LETTERS ON AGRICULTURE.
(Concluded from last Number.)
Though the cultivation of land by metayers may be unfavourable to its amelioration, still it may be easily imagined, that the smaller products of every little farm will be greater, as each must possess both a garden and a poultry yard. Every field in Lombardy is encircled with a band of poplars, mulberries, oaks, &c., and they are often so thick that the eye can scarcely penetrate the rich growth of leaves. From the boughs, luxuriant vines hang in festoons, and present to the passing traveller a scene of rural beauty and enjoyment which he may search for in vain in other countries. The shade of the trees does not injure the crops, such is the invigorating effect of a humid soil and an Italian sky.
Of the constant succession of crops we here know very little; indeed it is the result of experience alone. So much depends on climate, that we imagine the rotation practised elsewhere can never afford certain information to us. The largest quantity of the most valuable product, which may be taken from a spot of ground in any number of years, is a problem whose solution is of the greatest importance. In Piedmont the rotation is generally as follow:
1st year, Indian corn, manured, Beans—hemp.
2d year, Wheat.
3d year, Clover, turned up after the first cutting and fallowed by a fallow.
4th year, Wheat.
This rotation, says M. de Chateauvieux, is one of the most abundant, and may be pursued indefinitely, notwithstanding the recurrence of wheat, though perhaps the result may be atributed to the abundance of manure furnished by a meadow cut three times. After stating that a farm of sixty arpents supported a family of eight or nine persons, who kept twenty-two head of large cattle, of which two oxen and a cow are fattened every year, as well as one or two hogs, that it gave about one hundred and twenty-five dollars worth of silk, and furnished more wine than could be consumed, that the preparatory crop of Indian corn and beans almost subsisted the metayers, and that nearly all the grain might be sold, as well as a great quantity of smaller products, he celebrates the industry and management of the Piedmontese proprietors in the following terms: 'It will be easy for you, after this, to conceive how Piedmont is perhaps, of all countries, that where the economy and management of land is best understood, and the phenomenon of its great population and immense exportation of produce will thus be explained.'
In the neighbourhood of Placenza, cattle rather than grain constitute the wealth of the farmer. The cows and oxen are distinguished by immense horns and beautiful figures, and we believe that our American race is in no way to be compared with them.—Their origin is said to be Hungarian; the males are noble animals, but the cows give little milk. To remedy this inconvenience, two thousand cows are imported from Switzerland, and the valuable qualities of the animal are thus perpetuated. The cattle are almost universally of a slate-grey colour. The rotation of crops is here as follows:
1st year, Indian corn and hemp, manured.
2d year, Wheat.
3d year, Winter beans.
4th year, Wheat, manured.
5th year, Clover, ploughed after the first cutting.
6th year, Wheat.
This succession, however, can only be pursued in a rich soil, which is manured every three years. There is one article we beg leave to notice particularly. We imagine that the winter bean might easily be introduced among us, and with great advantage, as it is capable of supporting the cold of the severest winter. It is sown in the beginning of September, and it must have considerable growth before autumn to resist the attacks of the cold. The stalk then perishes by the frost, but at the moment the genial warmth of the spring is felt, two or three new stalks arise, which bloom in the month of May, and the beans are fit to gather at the end of July. The management of this important vegetable we give in the words of the author. 'La culture est extrêmement simple; aprés a récolte du blé fumé, on retourne la terre par un seul labour et on la laisse émietter par l'influence de la saison. Aux premiers jours de Septembre on séme les féves, soit en les enterrant á la charrue, soit en les recoverant á la herse, soit enfin avec le semoire, qui les place par rangées, de manière à pouvoir au printemps les sarcler avec la houe à cheval. Si on ne suit pas cette dernière méthode, il faut les sarcler à la main, dans le courant d'avril.' The culture of the winter bean is suited to argillaceous soils, and while it allows the proper intervals between ploughing the ground and sowing wheat which succeeds, it is admirably calculated to maintain the fertility of the ground.
The plains which border on the Po, in the vicinity of Parma and Lodi, support those fine animals, whose milk is converted into the celebrated Parmesan cheese. The grass is here far more valuable than any crop of grain. In the summer the cows are housed and fed with the green grass of the first and second mowings: that of the third is converted into hay. At the end of autumn the cows are allowed to pick up whatever may be left in the fields. These meadows are perhaps the most fertile on earth; they are generally mowed four times a year. The cheese is here never made from less than fifty cows, and as the farms are small, there is one common establishment, to which the milk is brought twice during the day; an account of it is kept by the cheesemaker and settled in cheese every six months. The same plan has been introduced in Switzerland.
In the Milanese, the farms are larger than in other parts of Italy, because the culture of the grasses demands less care and labour than other branches of farming, and fewer advances. Irrigation is here carried to such an extent, that every two or three arpents can be inundated by its own canal. The good quality of the grass, however, in time becomes deteriorated, other plants gradually spring up in the place of the grasses; the sluices are then closed, and the ground is ploughed for hemp; after which, and a crop of legumes, oats, and wheat, it is again laid down in grass. A meadow will generally last fifteen years, and the course of harvests returns every five. M. de Chateauvieux gives the following remarkable outline:
1st year, Hemp, followed by legumes.
2d year, Oats.
3d year, Wheat, followed by legumes.
4th year, Indian corn.
5th year, Wheat.
15th year, Natural meadow, dunged every 3 years, and mowed 4 times a year.
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20 years 67
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Of these sixty-seven crops from the same ground there are sixty-one for the use of animals, five for the sustenance of man, and only one for his clothing. There is, perhaps, no country on the face of the earth which can boast such a proportion of agricultural products. To obtain this result, the ground is manured, very profusely however, five times in twenty years, and it is a singular fact that this manure is applied always to the grass and never to the grain.
The culture of rice occupies a part of Italy, and is a source of great profit to the owner of the soil. The difficulties in its cultivation are so trifling, that, contrary to the usual custom, the ground is let out at a fixed rent of one hundred and sixty francs the arpent; three crops are received every five years. As with us, these rice grounds are most unhealthy, and the stagnant water which covers them produces disease in all the surrounding country. The unfortunate peasant rarely escapes its deleterious effect, and the government, sensible of this constant draft on human life, have prohibited the further extension of the culture of this grain.
One of the most singular features in the physical character of Italy, is the constant elevation of the beds of rivers, particularly the Arno and the Po, by means of depositions of earth and stones, brought down by the heavy rains from the mountains.—This had become so alarming, that the raising of dykes yielded to a very ingenious operation called Colmata, by which the water of the river was allowed to overflow a certain space, and this very deposition, about three or four inches in a year, made to raise the level of the adjacent shores. But this process, which is fully described by Sismondi, must necessarily have a limit. Embankments are resorted to, and in some places the bed of the Po is absolutely thirty feet above the level country. The Po even now frequently overflows and devastates its banks; the inhabitants, provided always for the calamity which unfortunately is not unfrequent, take to their boats and wait till the inundation has subsided. There would seem to be little doubt that at some day not far distant, the whole delta of the Po, or Polesino, as it is called, will become one wide and wretched marsh. Even now the roads are often impassable. Ferara, consecrated by the genius of Ariosto and Tasso, will be extinguished, and Revenna, already fallen from its high honours, be known only as the deserted capital of a potentate of the lower empire.
M. de Chateauvieux, climbing the mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena, and leaving behind him the fertile plains of Lombardy, entered those lofty regions, where the earth does not produce sufficient sustenance for the inhabitants, who are employed with their flocks of goats and sheep, in constantly traversing the mountains in a manner somewhat similar to that of the Spanish shepherds. The author employs himself in describing the scenery of the Corniche, and though it is perhaps among the finest in Europe, and he might have felt all its changeful beauty and sublimity, still we think he is far more fortunate in his delineations of rural economy.
The agriculture of Tuscany has been so fully and ably investigated by Sismondi,[2] that little was left to M. de Chateauvieux. The valley of the Arno, in truth the only fertile part of the dukedom, (for the rest is composed of precipitous mountains, or that silent and hideous district the Maremma) stretches from Cortona to Pisa, and forms about one-sixth of its whole territory. The farms are very small, being from three to six arpents, so that one pair of oxen supplies the necessities of ten or twelve metayers, in the working of their little plat of ground. They manifest, however, their extravagance in maintaining a horse, which may transport their produce to market, and their wives and daughters to mass or a rustic ball.—The most general rotation of crops is here:
1st year, Indian corn, beans, peas, or other legumes dunged.
2d year, Wheat.
3d year, Winter beans.
4th year, Wheat.
5th year, Clover, sown after the wheat, cut in the spring and followed by sorgho.
This sorgho is a sort of parsnip, which is reduced into flour, of which they make a bad soup and a poor polente. The ground is manured only once in five years, a circumstance which abundantly proves the richness of this deep alluvial soil. Notwithstanding all this fertility and a cultivation which resembles rather that of a garden, than a farm, the country does not produce enough to resist the effects of a bad year. The metayers live with the greatest economy, and though their cottages are built with a taste which seems indigenous to the country, the interior exhibits a total absence of all the conveniences of life, and supplies but a frugal subsistence. Such is the view which M. de Chateauvieux has taken. But in our opinion the peasantry of Tuscany under all circumstances, are not only more neat in their persons, but better clothed, and apparently enjoying more happiness, than that of any other district in Italy. There can be little doubt, that all this distress and privation arises from the system of the metayers; a system which, deriving its existence from the feudal state, is equally to be deprecated, whether we consider the political character of the community or the individual happiness of its members. The man who has no other possession than his industry, and who cannot hope to change his situation, can never have such a stake in the state, as to render him either an intelligent or valuable member of it. On the other hand, the metayer, bound to furnish half the seed and to divide and sell the produce, pretty generally consumes one year the fruits of the last; or if there be a surplus, how is it to be invested? There would seem to be no other mode, than in the sticks which he is bound to supply, for the support of the vines, for the landlord provides the stock and repairs the house. He then can only lay up his money in his chest, or spend it on his pleasures. Thus the end of a year finds him no better off than at its commencement, for want of such an interest in the soil, as would secure him from the effects of his negligence and indifference in its cultivation.
Before leaving this part of Italy, we ought to mention a subject which is of some little importance; the manufacture of straw hats, which has just commenced in our country. It is doubtless a most profitable exertion of industry. The raw material costs nothing, and M. de Chateauvieux informs us that this branch annually amounts to three millions (we presume) of francs. The straw is of beardless wheat, cut before it is ripe, and whose vegetation has been thinned (étiolée) by the sterility of the soil. This soil is chosen among calcareous hills; it is never manured, and the grain is sown very thick. The women who are employed in making the Leghorn hats, earn from about thirty to forty cents per day, no trifling sum in Italy.
The Maremma or country of the Malaria forms the third district, extending from Leghorn to Terracina, and from the sea to the mountains, and having a width of twenty-five or thirty miles. M. de Chateauvieux speaks of this singular country in the following terms: 'Le ciel reste également pur, la verdure aussi fraiche, l'air aussi calme; la sérénité de cet aspect semble devoir inspirer une entiére confiance, et je ne saurais cependant vous exprimer l' espèce d'effroi que l'on éprauve malgré soi en respirant cet air à la fois si suave et si funeste.' A country so very singular in its character would necessarily require a very peculiar system of management. Our author developes this system in a visit he made to a domain called Campo Morto, in the most deserted part of the Maremma. Here was a Faltore, charged with the administration of the farm. The whole Maremma of Rome is in the hands of eighty proprietors, who are called mercanti de' tenuti, and reside as well as their Fattori in the city.—On this farm there were four hundred horses, of which, one hundred were broken; two thousand hogs, which ran in the woods and fed on the acorns; some hundreds of cows, who give no other revenue than the sale of the calves, which is estimated at about eight dollars each cow; one hundred oxen used to the plough, and about four thousand sheep. The rent of this farm was about eighteen francs the arpent of cultivated land, amounting in all to about $22,000. The annual profit was about $5000, besides interest at five per cent. on the capital of the flocks.
In the midst of this establishment there was a vast casale or farm house, destitute of furniture and inhabited but a very few days in the year.—Every thing around breathed the most perfect desolation; all was vast and silent. The harvest had just commenced and a thousand labourers, of whom one half were women, had descended from the mountains to gain a small pittance during a few days, by reaping the rich grain of six hundred and sixty arpents for the lordly proprietor, and if they did not perish at their toil, to go back after having respired the elements of a miserable death. Some days had elapsed since the harvest began, and only two labourers had been attacked by the fever of the Malaria; every day would, however, increase the number, till at the completion of their task, scarcely half of them would remain. 'What then becomes of these unfortunate people?' said M. de Chateauvieux. 'They get a piece of bread and are sent off,' was the inhuman reply,—'But where do they go to?' 'To the mountains; some stop on the road, some die, others get home almost expiring with misery and famine, only to follow the same life next year.'
The Malaria is one of those singular phenomena whose origin has baffled every effort at discovery, and the remedy for which has never yet been ascertained. Attempts have been made to cultivate the soil of the Maremma, and colonies were established within its circuit, but the resistless scythe of sure and silent death swept away the presumptuous intruders.—During half of the year, a few miserable beings, armed with lances and clothed in skins, the living images of death, wander over these devoted plains with their flocks; and if accident should delay their return to the mountains, fall certain victims to this fatal disease. Immense numbers of sheep, cows, horses, and goats find a subsistence on these wastes and supply the markets of Rome and the Val d'Arno. The soil is extremely steril; the whiteness of the pure argil being only alloyed by a mixture of sulphur, which is produced in great profusion. The cause of the Malaria, as we before remarked, has escaped all the investigations of science; it still remains a mystery no less profound, than its effects are dreadful. Some have supposed it to arise from the low pools of stagnant waters, which collect on the face of the Maremma; but the disease prevails on the heights of Radiocofani and within the lofty precincts of Volterra.
Some have supposed that the disease was caused by exposure to the sudden changes of temperature at the going down of the sun.[3] This is supported, it is true, by the very weighty face related by de Bonsteten in his Voyage au Latium, of a man who resided at Ardea sixteen years without being indisposed. But we doubt whether any solution that has ever been proposed was so perfectly ridiculous or so completely destitute of foundation. Do the people then die in the towns of this disease, where we know it to be a custom not to go out after dark, of mere exposure to a changing atmosphere? A short distance from the Porta del Popolo at Rome are two villas, one on each side of a small lane, but both situated on high ground. We were informed that during the summer season, a man would run very imminent danger of death in sleeping in one, while he might remain in the other with perfect impunity. How is this to be reconciled with the doctrine that the disease caused by the Malaria is nothing but fever and ague, brought on by exposure? The truth is, this dreadful enemy every year makes further inroads; no longer satisfied with pursuing the wretched thousands of enervated labourers and shepherds, who at evening crowd for safety into Rome, it is advancing into the city in the midst of darkness, and spreading from the Porta del Popolo, on the one side, and from the Palatine on the other, up the sides of the Quirinal. In 1791, says M. de Chateauvieux, Rome had a population of 160,000; at the time of this visit, it numbered only 100,000, of whom more than 10,000 were gardeners, shepherds, and vine-dressers. Four years afterwards we heard it computed at from 80 to 90,000. Undoubtedly political events have had no small effect in diminishing the number of inhabitants; but still we believe the Malaria must have had a no less powerful influence. Annually it roams over the finest villas without the walls, and ravages large districts of the town within; and neither the magnificence of the villa Borghese, nor the luxuriant beauty and towering pines of Doria Pamfili, can resist the assaults of this silent and deadly foe. Time seems to hold its mantle over the queen of cities, and to prepare by a fate as extraordinary as its former history, to blot it out from the admiration of mortals. Encompassed already by the awful stillness of a desolate waste, once filled up with sixty towns, which the antiquarian in vain attempts to trace, perhaps her own site may be hereafter unknown; and some future traveller may boast with enthusiasm of having once again penetrated its deserted streets, of having visited the spot enobled by the heroic virtue of Junius Brutus, or the eloquence and wisdom of Cato the censor. But we must leave a subject, on which we could dwell still longer with delight, and conclude our notice of a book, of which we would hope our readers have received a favourable impression. The subject of the work is not only important in itself, but most interesting to us. Italy is essentially an agricultural country; she is neither a manufacturing nor a commercial state. It is by her agriculture, that she supports more than 17,000,000 of inhabitants, or about 1237 to a square league; a population far superiour to that of France or England. It is her agriculture which laid the foundations of those splendid cities which crowd her plains; it is her agriculture, which, should it ever be protected by an enlightened government, will again yield nourishment to the principles of liberty, and raise her to a level with the most respectable nations of Europe. M. de Chateauvieux has devoted himself to the illustration of this noble subject, and we are confident that his work will not only afford many valuable hints to the practical farmer, but some lessons to our statesmen, in any future attempts which may be made to elevate manufactures at the expense of the most dear and invaluable interests in our country.
From the Edinburgh Farmer's Magazine.