the old town of Salem, in 

 Salem county, iSTew Jersey, are the very best I have ever seen. 

 Their rule of plowing is five inches or under; some so shallow as 

 three inches ; the ave^iage probably four inches. This shallow tillage 

 with them is comparatively recent. The laboring men of some of 

 these farmers, in their absence, have disobeyed orders, and have 

 been what Mr. Fuller calls very laz}'. Fields were only half plowed. 

 In some of these cases of very sliallow plowing, where the owners 

 expected nothing, they have had the best crops of the neighborhood. 



