the fence bars half broken and out of place; the summer utensils stored in mid-winter under "the starry canopy;" the "winter gear" under the caves of the barn in mid-summer, alternating between rain and heat; the cattle in the streets or the pasture, as chance may direct, ornamented with face boards, rings and horn-ropes; the horses wearing neck-laces in the shape of twenty pound pokes; the pigs in the corn, and weeds and thistles choking the crops and exhausting the soil, we may safely say that the farmer, if farmer he can be called, who manages such premises, is ignorant and indolent, and will inevitably see the gaunt wolf of poverty staring with his famished eyes in his door, and that all respect, personal, family and public, will die. On the other hand, as the practice of benevolence brings its own sweet pleasure and reward, so order brings the love of order, it augments selfrespect, increases the public esteem, begets industry and the love of labor and knowledge, from which flow those high civic virtues which have exalted the farmer, and honored the State. Let this then be our aim, that whatever is done, that it be well done. Philosophers may study the true, the beautiful, and the good, in all departments of nature and art; but the farmer must do it in the nice adaptation of means to ends, in the tasteful with the useful, in the laying out of yards and lots, in the disposition of shade, orchards, gardens, and buildings; and so, while he studies the tasteful, he enhances the value of his estate. All these things act and re-act in their effects upon himself and his family, and render home, sweet home indeed. Surround your farm-houses and buildings with shade and shrubbery, with fruit trees, vines and flowers, and make home handsome, as well as happy; and as life advances, hold daily converse with the garden, the orchard, and the delightful things of nature planted by your labor, trained by your hand and cultivated by your taste; and, above all things, do not in age abandon these simple delights, these old familiar friends, to tread the busy haunts of men, to retire to country villages to rust away in bar-rooms and country stores, for your hearts will live to long once more for its old associations, and to learn that and that "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, "There is society where none intrudes." With regard to Agriculture, it is simply and strictly speaking, "field cultivation," and the science consists in obtaining from the field the best attainable crop with the least expense and without exhaustion of the soil. Principles are sometimes best illustrated, and oftentimes are rendered more forcible, and as a consequence are better remembered by what is called "a reduction to an absurdity." If a farmer have a clay-bottom field, in good part covered with water, well adapted for raising frogs for a French café or saloon, and should sow it in grain, he would be esteemed a lunatic. And so, if a farmer have a field with a rich clay soil, and should plow it when wet and sow it in grain, with the furrows lying in lumps and sunbaked until the field much resembled the bottom of an old brick-kiln, and expect any profit on his crop, he might, justly perhaps, be esteemed a simple degree wiser than in the former example; and so, if not a lunatic, his neighbors might be excused for suing out a writ of inquiry concerning his lunacy. And again, if a farmer have a field of sand growing an occasional redtop and plenty of sorrel, and holding water no better than a seive, and should expect good crops from its cultivation, without improvement, his expectations would be blasted and his labor thrown away. Without proceeding further, let us say, that to all this absurdity, bad farming, on such soils, more or less approximates-the good farmer corrects both extremes. The richest soil here is clay, the warmest and best soil to work is loam, the poorest soil is sand; and by the mixture of clay and sand loam is made. A Roman once sent from Byzantium, in Africa, to the Emperor Nero at Rome, a stool of wheat, having three hundred and forty heads from a sin gle grain or seed. He assured the emperor "that it grew in a clay soil that was so hard, when dry, that strong oxen could not plow it, but which, after a rain, he had seen opened by a share drawn by a wretched ass on one side, and an old woman on the other." This shows the richness of clay soils; it illustrates their tenacity when dry, and the difficulty of their cultivation in such a state. This hardness is because the water escapes from the soil by evaporization and not by drainage. There is no land better than good clay land, if well drained, and nothing but coarse sand more uncertain if not drained. It will pay for drainage in the greater ease of cultivation, and in the certainty and enhanced quantity of its produce in a few years. If well drained and deeply plowed, there is little to be apprehended from the baking of the soil. It was suggested to me this morning by our guest, Mr. Whittlesey, on the stand, the president of the Franklin county society, that deep plowing of clay fields was the next thing to draining, as it greatly enhanced the capacity of the field to absorb an excess of water, and for the same reason to better resist a drouth. I have heretofore, also, turned your attention to the same thing. In China, they compel females to wear an iron shoe. The growth of the foot is arrested thereby, the human organism cannot expand, strong and vital as it is, and the foot is a deformity. The man who does not drain his clay fields, when he has a wet spring and a hot summer, puts an iron shoe on the foot-stalk of every plant in his fields. His timothy will stand in bunches, stalks and heads, without bottom grass; his corn will be of half height, yellow and sickly; and all his crops are wearing iron shoes. Iron when cold contracts, and when hot expands; clay reverses this order, and when cold expands and disintegrates, and we therefore plow it in autumn; when hot clay contracts, and it will kill almost any grain by its contraction, if the seed be not altogether lost by the inability of the plant to penetrate it. Two things are essential to the proper cultivation of clay fields: 1st. They must be drained. This is a primary and absolute necessity for ease of culture and certainty of a crop. 2d. The soil must be disintegrated, or divided, and this can be done after drainage, permanently by sand, or temporarily by coarse manures. When your field lies in furrows, take a load of sand from the sandy portion, and spread it on the clay portions, and in returning take a load of clay and spread from where you drew the sand, and thus you are drawing physical manure one way, and physical and chemical manure the other. You are making loam, and though a slow process, yet if you interchange the surface of but two acres per year, you have two acres fitted for corn, potatoes, hops or barley, none of which would have grown there before with any certainty of success, and your two acres of land are doubled in value for anything, and doubled for all time to come. Coarse manures have the same mechanical effect on clay-fields, and fine manures on sandy fields; but it seems a waste to expend such manures on sandy fields unless mixed with clay, so as to arrest both the drainage of the manures and the escape of their gases. In the early days of Rome, each citizen had six acres of land alloted to him by the State and no more (English measure), which he was obliged to cultivate as his farm. Kings and emperors, in those days, were farmers, and cultivation was carried to a high degree of perfection. If I remember rightly, and as this allusion but this moment occurs to me, any scholar may correct it if wrong, when Quintius Cincinnatus was called by the Senate to be the Dictator of Rome, he was found plowing on his farm, which consisted of only four Roman acres, or about three and one-third acres of our measure. By the plow and horse hoe we can cultivate more. In this county, however, we require but a few acres on each farm for hoe culture. It is a waste of time, of treasure and of life, to hoe undrained, wet and clammy clay-fields, or dry sand. Let the fields first be made right, and then plant in faith, for God prospers intelligence, and blesses those farmers only who regard in their agriculture his natural laws. We have much land in this county requiring the treatment described, but more particularly requiring drainage. We have, besides these soils, large tracts which require other treatment-mixed soils they may be called-light on the surface and clay below, and if by plowing twelve inches deep the clay subsoil can be brought into the light surface soil, no better treatment nor cheaper manure can be had. An Englishman, by the name of Tull, greatly distinguished himself in agriculture during the last century, and gave great impulse to the science. He assumed as a theory what was false in fact, though wonderful then in its practical effect, that plants took into their roots minute portions of the soil and assimilated them, and that, as a necessary consequence, the farmer must plow deep, and render his soil mellow and fine, so that the roots could take in the soil. His splendid crops proved his practice most excellent, but did not prove his theory. It may be a misfortune to some farmers that the theory was not literally true; for then they might feel compelled to that thorough cultivation which they now neglect. But, on a whole acre of land, the crop rarely takes over 500 pounds of the soil, and this by means of solution; the balance is taken from rains, gases, dews and the atmosphere. But the amount of growth depends on the capacity of the plant to absorb, and the power of absorption depends on the growth and extent of the roots; and how are the roots to extend and present the necessary ducts or absorbents, and make the necessary leaves, unless farmers do as Mr. Tull did, make the soil fine so that the roots can expand and grow, that the soil may hold moisture and better dissolve what salts and earthy food the roots absorb and the plants require? Thus it is to be seen, that Mr. Tull's practice was correct, whatever his theory; and here lies the secret of growth and cultivation-the bed of the root made deep and fine, the soil naturally, or made artificially by manures and mixture of soils, so as to hold moisture and to furnish the plant its food and gases. These things done, and the plant protected from weeds, the farmer may confidently anticipate good crops. The ancient Greek who told his son that a fortune was hidden under his fields, to be found only by careful digging, had as good a theory as Mr. Tull; and, as you are all aware, the son found the pot of gold; but it was when he sold his crops. You have heard and read much, undoubtedly, on the subject of analytical chemistry in its application to agriculture. By chemical process the plant is analyzed, and its constituent parts, so to speak, discovered; and thus is found the food it draws from the soil, and thereby is shown also what kind of manure should be applied to restore the soil. Such is the theory; but so few can analyze the soils with certainty, and such various soils are presented in the same fields, that it is apprehended that in the present state of the science, the farmer may much better devote himself to synthetical chemistry in agriculture-that is to say, to making, mixing and applying manures as the appearance of his soils, the nature of his crops and his previous experience may dictate, carefully noting and preserving the results as experiments; thus preserving, widening and improving his experience, and, in the mean time, gather such hints from analytical experiments published in the agricultural journals as he can, and be guided in his synthetical or manuring course thereby, as nearly as may be convenient and possible. We have but little time here to devote to mere experiment. Give us drained fields, deep and fine cultivation, rotation of crops, and occasional resting of the field in grass, a careful saving of all the manure of the farm and a judicious application of it to the hard places, and we shall soon be able to indulge ourselves in the study of analytical chemistry, and in the purchase of special manures. Lime and plaster of Paris, or gypsum, are in the reach of most of our farmers, and on mixed and light soils pay well. The clay of this county has abundance of lime; and further, lime on our clay soils would be of no use, save as a disintegrator, for which sand would be as well and much cheaper. Before leaving the subject of cultivation altogether, permit me to detain you a few moments on the subject of the grass crop. Its importance requires no comment. While of no direct value compared with cotton or corn, in the matter of foreign commerce, or in buying foreign gold or merchandize, yet, in an indirect and domestic sense, it is valuable beyond estimate. By the melting of the snows in the winter of 1862, and the freezing of the waters on the meadows, followed by a dry and hot summer, many farmers of this county found their hay crop destroyed last season. Now, when your pastures and meadows showed a large part of the turf destroyed on the melting of the snows, did you expect a full crop on those fields when half of the grass roots were gone? Was there a farmer in the county who took the precaution to re-stock those barren places, or blighted meadows, that spring? And when summer followed, showing no hay, and a still further destruction of the roots by drought, how many of you let the same halfstocked meadows run to this year, and are now complaining that your old meadows have done nothing, and that you have again but a partial crop? Does any farmer wait for his potato fields to re-stock themselves by their last year's balls? Does he rely on the winter wheat that shells in harvest as seed for his next crop? Is he intending to let his meadows lie idle until his timothy comes of itself, or until those scattered roots can cover the ground by stooling, or by scattering seed? We not unfrequently have winters, and sometimes late frosts, which destroy our meadows; and I submit, when a farmer meets this misfortune if he had not better put his plows into such fields forthwith? He may expect disappointment if he takes any other course. It does not pay, gentleman, to cut but a ton of hay to the On the value of meadow land in this county, there is an interest and tax account of about three dollars an acre per year; and such a yield will rarely pay beyond the interest, taxes and expenses. It is vastly cheaper to take eighteen tons of hay from six acres, than to cover eighteen acres to get the same produce; and it is easy, and entirely feasible, to get three tons per acre from most of the clay or mixed soil meadows of this county. All you get above one ton per acre, may be called profit; but if you get no more than that per acre, it will not pay day's wages, either by consumption, or sale at the usual prices. acre. Allusion was made to the rotation of crops; and on this point let me remark, that no other system is esteemed worthy of pursuit in England, and it is the correct system with us. Certain it is, that before a meadow is laid down, the soil should be in fine tilth; and this can hardly be effected by a single crop. The soil should not lie uncovered, for it loses as much or more than by cropping; and for that reason, summer fallowing is now discontinued among all farmers who have any knowledge of scientific farming. It becomes necessary, therefore, to have a course of cultivation, which in England is usually of four years. It is requisite that different crops follow each other; otherwise the soil might become exhausted of some element, and the last crops without change would prove a failure. Hence a rotation, or change of crops, is now universally adopted, of which one is usually a hoed crop. In reading on the subject of European, and particularly of English cultivation, the farmer should steadily bear in mind the great difference in climate, and found no important or expensive operations on English prac tice or results, save with those modifications rendered necessary by differ ences of soil and climate; and these, can only be determined safely and surely by experimental operations or trials, which should be, at first, on a small scale. These remarks apply with much force also to the agriculture of the western parts of this State, where there is a marked difference in soil and climate from our own. Thousands have paid dearly to learn these facts, in purchasing fruit trees from that part of the State, and transplant ing and losing them here. Even many of the varieties which flourish well and are highly esteemed there, are of no use whatever here. These things should all be borne in mind in perusing the agricultural journals of the |
