228 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
to the author of every good and perfect gift; and who have 
greater cause for thankfulness to the good God than the fortunate 
people who occupy this great and magnificent country ? Your 
lines have indeed fallen in pleasant places, and as you survey your 
chosen home, where there lingers scarcely a trace of that primal 
curse which doomed all mankind to eat bread in the sweat of their 
faces — you might well exclaim with the poet— 
“ It is a goodly sight to see 
What Heaven hath done for this delicious land! 
What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! 
What goodly prospects o’er the hills expand! ” 
That veracious traveler, Captain Lemuel Gulliver, in his voyage 
to Brobdignag informs us that while interviewing the King of that 
country, the sagacious monarch remarked, “Whoever could make 
two ears of corn, or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of 
ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of man¬ 
kind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole 
race of politicians put togetherand I hesitate not to give it as 
my opinion that the gentlemen who have devoted themselves in 
this state to the introduction of the noble breeds of stock, which 
you have seen here to day, have done more to benefit your state 
than all your governors, senators and congressmen combined have 
done in the past or will do in the next half century. 
But, while I may riot be able to tell you precisely what you 
ought to do to still farther enhance your prosperity, there are some 
things I shall venture to say that you ought not to do. 
The great mistakes of modern farming, as almost universally 
pursued in the United States, consist in the attempt to obtain con¬ 
tinued crops without suitable return to the soil; the popular ignor¬ 
ance or carelessness concerning the true system of rotation of crops; 
and—last but not the least—the general craving for cultivating 
more land than can be properly attended to. I need not tell you, 
perhaps, what every farmer knows, that the method of cultivation 
habitually pursued in Wisconsin tends directly and speedily to the 
utter impoverishment of the soil. This is demonstrated to the 
most superficial observer by facts too well known to escape notice. 
When I was a boy, the great wheat producing district of the 
country was the Genessee Valley, inthe State of New York. But, 
