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Wisconsin state agricultural society. 
the improvement was slow. But as the avenues of communication 
between the farmers became practical, farmers increased, the im¬ 
provement became more rapid, and the success or failure of this or 
that method became the common knowledge of the whole. The ab¬ 
surdity of depending on a single crop, the constant and further ex¬ 
haustion of the soil without some compensating return to it as a 
fertilizer, the growing of scrub, or inferior stock at a positive loss, 
and other like methods, are fast becoming things of the past, and 
farmers are becoming better acquainted with the necessities and re¬ 
quisites of their calling. 
Improvement and progress are the watchword and reply, and the 
farmer who will not take heed to his own experience and that of 
others had better change his occupation at once, for improved 
agriculture will produce more and cheaper, and undersell him in 
the markets, and at better profits. As this is the “ Centennial 
year ” of our national independence, a slight retrospective view of 
agriculture, then as compared with it now, may not be amiss. 
Our revolutionary forefathers plowed their lands, not as the old 
Romans with their oxen hitched to a crooked limb of a tree to 
loosen up the soil; no, not they; for they had wrought the tree into 
a wooden plow with a trifle of iron on the lower edge of the mold- 
board fora lay; and fancy to yourselves the sturdy yeoman of that 
period with his fine wooden plow, how he must have felt elated that 
he was not compelled to do as Romans did, tie the yoke to the 
oxen’s horns and use a crooked limb for a plow while he was mark¬ 
ing out the boundaries of Rome. Compare the wooden plow that 
that brave old war-worn veteran, General Putnam, was ploughing 
with when he heard the first gun of the revolution, with the hardened 
and brightly-polished steel plow of to-day, that cleaves and turns 
the soil of Wisconsin, and we have some idea of the improvement 
in tools for the use of agriculture that has been made in one 
hundred years. 
Again we may only go back half of that period to find the farmer 
stooping, and with the sickle in his hand gather in his sheaves by 
the slow and toilsome progress of reaping. But now the stately 
reaper goes forth into the ripening grain and the harvest is rapidly 
gathered in. Then our forefathers threshed their grain by that 
slow and tiresome process, the flail. Now the thresher and often 
the steam-thresher does the work, and it devours the sheaves of 
