On the Agricultural Improvements of Lincolnshire. 
303 
Chaplin was not disturbed nor discouraa:ed. On one of these farms 
wliich he then estaVilished at Temple Bruer, his tenant, Mr. Frank- 
isli, a practical farmer, now advanced in years, has been steadily 
pursuing a system, of farming, so admirable that I must state the 
<letails, though its merits T fear can only be appreciated by other 
farmers. The soil is a yellowish sand, about 6 inches deep only, 
and on a dry walling-stone rock. The extent of the farm is about 
700 acres, of the same light shallow soil, all under the plough. 
The rotation is the common four-course one — turnips, barley, 
clover or grass seeds, and wheat. 
The peculiarity is in the number of dressings, purchased and suc- 
cessively applied to these crops. The ordinary number of dressings 
varies in other districts where this four-course system prevails. 
Thus on one farm of my own, the land during the four years' rota- 
tion only received a little poor dung, or rather rotten straw, at 
wheat-sowing. The turnips, if any turnips grew, were fed off by 
breeding ewes, who sometimes obtained rough hay, and who in 
one season, as I found, obtaining only mouldy pease-straw, had 
lost one-half of their sucking lambs, which they could not sustain. 
Such starvation of land, and far worse of animals, is, one must 
hope, extraordinary also. A better treatment is to give dung to 
some of the turnips, and to buy woollen rags for part of the 
wheat. A further step would be to fatten off the young sheep when 
they are a year old, giving them corn with their turnips ; and this 
could not be called bad farming, if the soil had any depth or 
natural strength ; but the farm at Temple Bruer has neither depth 
nor natural strength — and I will state how these two defects are 
supplied by its tenant beginning with the turnip-crop as the foun- 
dation. This crop is sown with 16 bushels of bones, and it is fed 
off upon the land by sheep receiving oil-cake, which may be re- 
garded as a dressing for the following barley crop. In the next 
year, after the barley is mown, follows a dressing which will sur- 
prise many farmers. The dung of the whole year, which I saw 
in a vast mass, cleared out of the yard in October, enriched with 
oil-cake that had been purchased for sixty beasts wintered there, is 
laid at Christmas upon the barley stubble, for the benefit of the 
artificial grasses which follow. Of these grasses or seeds, as they 
are called ( among which two pounds of parsley are sown, a 
common Lincolnshire practice), only one-third is made into hay 
and carried off, two-thirds are depastured and return again 
to the ground. Observing too that troughs were set out upon 
these seeds last October, I found on inquiry that they contained 
oil-cake for fatting ewes; and that this is a growing practice, the 
ewes receiving each a pound of cake daily. Last follows the 
wheat-sowing; and not content with having spread the whole of 
Lis oil-cake dung upon the seeds at the previous Christmas, or 
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