What I know of farming:

7. I know that most of us are slashing down our trees most improvidently, and thus compelling our children to buy timber at thrice the cost at which we might and should have grown it. I know that it is wasteful to let White Birch, Hemlock, Scrub Oak, Pitch Pine, Dogwood, etc., start up and grow on lands which might be cheaply sown with the seeds of Locust, White Oak, Hickory, Sugar Maple, Chestnut, Black Walnut, and White Pine. I know that no farm in a settled region is so large that its owner can really afford to surrender a considerable portion of it to growing indifferent cord-wood when it would as freely grow choice timber if seeded therefor; and I feel sure that there are few farms so small that a portion of each might not be profitably devoted to the growing of valuable trees. I know that the common presumption that land so devoted will yield no return for a life-time is wrong – know that, if thickly and properly seeded, it will begin to yield bean-poles, hoop-poles, etc., the fifth or sixth year from planting, and thenceforth will yield more and more abundantly forever. I know that good timber, in any well-peopled region, should not be cut off, but cut out– thinned judiciously but moderately and trimmed up, so that it shall grow tall and run to trunk instead of branches; and I know that there are all about us millions of acres of rocky crests and acclivities, steep ravines and sterile sands, that ought to be seeded to timber forthwith, kept clear of cattle, and devoted to tree-growing evermore.

8. I do not know that all lands may be profitably underdrained. Wooded uplands, I know, could not be. Fields which slope considerably, and so regularly that water never stagnates upon or near their surface, do very well without. Light, leachy sands, like those of Long Island, Southern Jersey, Eastern Maryland, and the Carolinas, seem to do fairly without. Yet my conviction is strong that nearly all land which is to be persistently cultivated will in time be underdrained. I would urge no farmer to plunge up to his neck into debt in order to underdrain his farm. But I would press every one who has no experience on this head to select his wettest field, or the wettest part of such field, and, having carefully read and digested Waring's, French's, or some other approved work on the subject, procure file and proceed next Fall to drain that field or part of a field thoroughly, taking especial precautions against back-water, and watch the effect until satisfied that it will or will not pay to drain further. I think few, have drained one acre thoroughly, and at no unnecessary cost, without being impelled by the result to drain more and faster until they had tiled at least half their respective farms.

9. As to irrigation, I doubt that there is a farm in the United States where something might not be profitably done forthwith to secure advantage from the artificial retention and application of water. Wherever a brook or runnel crosses or skirts a farm, the question – "Can the water here running uselessly by be retained, and in due season equably diffused over some portion of this land?" – at once presents itself. One who has never looked with this now will be astonished at the facility with which some acres of nearly every farm may be irrigated. Often, a dam that need not cost $20 will suffice to hold back ten thousand barrels of water, so that it may be led off along the upper edge of a slope or glade, falling off just enough to maintain a gentle, steady current, and so providing for the application of two or three inches of water to several acres of tillage or grass just when the exigencies of crop and season most urgently require such irrigation. Any farmer east of the Hudson can tell where such an application would have doubled the crop of 1870, and precluded the hard necessity of selling or killing cattle not easily replaced.

Of course, this is but a rude beginning. In time, we shall dam very considerable streams mainly to this end, and irrigate hundreds and thousands of acres from a single pond or reservoir. Wells will be sunk on plains and gentle swells now comparatively arid and sterile, and wind or steam employed to raise water into reservoirs whence wide areas of surrounding or subjacent land will be refreshed at the critical moment, and thus rendered bounteously productive. On the vast, bleak, treeless Plains of the wild West, even Artesian wells will be sunk for this purpose; and the water thus obtained will prove a source of fertility as well as refreshment, enriching the soil by the minerals which it holds in solution, and insuring bounteous crops from wide stretches of now barren and worthless desert. Immigration will yet thickly dot the great Sahara with oases of verdure and plenty; but it will, long ere that, have covered the valleys of our Great Basin and those which skirt the affluents of the savage and desolate Colorado with a beauty and thrift surpassing the dreams of poets. And yet, its easiest and readiest triumphs are to be won right here – in the valleys of the Connecticut, the Hudson, the Susquehanna, and the Potomac.

10. As to Commercial Fertilizers, I think I have been well paid for the application of Gypsum (Plaster of Paris) to my upland grass at the rate of one bushel per acre per annum, while my tillage has been supplied with it by dusting my stables with it after each cleaning, and so applying it mingled with barn-yard manures. Lime (unslaked) from burned oyster-shells, costing me from 25 to 30 cents per bushel delivered, I have applied liberally, and I judge, with profit. Bones, ground, (the finer the better) I have largely and I think advantageously used; but my land had been mainly pastured for nearly two centuries before I bought it, and thus continually drained of Phosphates, yet never replenished: so my experience does not prove that the farmers of newer lands ought to buy bones, though I advise them to apply all they can save or pick up at small cost. Pound them very fine with a beetle or ax-head on a flat stone, and give them to your fowls: if they refuse a part of them, your soil will prove less dainty. I am not sure that it pays to buy any manufactured Phosphate when you can get Raw Bone; though I doubt not that, for instant effect, the Phosphate is far superior. As to Guano, it has not paid me; but that may be the fault of careless or unskillful application. I judge that any one who has to deal with sterile sands that will not bring Clover, may wisely apply 400 pounds of Guano per acre, provided he has nothing else that will answer the purpose. After he has produced one good stand of Clover, I doubt that he can afford to buy more Guano, unless he can apply it to better purpose than I have yet done.

I have a strong impression that most farmers can do better at making and saving fertilizers than by buying them. Lime and Sulphur (Gypsum), if your soil lacks them, you must buy; but a good farmer who keeps even a span of horses, three or four cows, as many pigs, and a score of fowls, can make for $100 fertilizers which I would rather have than two tuns of Guano, costing him $180 to $200. If he has a patch of bog or a miry pond on his farm – any place where frogs will live – he can dig thence, in the dryest time next Fall, two or three hundred loads of Muck, which, having been left to dry on the nearest high ground till November or later, and then drawn up and dumped into his barn-yard, pig-pen, and fowl-house, will be ready to come out next Spring in season for corn-planting, and, being liberally applied, will do as much for his crop as two tons of Guano would, and will strengthen his land far more. If he has no Muck, and no neighbor who can spare it as well as not, let him at midsummer cut all the weeds growing on and around his farm, and in the Fall gather all the leaves that can be impounded, using these as litter for his cattle and beds for his pigs, and he will be agreeably surprised at the bulk of his heap next Spring.

I am an intense believer in Home Production. We send ten thousand miles for Guano, and suffer the equally valuable excretions of our cities to run to waste in rivers and bays, poisoning or driving away the fish, and filling the air with stench and pestilence. No farmer ever yet intelligently tried to enrich his land and was defeated by lack of material. He may not be able to do all he would like to at first; but persistent effort cannot be baffled.

11. Shallow culture is the most crying defect of our average farming. Poverty may sometimes excuse it; but the excuse is stretched quite too far. If a farmer has but a poor span of horses, or a light yoke of thin steers, he cannot plow land as it should be plowed; but let him double teams with his neighbor, and plow alternate clays on either farm; or, if this may not be, let him buy or borrow a sub-soil plow, and go once around with his surface plow, then hitch on to the sub-soil, and run another furrow in the bottom of the former. There are a few intervales of rich, mellow soil, deposited by the inundations of countless ages, where shallow culture will answer, because the roots of the plants run freely through fertile earth never yet disturbed by the plow; but these marked and meagre exceptions do not invalidate the truth that nine-tenths of our tillage is neither so deep nor so thorough as it should be. As a rule, the feeding-roots of plants do not run below the bottom of the furrows, though in some instances they do; and he who fancies that five or six inches of soil will, under our fervid suns, with our Summers often rainless for weeks, produce as bounteous and as sure a crop as twelve to eighteen inches, is impervious to fact or reason. He might as sensibly maintain that you could draw as long and as heavily against a deposit in bank of $500 as against one of $1,500.

12. Finally, and as the sum of my convictions, we need more thought, more study, more intellect, infused into our Agriculture, with less blind devotion to a routine which, if ever judicious, has long since ceased to be so. The tillage which a pioneer, fighting single-handed and all but empty-handed with a dense forest of giant trees, which he can do no better than to cut down and burn, found indispensable among their stumps and roots, is not adapted to the altered circumstances of his grandchildren. If our most energetic farmers would abstract ten hours each per week from their incessant drudgery, and devote them to reading and reflection with regard to their noble calling, they would live longer, live to better purpose, and bequeath a better example, with more property, to their children.

My self-imposed task is done. I undertook to tell What I Know of Farming through one brief essay for each week in 1870; and, in the face of multifarious and pressing duties, and in despite of a severe, protracted illness, the work has been prosecuted to completion. Had I not kept ahead of it while in health, there were weeks when I must have left it unaccomplished, as I was too ill to write or even stand.

I close with the avowal of my joyful trust that these essays, slight and imperfect as they are, will incite thousands of young farmers to feel a loftier pride in their calling and take a livelier interest in its improvement, and that many will be induced by them to read abler and better works on Agriculture and the sciences which minister to its efficiency and impel its progress toward a perfection which few as yet have even faintly foreseen.

1

See Chapter XXII.