84 
On Breakbuj-xip Down Land. 
2,y. GcZ. ; nor is any part of the harvest wages so profitable for the 
hibourcr as tliis, owing to the general lightness of the crop. The 
turnip- crop not only creates a great deal more labour, but it 
affords so much employment in winter. In no part of the country 
are labourers worse paid than in the south-west of England ; and 
nowhere are they better paid and more comfortable than in York- 
shire, Lincolnshire, Nottingham, and, I believe, some parts of 
Norfolk. My knowledge of the mode of cvdtivation in these 
counties, from having farmed twenty-six years on the north 
V olds of Lincolnshire, and frequentlv visiting my friends and re- 
lations, who were agriculturists in ^^orkshire and Nottingham- 
shire, and my present acquaintance with the south-west of 
England, by farming 400 acres of the lightest part of Salisbury 
Plain, convinces me that the lamentable state of the labourers in 
the latter district is owing to the inferiority of the system of farm- 
ing light land, particularly by exhausting it when first brought 
into cultivation. As there are extensive tracts of land yet untilled 
which might be made useful turnip-land, and ought not therefore 
to remain in their present unproductive state, it may be important 
to draw the attention of the Society to the extraordinary difference 
of system that has long heen, and now is followed in first bringing 
poor soils into cultivation in the south, and that which has been 
})raclised with such beneficial effects in other counties. In a 
considerable part of the south-west of England, however poor 
and light the soil, it is first sown with wheat — by this means made 
lighter when it should be made firmer : it is next sown with barley 
or oats ; thus made poorer instead of richer : it is then sown with 
sM cdes, and if any manure is applied, this consists only of a few 
ashes, or at most one quarter of bone-dust per acre. What would 
our predecessors ha^e thought of this pitiful dressing who, forty 
years ago, never put on less than 60 bushels per acre? In feeding 
off the swedes, the sheep are frequently taken away at night to 
manure some more valued land. After swedes, barley or oats are 
sown, as it may be supposed the land is, by this time, too poor and 
light for any artificial grasses, with the single exception of rye- 
grass, which moreover is not fed off green by sheep, but cut for 
seed. Other rounds of miserable crops follow, substituting rye 
for wheat, oats for barley, but nothing is done to improve the land : 
almost everything indeed that the land produces is taken away 
to enrich better ground, until it is no longer capable of remu- 
nerating the farmer for the expense of cultivation, when it is left 
in a worse state than when it was first broken up. What a con- 
trast to this ruinous system was the plan pursued in first bringing 
into cultivation the once poor sandy forests, the barren heaths, 
the rabbit-warrens, and the almost valueless wolds of other 
counties ! 
