466 
STATE AGEICULTUEAL SOCIETY. 
industry in this region than the farmers, and it is important they should have 
clear views of the best means and wisest policy to that end. 
We greatly overrate the importance of the English grain market. 
When the British corn laws were repealed, the inducement was held out by 
the English, and the hope entertained by our grain growers, that a large mar¬ 
ket would open there for our products. 
But, in twelve years after the repeal of the corn laws, from 1848 to 1860, our 
exports of breadstufifs to England had decreased, in proportion to our popula¬ 
tion, almost thirty per cent, even by English estimate twenty-seven and a half 
per cent. 
During the same years the British imports of grain from this country wera 
only one-fifth their imports from other countries. 
Milwaukee and Chicago of ten send off in ten days more grain and flour than Eng¬ 
land has taken from us each year on the average, for twenty years past. 
The eleven Northwestern States in 1860, produced $900,000,000 worth of 
grain and provisions for consumption and export, of which only $26,000,000 
went to foreign countries, and less than half of that to great Britain, while 
our Eastern States and the South took $190,248,665 worth or more than 
seven and a half times as much as all foreign countries. New England is a 
larger market for us than Old England. The annual average of our exports 
to Great Britain, from 1846 to 1860 inclusive, computed at only $6,048,646. 
Your farming needs great improvement. With change of crops, root cul¬ 
ture, deep ploughing, under-draining, plaster and manure, I doubt not your 
products per acre will vastly increase, and that fruits and other products 
you now find it hard to raise will yield abundantly. You need to plant 
orchards and to have groves of trees growing to shield exposed lands on the 
prairies from the blast of the winter winds. 
All the labor and money spent in this way will be repaid a,hundred fold; 
and it would be timely wisdom if township and county agricultural societies 
would combine on some broad plan for the planting of trees, and perhaps laws 
might be passed for that purpose. But all these improvements, so greatly 
needed, I have little expectation of seeing until you diversify your industry 
and increase your home market. 
Let me warn you of another great change that is coming. The South will 
not only raise their own grain, but compete with you on the seaboard and in 
Europe. That region has so long been looked at as fit only to produce cot¬ 
ton and rice, and sugar, that we forgot its capacity for grain growing. From 
Virginia through to Alabama and Louisiana are great tracts of the finest 
wheat region, capable of producing that grain of the choicest quality, and 
putting it in market in New York or Boston a month earlier than you can, 
and at no more cost. This is beginning already, and it is sure to come, and it 
it is well for you to foresee and prepare for it. 
Its approach should stimulate you anew in your good work of putting farm 
and factory side by side, and should lead you also to look about, and find, if 
possible, some new product, fitted for your soil and climate, that may help 
to keep all right. 
