Agronomy

“ For the first and second classes of land we need a new type of agriculture, the crop-yielding trees. Our agriculture, which depends so largely now upon those members of the grass family which we call grains, is the result of accident, not the result of science. At the dawn of history man had practically all of these small grains, which have probably resulted from the selection and seed saving of the primitive woman, as the race came up from savagery into agriculture. ”

“ If nature has set limits to the produce of this grain to the acre, and if our farmers have come up to that limit, there is no use in their trying to do any better. But if their crop is four fold behind what it ought to be, they will feel courage to reach out for a better mode of cultivation. Vegetables collect food from the atmosphere, and from the soil; and different plants select different articles of food from the soil, just as different birds, beasts, insects, etc., require different food. One class of plants draws potash largely from the soil, as turnips, potatoes, the stalk of corn, etc. ”

“ It is true that, if the [Pg 153] crop is sold, and it is desired to maintain the fertility of the soil, the full amount of the ash must be applied, either before or after the crop is grown; but, in the ordinary use of crops for feeding purposes, a large part of the ash will exist in the excrements of the animals; so that the judicious farmer will be able to manure his land with more economy than if he had to apply to each crop the whole amount and variety required for its ash. ”

“ Mowing and reaping machines have ceased to be a novelty upon our plains and meadows. The natural fertilizers have been analyzed, and artificial nutrients of the soil have been contrived. The pick and pride of foreign herds have regenerated our neat stock, and the Morgan and the Black-Hawk eat their oats in our stalls. The sheepfold and the sty abound with choice blood. Sterling agricultural journals are on every farmer's table, and Saxton's hand-books upon agricultural specialties are scattered everywhere. ”

“ Water is supplied from the sky, or from springs and streams; and little more than the most ordinary capacity for observation is required to determine when it is present in sufficient quantity, when in baleful excess. But who, unaided by Science, can decide whether the soil does or does not contain the elements requisite for the luxuriant growth and perfect development of Wheat, or Fruit, or Grass, or Beets, or Apples? Who knows, save as he blindly infers from results, what mineral ingredients of this or that crop are deficient in given field, and what are present in excess? ”

“ The rotation of crops means—taking a surface crop, such as wheat, oats, maize, &c., off the land, and then ploughing and planting a root crop, say turnips, potatoes, &c., &c. One of the best ways to manure a field impoverished by successive cropping without rest or manure is by sowing broadcast some such crop as peas, vetches, turnips, or any quick growing tender leaf plant, and when it is a few weeks old, or when the plants have leafed out well, plough it under and leave the field fallow till the following spring. ”

“ They have long realized that much time is required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible. ”

“ The soil is uniform, and a change is the exception and not the rule; being a rich, sandy loam, producing a thick, heavy mat of bunch-grass. On all the streams there is more or less timber; but the mountains have to supply lumber, and rails for fencing."
Prolific in all her productions, her principal grains are wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, and buckwheat. Her fruits are apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, grapes, and small fruits of all kinds. Cattle remain fat the year round on the bunch-grass. The streams abound in fish. The climate is one which for salubrity may challenge the world ”

“ In selecting these homestead farms, the emigrant can have any temperature, from St. Petersburg to Canton. He can have a cold, a temperate, or a warm climate, and farming or gardening, grazing or vintage, varied by fishing or hunting. He can raise wheat, rye, Indian corn, oats, rice, indigo, cotton, tobacco, cane or maple sugar and molasses, sorghum, wool, peas and beans, Irish or sweet potatoes, barley, buckwheat, wine, butter, cheese, hay, clover, and all the grasses, hemp, hops, flax and flaxseed, silk, beeswax and honey, and poultry, in uncounted abundance. ”

“ Men had long known that the seeds of some of the wild grasses and plants were good to eat. Now some one noticed that if these seeds were sown they sprang up and brought forth many more seeds. Then it was discovered that the seeds grew better and yielded a more abundant crop if the ground were broken up and made soft before the seed was sown. Because of these discoveries some men began to be farmers. By cultivation, the wild grasses which grew in the fields or beside the rivers were developed [Pg 127] into wheat, oats, barley, and rice, the great cereals of the world. ”

“ This fertile belt is capable of supporting innumerable herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, and droves of horses, and of giving employment and happy homes to millions of the human race. It produces wheat and barley, and oats, and Indian corn, or maize, in great perfection, and potatoes and variety of other roots and vegetables of all sorts, and the finest grass for hay, and hemp and tobacco, and many other plants with difficulty grown in England. The rivers are fall of fish, and game of all sorts abound. ”

“ Fertilizers.—When a crop is fed to livestock, and all the manure is returned to the land that produced the crop without loss by leaching or fermentation, there is a return to the land of four fifths of the fertility, and a good form of organic matter is supplied. A portion of the crops cannot be fed upon the farm, or otherwise the human race would have only animal products for food. The welfare of the people demands that a vast amount of the soil's crops be sold from the farms producing them. ”

“ Thus we have tobacco soils, trucking soils, wheat and corn soils. Dairying can be most profitably followed in sections where crops like cowpeas, clover, alfalfa, and corn are peculiarly at home. No one should try to grow a new crop in his section until he has found out whether the crop which he wants to grow is adapted to his soil and his climate. ”

“ Plants discovered the grand principle of the rotation of crops long before man did. The farmer now knows that if he sows wheat or turnips too many years running on the same plot, he 'exhausts the soil,' as we say—deprives it of certain special mineral or animal constituents needful for that particular crop, and makes the growth of the plant, therefore, feeble or even impossible. To avoid this misfortune, he lets the land lie fallow, or varies his crops from year to year according to a regular and deliberate cycle. ”

“ Near the streams is a rich black soil; a sandy loam on the bench lands; and grazing lands on the bluffs. Dry farming has been satisfactorily tried on the uplands, and the experiment station encourages this method. In the order of relative importance the crops are corn, wheat, oats, barley and hay. ”

“ For example, if the staple crop of the locality is wheat or a certain type of tobacco, select the soil best adapted to this staple crop, and another soil, if possible, in the same locality, representing considerable area of land upon which this staple crop cannot be successfully grown on account of the inferior yield, quality, or the time of ripening of the crop. The soil sampled should be, or should recently have been, under actual cultivation in the crop or crops best adapted to it, so that the real agricultural value of the land can be accurately known. ”

“ And this difference should be kept in mind by all classes of cultivators as the basis of operations in tillage, cropping, and the order and character of rotations. The first thing to discover in the cropping of a farm is the kind of vegetation for which the land is best adapted to insure, in a run of seasons, fairly profitable results. If the soil is unfit for cereals, then it is sheer folly to sow any more corn than may be needful for convenience, as, for example, to supply straw for thatching and litter, and oats for horses, to save cost of carriage, &c. ”

“ Logged- off lands, cleared of stumps by a laborious and expensive process of blasting, pulling, and burning, now produce excellent crops of vegetables, berries, fruits, daffodils, and tulips in commercial quantities. Years of intensive cultivation are required to make farming such land profitable. The climate and soil of this part of the State are well suited to the growing of sugar beets, most of the beets coming from five- to ten-acre tracts or from diversified farms. The large fields, comparatively few in number, are planted, cultivated, and harvested by machinery. ”

“ Agricultural surveys, geological surveys, and skillful chemical analyses of the soil and its products have been made for, now, a series of years. A Hitchcock, a Dana, a Jackson have applied science to agriculture. Pamphlets, books, and widely circulated newspapers have diffused this knowledge. Agricultural societies, state and county; farmers’ meetings for discussion, such as are held every winter in Boston, have awakened the mind of farmers, and by learning to treat their soils skillfully, good wheat is raised in large quantities on soils naturally very averse to wheat. ”

“ Beginnings of Agriculture. Here agriculture begins. By relieving plants of this intense competition by means of tillage, and by selecting the most promising for domestication, they are enabled to use all their energy for the development of those qualities which add to their intrinsic value, instead of expending it in the struggle for existence. Given, thus, free access to the soil and sunshine, with needful nourishment supplied and their fungous or parasitical enemies destroyed, the domesticated plants yield trustful obedience to the protecting hand of the husbandman. ”

“ The soil being turned up to the action of the sun and air, becomes enlivened, and better fitted for producing vegetation. An acre of land yielding a ton of hay, at the usual season of ploughing greensward contains more than twelve tons of vegetable matter, consisting of the roots and lops of grass, and other vegetable remains upon the surface. Such a method of ploughing, then, as will be best calculated to secure for the benefit of the crop, this mass of enriching substance, the farmer should not hesitate to adopt. ”

“ When you want to put a thing straight that is upside down there is sure to be an overturning. The farmer is not sorry because his rude plow breaks the hard soil and bruises the weeds and turns all the greensward under. Oh no; he does that to make some better green grow. Wait three months and you will see the whole field covered with a waving harvest of wheat. Ploughing is pretty rough work on weeds. Opening a new mission station is pretty rough, I admit, on a false religion. ”

“ But if the grain is removed, and nothing resupplies the drain of phosphates which it makes from the soil, the soil will in due time, according to the original quantities in the soil, cease to yield grain, although the straw may be admirable. But if both straw and kernel were every year burned upon the [Pg 150] field, as grass and its seed is upon the prairies, wheat would grow for a thousand years in succession. The same is true of corn, of potatoes, and of any annual crop. When the annual growth is restored to the soil, it is repossessed of all its treasure which had been loaned for a season. ”

“ Agriculture, in its season, is prosecuted with such a degree of diligence, however, as suffices to supply the few simple wants of the mountaineer. The soil of the valleys and river bottoms, which are cleared by setting fire to the long grass and brushwood, generally yields a large increase of every species of grain. ”

“ Here are two systems of crop-rotation as practiced at one or more agricultural experiment stations. Each furnishes an ideal plan for keeping up land.
In these rotations the cowpeas and clovers are nitrogen-gathering crops. They not only furnish hay but they enrich the soil. The wheat, corn, and cotton are money crops, but in addition they are cultivated crops; hence they improve the physical condition of the soil and give opportunity to kill weeds. The grasses and clovers are of course used for pasturage and hay. This is only a suggested rotation. Work out one that will meet your home need. ”

“ In ordinary farming, “larger crops per acre” means fewer acres planted or sown with grain. It means more summer fallow, more grass, clover, peas, mustard, coleseed, roots, and other crops that are consumed on the farm. It means more thorough cultivation. It means clean and rich land. It means husbanding the ammonia and nitric acid, which is brought to the soil, as well as that which is developed from the soil, or which the soil attracts from the atmosphere, and using it to grow a crop every second, third, or fourth year, instead of every year. ”