52 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
lowed to remain iu heaps in the field day after 
day without turning, and were exposed to rains 
and dews until nearly all thcsoluble matter was 
decomposed or washed out of the straw, and 
half the leaves were knocked off of them before 
they left the field, and they were stacked in a 
damp condition, it is not difficult to understand 
why “the sheep and the chemist do not tell the 
same story” in regard to the value of the 
straw. On our own farm we have found pea- 
straw t om aluxuriant crop of peas, cured with¬ 
out rain, nearly as valuable as clover-hay. 
Ogden Farm Papers,—No. 36. 
I write from St. Malo, on the coast of Brit¬ 
tany, early in December. I have not yet had a 
sufficient opportunity to study a single detail of 
European agriculture to express a definite opin¬ 
ion concerning it, but it is beginning to suggest 
itself to my mind, that—in agriculture, as well as 
in a good many other branches of industry—an 
American can not “ dive deeper, stay under 
longer, and come up drier ” than any one else 
in the world. I may have been misled by ap¬ 
pearances, but so far as I have been able to 
judge from a rapid run through England, Bel¬ 
gium, Prussia, Baden, Wiirtemburg, Bavaria, 
the Tyrol, Northern Italy, and Fiance, there is 
no day’s journey along the whole route to which 
it would not pay an American farmer to devote 
at least a month. I do not doubt that the re¬ 
verse of the proposition is true: there are few 
farmers along the line of my journey who would 
not find in America very much that it would be 
of the utmost consequence for them to adopt. 
In the matter of implements we are far ahead 
of most of the farmers of the Continent, and 
we have been forced by necessity to learn how 
to get more value out of the labor of a man 
than they do here—as indeed we must, for the 
man costs us from three to five times as much. 
But when it comes to the question of getting 
value out of the land, we are nowhere. The 
best of us waste on every hundred acres enough 
ground to support a family in Germany, and 
enough manure to support two families. Ours 
is an agriculture of rich soil—even where our 
land is poor we have not yet modified the sys¬ 
tem that answered when it was rich—and theirs 
of poor soil. They can not draw on their land 
(as an Illinois farmer can) for a fair crop on 
every acre which they simply plow and plant. 
Their land has passed that point—as much of 
ours has done, and as the rest is fast doing. It 
no longer contains even the remnants of the 
“inexhaustible fertility” which invited the con¬ 
vent-building monks, as our prairies still invite 
the wholesale wheat and corn growers. It has 
long since been relegated to its true position of 
“ an implement of agriculture,” or, if the term 
ue more appropriate, of the farmer’s laboratory, 
or even his bank. It long ago ceased to be his 
mine. He can make it work for him much as 
the digestive apparatus of his cows does; its ap¬ 
paratus, if he rightly understands it, is ever 
ready to turn his crude chemicals into golden 
crops; its vaults are open to receive his deposits 
of manure or of labor, and quick to pay them 
out whenever he presents his check in the pro¬ 
per form. But the day is gone when he can 
reap where he has not sown, and take meal from 
the mill to which he has carried no grist. 
It is just this fact that makes the lessons of 
the Old World the most important of all for us 
to study. There is no danger that we shall 
yield any point in which we arc superior to 
them, and we can only hope for benefit from 
the adoption into our system of economies 
which they have learned in the dear and tedious 
school of experience. If we could combine 
what is good in the two systems (so far as our 
costly labor will allow) we should develop an 
agriculture far beyond what wo can hope to es¬ 
tablish by years of costly experience, and work¬ 
ing out our own agricultural salvation. 
The one thing that has impressed me every¬ 
where is the very close economy that is prac¬ 
ticed—economy of land, of manure, of food, of 
everything in fact but labor, which is almost a 
drug in this teeming land. The first half-hour’s 
railroading from Liverpool to Chester is 
through an almost uninterrupted park. Every 
foot of the company’s domain is made to pro¬ 
duce something of value—either beauty about 
the frequent stations, or food on the slopes of 
the cuts and embankments between them. 
Nothing is wasted; grass, roots, vines, flowers, 
shrubs, something that can give pleasure or 
supply food, is made to take possession of land 
which with us is devoted to mullein and goose- 
grass, and dust and hideous ugliness. In Lon¬ 
don, the cleanly and the magnificent, the metro¬ 
polis of the world, men and boys with dust-pans 
and brushes sweep up and save every ounce of 
manure that falls on the more crowded streets. 
On the banks of the lovely Moselle, where one 
hundred and fifty miles of vineyards climb to 
the tops of the legend-clad hills, every spot 
where the sun can l>e caught is saved and nursed 
like a child. In hundreds of cases I saw a little 
nook of a terrace high, high up the mountain¬ 
side, that was only kept from destruction by a 
solid cemented wall whi.ch was greater in area 
than that of the land it sustained, and there 
would be other little terraces .above and others 
below. If there were room for only a half- 
dozen vines—growing like beans on their little 
poles—they were supported in the same sub¬ 
stantial way as where a hundred or a thousand 
could be planted. The rule seems to be, “If 
you have a good thing, no matter how small, 
make the most of it,” and its application might 
be traced over every acre of tolerable land that 
I have seen, away up among the Alps, or where 
the sea can be kept out only with dykes and 
pumps, and it is the value of this rule which we 
most need to learn. 
Of course our circumstances are not the same. 
Our system grew up under the influence of 
cheap land and dear labor, and theirs under the 
opposite; but it should be remembered that in 
our Eastern States land is fast increasing in 
value, and that we are making our labor every 
year more effective by the aid of machinery. 
Furthermore, we formerly had a soil so rich 
that the most careless treatment sufficed for the 
production of good crops. With most of us 
this condition has passed. The land has grown 
poor, and we work over large areas for small 
returns. We need a closer economy of labor 
(more thorough cultivation) and more manure 
on less laud. That is, we need to follow more 
nearly the customs iu vogue here, making up 
for the difference in the price of labor by the 
use of our more efficient machinery, and of the 
further fact that in America a man docs more 
work in a day than in Europe—he is quicker 
and stronger, because living in a better climate 
and eating better food. Instead of a gang of 
women, fed on bread and cheese, plodding 
slowly up a mountain-side with baskets of ma¬ 
nure on their backs, we have one meat-fed man 
with a grain-fed team carrying more in a day at 
a less aggregate cost. 80 far as I can see, the 
circumstances are all in our favor. All we 
[FebruAbt, 
need is to couple our efficiency with their eco¬ 
nomy, and we shall develop, even on our worn- 
out soils, a better system of farming than ha3 
been attained here—except in England, where 
I suspect that they are iu nearly all respects 
ahead of us. 
To-morrow I start for the island of Jersey, 
where I shall try to learn something.that will 
be of practical value to my readers, and then I 
shall give some time to the better farming of 
England and Holland. 
I wish that some of my “solid-color and full- 
black-points” friends could have been with me 
in southern Germany and northern Italy. I saw 
there thousands of oxen and cows of such 
coloring as would have delighted their eyes. 
They were the most uniform lot I ever saw, steel- 
gray iu color, with black switches and black 
feet, and with the real “Jersey” fillet of mealy 
gray around their muzzles. Put on the markets 
of New York and Philadelphia they would have 
brought round prices as Jersey cattle; yet as 
dairy animals they are as poor as any scrub in 
New England, and clearly prove that this fancy 
coloring is not necessarily an indication of prac¬ 
tical value. It does not prove that the coloring 
is an indication of bad quality; this is fully ac¬ 
counted for by the fact that the giving of milk 
is only an incident of their duties. First and 
foremost they are beasts of burden. Many a 
farmer in Europe does all his plowing and road- 
teaming with his cows, working singly iu thills, 
or in pairs to the pole, as the case may be, and 
their development shows the effect of such 
treatment. They are heavy-shouldered and 
light-quartered, and their little udders give but 
a scanty and brief flow of milk. A peasant 
woman near the Moselle who showed me her 
dairy, said her cows gave her but little butter, 
as they had to work them like horses. The 
butter, too, was of poor quality when compared 
with that from cows kept for the dairy alone. 
I was sorry not to be able to investigate the 
irrigation in northern Italy. It is evidently a 
most completely engineered system, and it com¬ 
prises the whole of the country that lies within 
reach of the streams flowing from the moun¬ 
tains. It was easy to see, even from the car- 
windows, that it had developed a most pros¬ 
perous agriculture throughaut the whole land. 
Large houses and barns and a heavy working 
force of men and teams seemed to be the rule, 
and the deep and thorough cultivation of the 
land surprised me. The ground was evidently 
being prepared for the spring planting, and on 
every farm the work was being done by teams 
of from 10 to 14 oxen, and from 15 to 25 men 
beside the drivers. The plows were very large, 
though of rude construction, and they were 
drawn to a great depth. Iti each furrow there 
followed the gang of men with spades, who dug 
out and threw on to the top of the turned land 
a good spit of the subsoil. If such general 
prosperity would in our case follow the adop¬ 
tion of this deep cultivation and a complete 
system of irrigation, we should lose no time in 
turning our attention to it. With our improved 
plows, we could dispense with one half the 
team and with all the spading. So far as I 
could judge, all the manure used is applied to 
the grass land, where it develops a richness of 
sod that suffices for the production of rousing 
crops where it is plowed under fo.r grain, though 
the growth of both the grain and the grass is 
immensely aided by the fertilizing flow of water 
from the hills. 
