1868.] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST 
137 
is faith—faith that leads to good works. He 
has too much hope. He hopes for better luck 
next year—hopes for good crops without using 
the means. I am not so sure, however, that he 
had belter borrow a thousand dollars at 8 per 
cent. It is a high rate of interest, and if he has 
had no experience, he might not expend it with 
judgment and economy. Let him do a little 
this spring, and do it well as far as he goes. The 
result will convince him of the advantages of 
draining, and next spring he will do more, and 
he will not stop till the whole farm is drained. 
If everybody should farm right, and raise 
large crops, we should hardly find a market for 
them. But there is no danger. Our productions 
do not keep pace with our population. Farming 
is not popular. And those who' stick to the 
land, and bend all their energies to increase its 
productiveness, have every prospect of abundant 
success. Good farming will pay. 
“Does it pay me ?” I did not say I was a good 
farmer. I mean to be. I do not preach one 
thing, and practice another—an}' more than I 
can help! But supposing I did not make it pay, 
what would it prove? One of the newspapers 
recently said that I “ had succeeded in applying 
science to Agriculture in a common-sense way, 
and in making it pay." I have never said so, 
publicly or privately. The man who wrote the 
above sentence does not know much about 
farming, or he would not have been so willing 
to assume as true what he could have no means 
of knowing, and what is so improbable in itself. 
It would require pretty conclusive evidence to 
make me believe that any purely scientific man 
had made farming pay. Watts would never 
himself have succeeded in manufacturing steam 
engines with profit. It was his partner’s busi¬ 
ness talents that gave him his fortune. One of 
the very ablest agricultural chemists of the age 
once told me that he did not believe he himself 
could make farming pay. He was at the time, 
and had been for years, engaged in making ex¬ 
periments in agriculture. Had he known less 
of fanning, he would not have been so modest. 
Whenever a man talks flippantly of the great 
pleasure and profit of farming, of its comfort 
and independence, of its freedom from care and 
anxiety, of the great respect he has for the 
“honest, hard-fisted tillers of the soil,” set him 
down as a flatterer or a fool. This matter ought 
to be understood, more especially as the subject 
of agricultural education is now attracting much 
attention. It will not be long before every State 
has its Agricultural College. We ought not to 
ask or expect too much from them, or we shall 
be disappointed. The farms connected with 
them cannot and will not pay. 
Some time ago, I was reported as saying that 
we wanted young men of capital, intelligence, 
and enterprize, who should engage in farming 
with a determination to make it pay. If I said 
so, I spoke thoughtlessly, for it is not my idea 
at all. We want intelligent, educated men who 
love farming , and who are determined to adopt 
it as the business of their lives, and who shall 
follow it with all the skill and science and 
energy they can command. A manufacturer 
who should engage in making woolen goods 
with a determination to make it pay, would 
probably soon furnish nothing but shoddy. A 
grocer whose only object was profit would be 
tempted to give us more peas than coffee. And 
the young man wflio engages in farming, deter¬ 
mined to make it pay, will probably skin his 
land, or advertise “ Japan Spring Wheat that 
will yield 60 bushels per acre,” or go into the 
chicken business, or sell grades for thorough¬ 
breds. Ordinary farming is too slow a business 
for such a man. He would soon be driving 
round with every patent-right man who visited 
the neighborhood, and would wind up as a sec¬ 
ond class politician or a horse jockey. 
All the eminent farmers I have ever known 
or read of have been men who were willing to 
wait. Jonas Webb began fanning in 1822, 
when he was 26 years old. He immediately 
commenced improving his flock of sheep by se¬ 
lecting and purchasing the best he could find; 
but it was not until 1840 that he took his first 
prize at the Royal Fair. For eighteen years he 
worked quietly and patiently, but energetically 
and hopefully. Had he been “determined to 
make farming pay,” we should never have heard 
of Jonas Webb. He aimed at improving his 
farm and improving his stock, and in the end 
honors and wealth flowed in upon him freely. 
I am inclined to think the root of all roots for 
this climate is the Parsnip. It can be sown 
earlier than any other, and is thus in full posses¬ 
sion of the soil before the usual period of drouth, 
and suffers but little. The crop requires far less 
labor in weeding than the carrot. Sow in rows 
two feet apart, and use the cultivator between 
the rows. If the land is ridged, and the seed 
drilled in on the ridges, it will greatly lessen the 
labor of hoeing and weeding. And indeed this 
is true of all root crops. But the trouble is that 
our machines for drilling in the seed are ill 
adapted for the operation. We need a good 
double-mould board plow for making the ridges, 
and a drill that will sow two rows at a time, 
with a roller in front to press down the ridges, 
and a lighter one behind to cover the seed. The 
horse walks between the ridges, and the opera¬ 
tion of sowing is mere child’s play. This is the 
way turnips are raised in England. As soon as 
the plants are up, a light cultivator is run be¬ 
tween the rows, and as the plants are on ridges 
there is no danger of smothering them. Par¬ 
snips are twice as nutritious as rutabagas, and 
three times as nutritious as ordinary turnips; 
and the importance of this fact will be appre¬ 
ciated when we consider how much labor it is 
to handle a heavy crop of roots. I have known 
a crop of late sown white turnips to contain 
only 6 per cent, of dry matter; and our popular 
varieties of rutabagas, such as Skirving’s Im¬ 
proved Purple-top, contain only 10 per cent; 
Mangold wurzel contain from 12 to 14 per 
cent.; Carrots, from 12 to 15 per cent.; Parsnips, 
18 per cent. And the dry matter of the par¬ 
snip is said to be more nutritious than any other 
root. So that if parsnips are preserved in the cel¬ 
lar like other roots, half as much space as is re¬ 
quired by other roots will hold an equal amount 
of nutriment. But this is not all. Parsnips can 
be left in the ground all winter without injury; 
or, if dug in the fill], can be thrown into a pit, 
and covered with a little straw, and they will 
keep perfectly well. So, at least, an experienced 
grower assures me. For these reasons I believe 
the Parsnip will prove to be the great root crop 
of American farmers. The seed is easily raised, 
and farmers should grow' their own, or be care¬ 
ful from wdiom they purchase, as old seed will 
seldom grow. Two pounds is sufficient for an 
acre, but it is best to sow three or four pounds 
unless you are sure that it is good. It is not ex¬ 
pensive, the growers in this section seldom get¬ 
ting more than 40 cents per pound for it. 
“ Why have you such a special spite against 
hen manure ?” asks a friend. Simply because 
people make so much fuss about it. There is 
even now a statement going the rounds of the 
papers to the effect that 100 pounds of hen ma¬ 
nure is worth more than a ton of horse .dung, 
and twice as much as guano. Now r , if you 
feed hens on meat, you will doubtless get rick 
manure. But farmers’ fowls, as usually man¬ 
aged, are fed very little flesh meat. In the win¬ 
ter, they are able to pick up but little animal 
matter in any form, and it is at this period that 
we get the most droppings. From what I know 
of the v r ay in which most fowls are fed in the 
country, I would rather have a ton of good 
Peruvian guano than five tons of hen manure, 
even after it had been pounded and sifted, and 
worked over in the most orthodox manner. 
“What would I do with it?” Use it as w T e do 
other manures. Throw' it into the manure cel¬ 
lar, or put into the manure pile, or compost it 
with muck, leaves, etc., for the garden. 
The Cultivation of Barley. 
Barley is excellent food for horses and for pigs. 
The Arabs seldom feed their horses any other 
grain, and barley meal is the favorite English food 
for fatting hogs. In this country it cannot 
compete with the oat crop for the former pur¬ 
pose, nor with the corn crop for the latter. 
When it brings a low r price, however, it is well 
to recollect that it is a capital food for almost 
all kinds of stock, and can be fed out on the 
farm with advantage. As a general rule, how'- 
ever, it commands a higher price from the malt¬ 
sters than it is worth for food. The price, how¬ 
ever, is subject to greater fluctuations than that 
of almost any other crop we raise. There is no 
export demand for it, except at low rates, and a 
large crop knocks down prices to a point below 
the cost of production. There is no outlet for 
the surplus. This is owing to the fact that the 
quality of our barley does not come up to the 
standard of foreign maltsters. They will not 
buy it at any price, and when exported it is 
used for food or for distilling purposes. At pres¬ 
ent prices, how r ever, it is a highly profitable crop 
to raise on land that gives a good yield. 
Spring barley requires richer and better pre¬ 
pared land than winter wheat. It is useless to 
hope for a good paying crop on land that needs 
draining, or that is poor, or that is full of weeds. 
It must have good culture. Oats do wrnll on 
sod land; barlej', seldom or never. It generally 
follow’s corn or potatoes. It should be sown 
early in the spring, and there is consequently 
no chance to manure it. The manure must be 
used on the previous crops. Artificial manures, 
such as equal parts of guano and superphosphate, 
would probably pay as w r ell on barley as on any 
other farm crop. Sow them broadcast, at the 
rate of 300 pounds per acre, and harrow in be¬ 
fore drilling the seed. At the present price of 
barley, their application on w r ell-prepared land 
would be highly profitable. As barley is gen¬ 
erally followed by winter wheat, special efforts 
should be made either to have the land highly 
enriched for the previous crop of corn or po¬ 
tatoes, or some such manures as the above must 
be used, or the wheat must receive a crossing of 
w r ell-rotted manure. 
If your land is not dry, mellow, clean, and in 
good heart, do not sow it to barlejc It is*a 
w r aste of seed and time to sow T it on w r et, cold, 
lumpy, weedy, poor land. It costs more to 
harvest a poor crop of bailey on cloddy laud 
than it is worth. Oats will do better than bar¬ 
ley, but the best thing to be done under such 
circumstances is to summer fallow, or to plant 
the land again to corn or beans, and cultivate 
thoroughly. There were hundreds of acres of 
