50 
THE CULTIVATOR. 
finished and complete for thrashing. For those requiring one 
horse power, the price is less, and for those requiring the strength 
of three horses, the pricee is proportionately increased. 
JBoth of the machines above spoken of do their business well and 
with despatch, but the preference is generally given to Allen’s. It 
is certainly an excellent instrument, and is extensively used. It 
thrashes quick and clean, and I think promises to be durable. I 
found that my men would thrash out 100 sheaves with it in from 10 
to 15 minutes, and remove the straw; but the machine was stopped 
when the 100 sheaves were thrashed, to clean up the floor and to 
throw more from the mow. This last operation took up as much 
time as the thrashing. With a sufficiency of hands and a relief of 
horses, I think from 1,500 to 2,000 sheaves of wheat or oats might 
be thrashed during a day, and not hurry much—but in any event, 
hurry or not, the grain would be thrashed clean : if there was loss 
it would be in the carelessness of the men, in not raking out the 
straw carefully. If the machine is not too much hurried, the work 
is not hard for two horses, as mine seldom sweat; but they were al¬ 
ways rested at the end of thrashing 100 sheaves. There can be no 
complaint that the machine does not work fast enough. The great¬ 
est labor is to remove and house the straw. To thrash off your 
grain as quick as you are enabled to, is one of the disadvantages of 
a machine ; the straw is, in a measure, wasted, scattered and lost, 
and the farmer finds that he is minus at the end of the year several 
loads of manure. By slow thrashing this is avoided; then it is gra¬ 
dually thrown into the barn yard, becomes soaked with offals, and 
trod under foot by the cattle—the consequence is a good rich bed 
of manure at the end of the year. It is not so when the crop is 
thrashed off at once in the fall. The large quantity of straw col¬ 
lected in heaps around the barn is too often suffered to remain as it 
is thrown out, and becomes rotten straw, but not good manure. If 
some better plan of managing the straw to convert it into manure is 
not adopted, the introduction of thrashing machines will ultimately 
be an injury. 
Another disadvantage inthe use of the thrashing machine is, that 
cattle do not eat the straw as readily as when the grain is thrashed 
out by the tread of horses; the machine beats off the blade and 
leaves the straw hard and stiff and it is only when they can get no¬ 
thing else that they will touch it. The farmer can obviate the dif¬ 
ficulty of wasting his straw from thrashing his grain at once, by 
mowing it or scattering it carefully in his yard, and perhaps he can 
the second, by sprinkling it with salt, so that the cattle would eat it 
readily. These two objections overcome, and the thrashing ma¬ 
chine is all that we could reasonably desire it. There is a great ad¬ 
vantage in being enabled tu get your gram to market in a short 
time; you can commonly obtain the highest price for it; and this to 
a farmer is an important consideration. For the last six years I 
have taken as accurate a note of this loss as possible, as in that 
time I have sometimes had a machine and sometimes not. My es¬ 
timate would be 75 cents an acre for the size of my farm: at least it 
has operated so with me, and the loss has been, that when 1 have 
thrashed my grain in the ordinary way, the process was so slow that 
it was never ready for sale at the proper time, and sometimes, which 
is always bad policy, had to be kept over. The saving of time, to a 
farmer, is a great consideration, and is one of the great benefits he 
derives from the use of this instrument. When the spring comes 
he is then ready for the labor of the season; his old crop is entirely 
out of the way, and he can devote his whole time towards the at¬ 
tainment of another; besides, during the winter, from the time gain¬ 
ed by the use of the thrashing machines, he has collected all the ma¬ 
terials for his fencing and fire wood, done off all his chores, and his 
necessary visiting, so that during the summer season he can with 
ease keep ahead of his work, and have every thing done in due sea¬ 
son—the gain in this way is at least equal to the gain in the increas¬ 
ed price of the grain sold, so that he is twice paid for the cost of his 
thrashing machine. Such a man requires hire less during the sea¬ 
son, and makes a saving that way, while at the same time he keeps 
his farm in the best possible order. The life of the farmer is at 
best a busy one, but when he gets behind his work, it is very slav¬ 
ish and unpleasant. So much for the advantages and disadvantages 
of the thrashing machine; but we will sum up and say it is upon 
the whole a decided improvement. A. 
PASTURES. 
It is now a well settled opinion, among good farmers, that lands, 
generally, cannot be profitably improved, for a course of years, ei¬ 
ther for meadow or tillage crops alone ; but that the product and 
profits in both cases are materially increased, by changing from one 
to the other alternately. Constant tillage exhausts more than the 
manure of the farm can restore; while in the meadows the burthen 
of the hay annually diminishes, the soil becomes compact and hard, 
the benign influence of heat and air are partially excluded from it, 
the finer grasses run out, and their place is naturally usurped by 
moss and a stinted herbage. Besides, alternation seems to be among 
the primary laws of nature. We all know the importance of alter¬ 
nating our tillage crops; that a field will not carry the same grain, 
or kind of roots, two or more years in succession, without great ex¬ 
pense in manuring, or constant diminution in product; and that mea¬ 
dows, after two or three years from being laid down manifestly de¬ 
crease in their product. 
The same law that renders alternation of grain and grass essen¬ 
tial, applies with equal force to our pastures, although the opinion 
has prevailed, and with most persons is still popular, that old pas¬ 
tures are the best. To satisfy any farmer of the error of this opi¬ 
nion, let him appropriate an acre of old, and an acre of new pasture, 
recently laid down, to hay. If the land is of similar quality, he will find, 
that the new will give him two, three, and probably four times as much 
hay as the old. The same difference that we find in the hay, must exist 
in the pasture. The disparity appears not only in the quantity but 
in the quality and duration. From the soil being more permeable to 
heat and air, the active agents of vegetable decomposition and nu¬ 
trition, the grass starts earlier in the spring, when in most demand, 
and continues to grow longer in autumn, in the new than in the old 
pasture. The plough and the harrow, and a change of crops, are as 
necessary to renovate pasture as they are to renovate meadow 
grounds. In noticing the modern system of Scotch farming in a re¬ 
cent work, we observed that on a farm of 500 acres, there was not 
an acre of grass, in pasture or meadow, which had been laid down 
more than two years. 
As pertinent to the subjecl, we make the following extracts from 
a communication of Mr. Main, in the March No. of the Edinburgh 
Quarterly Journal of Agriculture. B. 
w Struck, when a boy, with delight at the evergreen meadows of 
Doncaster, and the freshness, in the dead of winter, of the fields 
near London, I could not, in settling in the north, help contrasting 
these—with a feeling almost bordering on disgust—with our whity- 
brown grass parks of Scotland, wearing, in many places, a pale blue 
tint till the beginning of June, or puffed off in the newspapers, as af¬ 
fording “ a full bite” in the middle of May. I said to myself, “ can¬ 
not industry and exertion produce a rhangc in our grass lands? 
Perhaps we cannot expect to vie with Doncaster or London, but still 
something may be done.’ So doffing the gay soldier’s coat, and 
putting on the hodded grey, I set to work, to try if fine pasture could 
not be got in Scotland. Long did I toil at top-dressing,—all the 
never-failing, oft recommended recipes of this compound and that 
compound, I tried in vain,—peat-earth in all the varied shapes of 
mixture with lime and dung, soot, composts with scrapings of ditches 
or other matter—all these 1 tried in various ways. I exhausted the 
pharmacopeia of agricultural quacks; and soon found out, that with¬ 
out the aid of plough and harrow, nothing could be done—in other 
words, that the ground must be put in good heart before you can 
have good grass. 
“ Well, that being done, I had fine grass ; but it grew bad again ; 
it was not fine permanent pasture. I had recourse, once more, to the 
old system of top-dressing, and of course improved the pasture, but 
again it fell off. By this time I had before my eyes the palpable fact, 
that new laid down grass was good, and that, do what I would, old 
grass could not be made to bring the same rent.” 
“ It appears to me, that only on certain soils and situations, that 
pasture can be allowed to remain without great loss; that such situ- 
tions are flat meadows, or the neighborhood of rivers or streams, 
rich in alluvial soil, and the natural habitat of the pasture plants, or 
in the vicinity of large towns, where manure has been applied till 
the ground could not bring a grain crop to maturity; and that on all 
other situations, recourse must be had to the plough, as soon as a 
failure in the grass crop takes place ; and the breaking up will en¬ 
tirely depend on the quality of the land and manner in which it has 
been treated, there being no such tru e unerring guide to the quality 
of the land, as the length of time it can be profitably left in pasture.” 
“ Little need be said on the unprofitableness of old pasture to the ac¬ 
tual farmer. There is little old grass to be found on the farm of a 
man who has rent to pay. Have you never remarked the diffe- 
