On the Agricultural Improvements of Lincolnshire. 30 1 
they have eaten the fanner still thinlcs himself well rewarded. 
Another method is to buy in tliree-year-old beasts, to give them 
first eight pounds, then twelve pounds, at last as much as sixteen 
pounds daily ; so that w hen these beasts are sold out in the spring, 
also, they are three-quarters fat, and ready to be finished elsewhere 
at grass. 'I'hese, however, like the others, only pay I suppose at 
most the bill for oil-cake, and are what the Lincolnshire farmers 
call them, machines for converting the straw into dung. But it is 
oil-cake dung, not the litter trampled by a few horses or pigs, and 
turned by the rains into the semblance of dung, which we frequently 
see in the South : and as the third horse is cast off from the plough 
upon our light land, southern dung, if it can so be called, will 
become weaker. We feed our sheep, indeed, sometimes more 
rapidly, and so recompense our land in some degree ; but in the 
manufacture of dung I must admit that we are distanced. It 
also strikes me that this Lincolnshire process might be applied to 
a kind of soil for which so little new help has yet been struck 
out ; I mean the cold, heavy, almost hopeless, clays- Drain 
them as we may, there are many tracts of such land on which 
roots cannot be grown ; or if roots be forced to grow, the injury 
done to the land if folded by sheep, or by carting the roots away, 
more than counterbalances the advantage, as Mr. Handley informs 
me that he and other farmers have found by experience. How 
then is good dung to be made upon such a farm ? I should say 
by transferring to it the Lincolnshire method. It is true that 
the straw is usually short and thin on such land ; but I do think, 
and I hope the suggestion will not appear theoretical, that if 
on such a farm, after draining and dressing it with burnt clay, the 
bulk of straw were increased, by applying guano, for instance, to 
the oat crop ;* and if that straw thus increased were used by cattle 
with oil-cake,j a new face might be given to its cultivation. The 
method would then be equally important for soil which is so light 
that the turnips grown on it cannot be drawn without weakening 
the succeeding crop, and for land which is so heavy that turnips 
* It is proposed to apply the guano to the oat rather than to the wheat- 
crop, because the slightest excess of stimulating manure applied to wheat 
brings the risk of mildew. Where guano has been drilled with wheat on 
a cold clay I have seen injury produced to the crop on the crown of the 
ridge, while the effect near the furrow was good. On the same farm the 
tenant had used guano with advantage on wheat by handsowing it in 
March on the parts near the furrow, and afterwards hoeing it in. The 
result of the guano so applied was very favourable. 
+ I do not mean that cattle so wintered must necessarily be kept on oil- 
cake. There is no doubt that the farmer might use spring-corn grown 
upon his own fields. Mr. Graburn informs me that the oil-cake imported 
into and produced last year at Hull amounted to more than 30,000 tons, 
which must have cost the farmers of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and Notting- 
hamshire, as much as 160,000 quarters of barley. 
