1869.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
251 
the harrows and cultivator (with narrow teeth) 
pulled the quack to the surface. We then raked 
it into heaps and burned it on the land ; then 
plowed the land again, and drilled in beans. 
We cultivated the beans thoroughly with a 
Johnston cultivator, which has narrow teeth, 
and hoed them twice. I do not think that 
, to-day, except on the borders of the fences, 
.where we could not get at it, there is a spear of 
-quack in the field. Of course some of the 
i members laughed at my plan of killing quack. 
They want an easier method. I have known 
quack killed by double plowing; that is, by 
running a second plow in the furrow made by 
the first plow, and turning up the soil eighteen 
inches deep, and then turning the first nine 
inches of soil containing the quack to the bot¬ 
tom of the furrow, and throwing another furrow 
nine inches deep on top of it. This method 
was tried by John Hilditch, an intelligent Eng¬ 
lish farmer, and the result was satisfactory; but 
I believe he concluded that on the whole it was 
not much cheaper than the old-fashioned way 
of pulling it out by repeated plowings, liarrow- 
ings, and cultivatorings. If a Michigan double 
plow would run deep enough, it might accom¬ 
plish the same thing at one operation as Mr. 
Hilditch did at two, and with less than half the 
cost, as he found it necessary to put four horses 
on to the last plow. But on sandy soil it would 
be necessary to cover the quack very deep; 
and when these sandy soils rest on a poor, 
hungry subsoil, such deep plowing would prove 
injurious, at least for the first few years. Better 
kill the quack honestly, by working it out. 
Our dry, hot climate gives us a splendid oppor¬ 
tunity to get rid of this pest, and in killing 
quack by thoroughly working the land, we kill 
all other weeds at the same time. It will 
enrich the land, and furnish the finest seed¬ 
bed. The land will not forget it for years. 
It will not do to depend on thorough tillage 
alone. This was Jethro Tull’s mistake. We 
need manure besides. But the means necessary 
to kill the weeds will mellow the soil, develop 
plant-food, and give us better crops; and these 
crops will enable us to make more manure, and 
so we can keep ou enriching the farm. Hence 
I contend that while weeds, if neglected, are a 
curse to the land, they will prove a blessing to 
the fanner -who has energy enough to use the 
proper means for destroying them. The crop 
of beans that grew on this field paid the whole 
expense of killing the quack, and left the laud 
in prime order for wheat, and I have had some 
capital crops of clover and grass since. To 
abandon good dry land, worth $100 or $150 
per acre, to quack, is not to be thought of. 
Twenty dollars an acre will kill it so that it will 
not trouble us for ten years to come, and we 
get rid of other weeds at the same time. Will 
not the crops be two dollars an acre better—or 
even live dollars ? And will it not pay ? 
A gentleman in Canada writes me that wood 
is becoming as scarce as on the Western prai¬ 
ries, and that farmers are anxiously asking, 
“ What shall we fence with ?” “ Stone walls,” 
he adds, “ do not seem to suit this climate. 
They are apt to be heaved up by frost, especial¬ 
ly those running east and west, owing to the 
ground thawing more rapidly on the south than 
on the north side. I notice some attempts to 
grow willow and thorn fences, but no care 
seems to have been bestowed upon them since 
planting, and they are now useless; and ‘What 
shall we fence with ?’ is yet unanswered.” 
In the neighborhood of cities, where land is 
high and the farms necessarily small, we shall 
have to adopt the soiling system, and this will 
do away with the necessity for inside fences. 
Where land is cheap, and where, consequently, 
it Avill not pay to soil animals, we shall have 
larger farms, and can then have large fields, 
and thus save considerable expense in fencing. 
A field of ten acres requires sixteen rods of 
fence per acre, while a field of one hundred 
acres requires only about five rods of fence per 
acre. I know you object to large farms. But 
I am at a loss to see how we are going to get 
along without them. The Pacific Railroad will 
open up millions of new firms, and we have 
already ten times as much land as we have peo¬ 
ple to cultivate it. If, by the aid of machinery, 
we can cultivate a large farm at a less cost per 
acre than a smaller one, and if there is vastly 
more land than there are purchasers, why 
should we deprecate the manifest tendency to 
larger farms ? Depend upon it, as farmers’ 
sons receive a better education, they will want 
to do a larger business. The profits from a 
fifty-acre farm, devoted to ordinary farm crops, 
and so managed that its productiveness is kept 
up from the farm itself, and not by the purchase 
of fertilizers or feeding stuffs, are not large 
enough to satisfy the necessities of an educated 
man. And I assume that he manages his farm 
to the best advantage. Prices are high enough 
for consumers, and the profits of good farming, 
on the whole, are as large as they ought to be 
for the good of the country. The business is a 
good business, and a respectable one, but such 
a man does not do enough of it to afford him 
an adequate support. This is not a popular 
doctrine, but it is true. 
Of course an intelligent, educated man can 
make a good deal of money from fifty acres of 
land; but it will not be by ordinary farm crops 
managed in the ordinary way. It cannot be 
done by depending on the usual sources of 
fertility on the. farm. A farm can be kept in a 
high state of productiveness from its own re¬ 
sources, but to do so we must sell a compara¬ 
tively small portion of the crops grown. Three- 
fourths of all the crops must be consumed on 
the farm. Mr. Lawes’ unmanured wheat-plot 
produces on the average fifteen bushels of 
wheat per acre every year. In other words, 
the natural resources of the land are capable of 
giving fifteen bushels of wheat per acre every 
year. If a crop of wheat was sown every third 
year, and during the other two years the land 
was in clover, which was all returned to the 
land, we might get thirty-five bushels per acre. 
But this is probably the limit of productiveness 
from ordinarily good land, that receives no ex¬ 
traneous fertilizing materials. By supplying 
manure, we could get thirty-five bushels every 
year,—at least the soil cau be made capable of 
doing so, or of producing even forty or fifty 
bushels; but the season may be such that the 
plants cannot use their supply of food to ad¬ 
vantage. As a general rule, however, we might 
expect to average thirty-five bushels per acre. 
Iu other words, ive can, by the use of purchased 
manure, get every year as large crops as we can 
get every three years , by depending on the nat¬ 
ural sources of fertility. Liebig, with a flash 
of genius, saw this truth when he wrote “ Am¬ 
monia is Time,” long before Lawes and Gilbert 
demonstrated the fact by experiments. 
This truth lies at the basis of High Farming. 
By fallowing, and growing clover or other green 
crops, we can get all the ammonia we need to 
produce large crops of wheat. But it will take 
three or four years to do it. Those writers who 
sneer at “ guano and oil-cake,” and who recom¬ 
mend farmers to depend entirely on home re¬ 
sources, do not seem to understand this matter, 
for most of them, at the same time, recommend 
small farms; while the truth is, if we adopt 
sloio farming, we must have large farms, or we 
shall have small incomes. If we have small 
farms, we must farm fast , or, in other words, 
we must adopt High Farming. There is no 
escape from this conclusion. The only excep¬ 
tion is in the case of new land that has been 
heavily manured by nature, and where the 
farmer depends on this accumulated manure for 
the first twenty or thirty years after clearing up 
the land. When this manure is used up, he 
must depend on the plant-food, gradually de¬ 
veloped from the soil by tillage, on the am¬ 
monia and nitric acid furnished by rains and 
dews, and on what the soil and plants can ab¬ 
sorb from the atmosphere. This is slow farm¬ 
ing. And it is the kind of farming that must 
be generally adopted. It means, in its best 
aspect, summer and autumn-fallowing, growing 
a large area of clover and other crops for plow¬ 
ing under or consuming on the land, and raising 
large crops at long intervals. It is the kind of 
farming now generally adopted, except that we 
do not work the land so thoroughly as we 
should, and do not give the soil time to accumu¬ 
late a sufficient quantity of ammonia and other 
plant-food for the production of a large crop. We 
try to raise crops at too short intervals, conse¬ 
quently the crops are poor, and the profits small. 
On the other hand, High Farming means un¬ 
derdraining, thorough tillage, irrigation, and the 
purchase of manures or feeding stuffs. It 
means well-bred animals and high feeding. It 
means soiling iu summer, and roots in winter. 
It means large crops every year, and crops that 
can be turned into money. There is no sum¬ 
mer fallow, and no plowing under clover. 
Summering Young Calves. 
The first summer is the important one for 
calves. If they come through it in good, 
sound, thrifty condition, their future rearing is 
easy. If they get pot-bellied, out of shape, and 
stunted, a j r earwill be lost in their development 
and growth, and they will never be so good as 
they would have been had they kept growing 
from their birth. The secret of success in rais¬ 
ing calves is to keep them thrifty from the very 
start. Let them never get a check, and they 
will pay in the end for the extra care. A fre¬ 
quent mistake is to turn calves out to grass too 
earlja They have to eat a large amount of 
succulent food, to supply to their unperfeeted 
digestive organs a sufficient amount of such nu¬ 
triment as they can use, and they develop 
enormous paunches, out of all proportion to 
their frames. By frolicking they expend, in 
muscular waste, material that should go to help 
their growth, and by becoming overheated, they 
disarrange their entire systems. Later in the 
season, on stinted, drought-parched pastures, 
they are often as much starved by the want of 
food as they were earlier by the want of ability 
to make complete use of what they did eat. 
Calves should not ba weaned on grass, unless 
constantly with their dams, and receiving a 
bountiful supply of milk late into the season. 
Good rowen hay, (or cured grass,) which con¬ 
tains a large proportion of nutriment that the 
young stomachs can easily appropriate, and a 
liberal feeding, twice or three times a day, with 
skim-milk—withholding water, so that they will 
drink the more milk—is the best bill of fare for 
at least four months. At the end of that time, 
they may, unless the weather is excessively hot, 
