94 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[March. 
Southern States the Mink may be trapped all 
■winter, but pelts taken in tbat mild climate 
are far inferior to those caught iu more 
northern latitudes. 
A Smithfield Christmas Prize-Ox 
At the Seventy-fourth Annual Smithfield 
(London) Cattle Show, held just before last 
Christmas-day, at which the beasts fed expressly 
for the London Christmas markets were ex- 
hibited, the ox represented on the preceding page 
took the first prize. He was a black polled ox 
of the Scotch breed. His weight was 2,500 
pounds. Ho was three years and eight months 
old, and was fed by Mr. James Brace, of Burn- 
side, Elgin. His feed had beeu grass, turnips, 
hay, beans, meal, oil-cake, and medicated cattle 
food. It is not usual that an ox of the polled 
breeds should take the precedence of the Short- 
horn Herefords or Devons at these shows, and 
the fact that this did so shows the capabilities 
of these hornless breeds for taking on flesh. If 
these breeds have equal feeding qualities with 
the horned breeds, they would be found very 
desirable in cases where beeves have to be 
shipped hundreds of miles by rail to market. 
We have already pointed out their value in this 
respect, and now show what they are capable 
of in the way of making beef. 
Walks and Talks on the Farm.— No. 111. 
One of my correspondents writes : " If high 
farming will not pay, low fanning will bring a 
man and his family to short commons, if not 
to the poor-house." I suppose this remark re- 
fers to something I have said in my Walks and 
Talks against an indiscriminate advocacy of 
high farming. There are people who recom- 
mend "high farming" in all cases. I do not. 
But it is useless to discuss the matter until we 
have first settled what we mean by high farm- 
ing. I' have no doubt that if I knew exactly 
what my correspondent means I should agree 
with him. He probably means to say, " If rais- 
ing large crops will not pay, raising poor crops 
will bring a man to short commons," etc. And 
this is a proposition to which I heartily assent. 
In fact, I have said the same thing over and 
over again. It is precisely what I am trying 
to do on my own farm. I am aiming to get 35 
bushels of wheat per acre, 80 bushels of shelled 
corn, 50 bushels of barley, 90 bushels of oats, 
300 bushels of potatoes, and 1,200 bushels of 
mangel-wurzel per acre on the average. I can 
see no way of paying high wages except by 
raising large crops per acre. But it' I get 
these large crops it does not necessarily fol- 
low that I am practicing " high farming." 
To illustrate : Suppose I should succeed in get- 
ting such crops by adopting the following plan. 
I have a farm of nearly 300 acres, one quarter 
of it being low, alluvial land, too wet for culti- 
vation, but when drained excellent for pasturing 
cows or for timothy meadows. I drain this 
land, and after it is drained I dam up some of 
the streams that flow into it or through it, and 
irrigate wherever I can make the water flow. 
So much for the low laud. 
The upland portion of the farm, containing 
say 200 acres, exclusive of fences, roads, build- 
ings, garden, etc., is a naturally fertile loam, as 
good as the average wheat land of Western 
New York. But it is, or was, badly "run 
down." It had been what people call " worked 
to death;" although, in point of fact, it had 
not been half-worked. Some said it was 
" wheated to death," others that it had been 
"oated to death," others that it had been 
"grassed to death," and one man said to me, 
" That field has had sheep on it until they have 
gnawed every particle of vegetable matter out 
of the soil, and it will not now produce enough 
to pasture a flock of geese." And he was not 
far from right — notwithstanding the fact that 
sheep are thought to be, and are, the best ani- 
mals to enrich land. But let me say, iu pass- 
ing, that I have since raised on that same field 
50 bushels of barley per acre, 33 bushels of 
Diehl wheat, a great crop of clover, and last 
year, on a part of it, over 1,000 bushels of man- 
gel-wurzel per acre. 
But this is a digression. Let us carry out the 
illustration. What does this upland portion of 
the farm need ? It needs underdraining, thor- 
ough cultivation, and plenty of manure. If I 
had plenty of manure, I could adopt high 
farming. But where am I to get plenty of 
manure for 200 acres of land? "Make it," says 
the Deacon. Very good ; but what shall I 
make it of? " Make it out of your straw and 
stalks and hay." So I do, but all the straw and 
stalks and hay raised on the farm when I bought 
it would not make as much manure as "high 
farming" requires for five acres of land. And 
is this not true of half the farms iu the United 
Slates to-day? What, then, shall we do ? 
The best thing to do theoretically \%Wi\$ : Any 
land that is producing a fair crop of grass or 
clover, let it lie. Pasture it or mow it for hay. 
If you have a field of clayey or stiff loamy 
land, break it up in the fall, and summer-fallow 
it the next year, and sow it to wheat and seed 
It down with clover. Let it lie- two or three 
years iu clover. Theu break it up in July or 
August, "fall-fallow" it, and sow it with barley 
the next spring, and seed it down again with 
clover. 
Sandy or light land, that it will not pay to 
summer-fallow, should have all the manure you 
can make, and be plowed and planted with 
corn. Cultivate thoroughly, and either seed it 
down with the corn in August, or sow it to bar- 
ley or oats next spring and seed it down with 
clover. I say, tlieoreticaUy this is the best plan 
to adopt. But practically it may not be so, be- 
cause it may be absolutely necessary that we 
should raise something that we can sell at once, 
and get money to live upon or pay interest and 
taxes. But the gentlemen who so strenuously 
advocate high farming are not perhaps often 
troubled with considerations of this kind. 
Meeting them, therefore, on their own ground, 
I coutend that in my case high farming would 
not be as profitable as the plan hinted at above. 
The rich alluvial low land is to be pastured 
or mown ; the upland to be broken up only 
when necessary, and when it is plowed to 
be plowed well and worked thoroughly, and 
got back again into clover as soon as possible. 
The hay and pasture from the low land, and the 
clover and straw and stalks from the upland, 
would enable us to keep a good many cows and 
sheep, with more or less pigs, and there would 
be a big pile of manure in the yard every spring. 
And when this is once obtained, you can get 
along much more pleasantly and profitably. 
"But," I may be asked, " when you have got 
this pile of manure, can not you adopt high 
farming?" No. My manure pile would con- 
tain say : 60 tons clover hay ; 20 tons wheat- 
straw; 25 tons oat, barley, and pea straw ; 40 
tons meadow hay ; 20 tons corn-staiks; 20 tons 
corn, oats, and other grain; 120 tons of mangel- 
wurzel and turnips. 
This would give me about 500 tons of well- 
rotted manure. I should want 200 tons of this 
for the mangels and turnips, and the 300 tons I 
should want to top-dress 20 acres of grass land 
intended for corn and potatoes the next year. 
My pile of manure, therefore, is all used up on 
25 to 30 acres of land. In other words, I use 
the unsold produce of 10 acres to manure one. 
Is this " high farming" ? I think in my circum- 
stances it is good farming, but it is not high 
farming. It gives me large crops per acre, but 
I have comparatively few acres in crops that 
are sold from the farm. 
"High farming," if the term is to have any 
definite meaning at all, should only be used to 
express the idea of a farm so managed that the 
soil is rich enough to produce maximum crops 
every year. If you adopt the system of rotation 
quite general in this section — say, 1st year, corn 
on sod; 2d, barley or oats; 3d, wheat; 4th, 
clover for hay and afterwards for seed ; 5th, 
timothy and clover for hay ; and then the 6th 
year plowed up for corn again — it would be 
necessary to make the land rich enough to pro- 
duce say 100 bushels shelled corn, 50 bushels 
of barley, 40 bushels of wheat, 3 tons clover 
hay, and 5 bushels of clover seed, and 3 tons 
clover and timothy hay per acre. This would 
be moderate high farming. If we introduced 
Lucern, Italian rye-grass, corn-fodder, and 
mangel-wurzel into the rotation, we should need 
still richer laud to produce a maximum growth 
of these crops. In other words, we should need 
more manure. 
The point I am endeavoring to get at is this : 
"Where you -want a farm to be self-supporting 
— where you depend solely" on the produce of 
the farm to supply manure — it is a sheer impos- 
sibility to adopt high farming on the iphole of 
your land. I want to raise just as large crops 
per acre as the high farmers, but there is no way 
of doing this, unless we go outside the farm for 
manure, without raising a smaller area of such 
crops as are sold from the farm. 
I do not wish any one to suppose that I am 
opposed to high farming. There is occasion- 
ally a farm where it may be practiced with ad- 
vantage, but it seems perfectly clear to my 
mind that as long as there is such an unlimited 
supply of land, and such a limited supply of 
fertilizers, most of us will find it more profit- 
able to develop the latent stores of plant-food 
lying dormant in the soil rather than to buy 
manures. And it is certain that you can not 
adopt high farming without either buying 
manure directly or buying food to feed to ani- 
mals that shall make manure on the farm. 
And you must recollect that high farming re- 
quires an increased supply of labor, and hired 
help is a luxury almost as costly as artificial 
fertilizers. 
We have heard superficial thinkers object to 
agricultural papers on the ground that they 
were urging farmers to improve their laud and 
produce larger crops, "while," say they, "we 
are producing so much already that it will not 
sell for as much as it costs to produce it." My 
plan of improved agriculture does not neces- 
sarily imply the production of any more wheat 
or of any more grain of any kind that we sell 
than we raise at present. I would simply raise 
it on fewer acres, and thus lessen the expense 
for seed, cultivation, harvesting, etc. I would 
