Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 155 
true, as I have been assured, that farmers sometimes leave their 
cattle a week without water, they commit a sin that like forked 
lightning, strikes two ways, toward heaven and toward earth. 
There are three or four-fifths of the work for a good crop which 
a farmer must do; the remaining fifth, upon which the complete 
success of the whole depends, he may or may not do. Here is the 
point of wisdom, of economy, in putting the time of sowing the 
seed, and the method of cultivation in such harmony that a full 
crop shall, if possible, be realized. Failure in method, failure in 
nice touches of skill, waste half the work that goes before them. 
An obvious instance of this adjustment of labor to the right time 
is seen in the gathering of crops. Why. should that timothy, which 
was brought me last fall, have lost twenty or thirty per cent of value 
by being cut too late? It was sheer, inexcusable waste to turn 
toothsome and nutritious hay into straw and wood-fibre in this 
way. Why should it have lost another ten or twenty per cent of 
value by being allowed, in part, to mould in spite of its hard, dry, 
fibrous quality, and so, not merely to rob the horses that fed on it 
of their pleasures, but to endanger their health? If the hay 
throughout the country, in many places the most important crop, 
were subjected to rigorous examination, it would disclose an aston¬ 
ishing amount of negligence and thoughtlessness—faults sure to 
reappear in the stock fed upon it. The degree in which we miss 
that economy, that skill, which commands the largest return in 
crops for labor, is seen in contrasting the yield in wheat in this 
country with that in Europe. We so fail nature, that, in spite of 
all her prodigal gifts, our English cousins leave us out of sight in 
the race of intelligent husbandry. The average produce of wheat 
per acre, in Michigan, is 11 bushels; New York, 14 bushels; Ohio, 
15 bushels; England, 20 bushels, with a maximum produce of 60 
bushels. 
It is almost useless in this region to talk about manure, but at 
this point in farming at large is found the crowning waste of all. 
Farmers, as a rule, will waste manure just as long as they can waste 
it; and, when they begin to save it, their providence is very inade¬ 
quate and incomplete. A farmer’s eye ought to distend and gloat 
over a well-saved manure heap, as holding, buried in it, sacks of 
gold; nay, more than that, his own good sense and fore-sight. No 
man’s brain was ever shoveled in and in, in a well-wrought com- 
