408 Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. 
tleman assured me that the best cows he had selected for milk, and 
then he raised a sort of breed from them, crossing the Durham, and 
the Ayrshire, and that they were, for dairy-cows, far better than 
either of those breeds for butter and cheese. A gentleman in the 
village of Clinton was offered $225 an acre for two hundred acres. 
He had twenty acres of orchard which he assured me vrould pay 
the interest on $2,500 per acre. Now, with our cheap lands, we 
can raise four bushels of corn to their one, although they raise 
more than we do to the acre, but they cultivate a great deal more; 
they don’t throw their manure out of their barn. They have plenty 
of water; they have land they have pastured for sixty or seventy 
years. The} 7 do this by keeping the land in grass and making an 
immense amount of manure. They are also all thrifty, economical 
people. They have turkeys to sell, and also some fat cattle to turn 
out. They are all in good circumstances, although the iron inter¬ 
est in the town was depressed. I observed one fact, that most all of 
those farmers that lived there when I was a boy, had sold out and 
gone to the village. Their young men were going around town 
telling smutty stories; the daughters were spending their time 
thrumming on a six or seven hundred dollar piano. Nearly all the 
men I knew in my boyhood had moved into the village; some had 
gone into speculation, some had got rich, and some had lost all of 
their money. The men from England who came there poor owned 
the lands. By raising hops, and keeping cattle, and raising grass, 
they have kept up the fertility of the land. Our lands are deterio¬ 
rating; land that produced thirty bushels to the acre in 1860, now 
will not produce ten. 
Mr. Peffer: I was very much interested in the paper read just 
now, and I find it mentioned that where there are the most people, 
and the most productive soils, it is not alone enriched by the grass. 
These lands mentioned must, from necessity, support a large pop¬ 
ulation. The sugar-beet cultivation came into existence from that 
cause. They have to enrich their soils to such an extent that they 
can support that population. I came from the old country myself 
when I was a boy. At those times, in most of the agricultural por¬ 
tions of the country, the manner of enriching the soil was by rais¬ 
ing clover and grass, and by irrigation. From that they went to 
raising plants that produced oils; they made oil-cake for fattening 
their stock, and enriched the ground in that way. They also cov- 
