458 
Report of the Judges on the 
production of milk the most paying part of Derbyshire farming. 
There is also nothing to note in elevation of the majority of the 
farms inspected, as many of them border the Trent, and the 
Midland Railway Station at Derby is only 174 feet above 
the sea-level. Through the courtesy of the President of the 
Board of Trade, we are enabled to give the Agricultural 
Statistics of the present year. The figures for 1881, we are 
officially told, " are the approximate returns before examination, 
but these corrections, as a rule, do not affect the substantial 
figures," and are sure to be accurate enough for the purpose of 
our rough comparison. (See Table opposite.) 
It is satisfactory to find in these returns that something is 
stationary. The total area of the county happily remains the 
same as it did ten years ago, but in 1867 Derbyshire was said 
to contain 658,803 acres, which showed a loss in four years of 
2600 acres somewhere. But while the total acreage was so 
much larger than it is now, the area under cultivation was in 
1867 only 477,000 acres as against 495,000 acres in 1871, and 
512,000 acres in 1881. We can hardly credit that there has been 
any such increase as 35,000 acres of crops, fallow, and grass, in 
fourteen years, or the lesser one of 17,000 acres in the last 
ten years. No doubt the difference is mainly due to the in- 
creased accuracy of the returns, and the greater pains which a 
larger number of farmers exercise in filling them up. It is 
not such an easy matter for a farmer with several holdings, or 
the illiterate occupier of a small farm, to make out these returns 
with perfect accuracy. The difference between landlords' and 
tenants' measures where fields are small and hedgerows wide, 
where wastes, roads, and frontage, are measured into the farm, is 
often as much as 20 per cent., while the contents of certain 
fields which pass for so many acres upon a farm, vary much 
from the exact area under cultivation. Still, for all purposes of 
comparison, these statistics are most useful, and may be de- 
pended upon as not only substantially, but actually correct. 
They disclose the fact that there are about 10,000 acres less 
wheat now in Derbyshire than there were ten years ago. The 
decline in the growth of wheat seems to have been more rapid 
of late years, and not to have begun much before 1871, for the 
area returned in 1869 was almost the same as in that year. 
Barley, which generally keeps up its area better than any cereal, 
shows a falling off of nearly 3000 acres, but the decline in oats 
is very trifling. It is curious in the summary of the Agri- 
cultural Returns for Great Britain just published, that oats, 
which as late as 1879 had a less area than our wheat crops by 
nearly 250,000 acres, have this year more than 100,000 acres in 
excess of the wheat, showing how low prices, wet seasons, and 
