EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI EIVER. 255 



(Ired years ago, and they are constantly increasing in productiveness. 

 British writers and farmers declare that " the sheep is literally the 

 basis of English husbandry; that they have become an indispensable 

 necessity, as there is no other means of keeping up the land." The 

 secret of success in English husbandry is ascribed to turnips and sheep. 

 The turnips make mutton and the sheep make wheat. No country of 

 like extent breeds sheep so extensively, and no country exceeds it in 

 agricultural wealth. There seems to be uo valid reason why the keep- 

 ing of sheep would not have the same results on the soil of Massachu- 

 setts and other States as it has in England, 



Sheep have no equals as improvers of old pastures — those which do 

 not and can not carry more than half or two-thirds as much stock as 

 they did formerly. It is calculated that where once in Massachusetts, 

 and elsewhere in New England, 60 acres were ample for a certain number 

 of live stock, now 100 acres barely sufBce, a loss equivalent to 2 acres in 

 every 10. 



Horned cattle, especially cows in milk, soon graze out the available phosphates — 

 bone- forming and milk-supplying elements — and with the cropping out of the phos- 

 phates, the succulent and nourishing grasses give place to sour grasses, tap-rooted 

 weeds, coarse herbage. Many of these, which hunger can hardly compel a horse or 

 cow to eat, are eaten by sheep with avidity. It is found by actnal test that sheep 

 will eat some 140 kinds of herbage which other pasture-fed animals refuse. Of all 

 the domestic animals sheep are the most indiscriminate feeders, as well as very close 

 feeders. They nip the shoots of almost every shrub aud weed and extirpate many 

 kinds in a very few years. It is said that by sheep-feeding pastures their produc- 

 tiveness may be increased 5 per cent per annum, or brought up to carry double the 

 stock in twenty years. But their usefulness in improving pastures is not restricted 

 to that of weed-destroyers ; their manure, which is a highly concentrated form, is 

 minutely divided and evenly distributed over the soil surface, where it suffers no 

 waste, while it possesses in the highest degree the requisite essentials to restore to 

 the soil the phosphates which it loses by depasturing with cattle. This, in England, 

 is so well understood that they turn it to greater advantage by feeding them with 

 oil-cake when in pasture to give their droppings an additional value. They are 

 powerful digesters, not only converting the driest and coarsest herbage into food, 

 but destroying the vitality of everything they consume; and thus they do not, like 

 cattle, scatter foul seeds behind them, while from whatever is eaten they extract 

 more nutritive matter than any other animal. * 



The soil-invigorating power of sheep is so great " that a pasture suf- 

 ficient to feed 1,000 sheep the first year, as a result of their own drop- 

 pings, will feed 1,365 the next year, or 4 sheep will highly manure 1 

 acre of land per year." Another estimate is that 100 sheep in fifteen 

 days would enrich an acre of land sufficient to carry it through 4 years' 

 rotation. The Italians have a proverb that " a sheep is the best dung 

 cart," the proof of which can be shown in the fact that 36 pounds of 

 sheep excreta are equal as a fertilizer to 100 pounds of ordinary farm- 

 yard manure, being richer in nitrogenous substances than that of the 

 cow or horse, ranking next in ammonia and richer in the phosphates 

 than guano or the droppings of fowls. 



* Samuel Wasson, in Report of Maine Board of Agriculture. 



