The only exceptional feature or arrangement, besides the irrigating machinery and process, that I noticed, was an iron hurdling for folding sheep. This, at first sight, might look to a practical farmer a little extravagant, indicating a city origin, or the notion of an amateur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of the necessary. Each length of this iron fencing is apparently about a rod, and cost £1, or nearly five dollars. It is fitted to low wheels, or rollers, on an axle two or three feet in length, so that it can be moved easily and quickly in any direction. It would cost over fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose an acre entirely with this kind of hurdling. Still, Mr. Mechi would doubtless be able to show that this large expenditure is a good investment, and pays well in the long run. The folding of sheep for twenty-four or forty-eight hours on small patches of clover, trefoil, or turnips, is a very important department of English farming, both for fattening them for the market and for putting the land in better heart than any other fertilising process could effect. Now, a man with this iron fencing on wheels must be able to make in two hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more of busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.
On the whole, a practical farmer, who has no other source of income than the single occupation of agriculture, would be likely to ask, what is the realised value of Alderman Mechi’s operations to the common grain and stock-growers of the world? They have excited more attention or curiosity than any other experiments of the present day; but what is the real resume of their results? What new principles has he laid down; what new economy has he reduced to a science that may be profitably utilised by the million who get their living by farming? What has he actually done that anybody else has adopted or imitated to any tangible advantage? These are important questions; and this is the way he undertakes to answer them, beginning with the last.
About twenty years ago, he inaugurated the system of under-draining the heavy tile-clay lands in Essex. Up to his experiment, the process was deemed impracticable and worthless by the most intelligent farmers of the county. It was more confidently decried than his present irrigation system. The water would never find its way down into the drain-pipes through such clay. It stood to reason that it would do no such thing. Did not the water stand in the track of the horse’s hoof in such rich clay until evaporated by the sun? It might as well leak through an earthenware basin. It was all nonsense to bury a man’s money in that style. He never would see a shilling of it back again. In the face of these opinions, Mr. Mechi went on, training his pipes through field after field, deep below the surface. And the water percolated through the clay into them, until all these long veins formed a continuous and rushing stream into the main artery that now furnishes an ample supply for his stabled cattle, for his steam engine, and for all the barn-yard wants. His tile-draining of clay-lands was a capital success; and those who derided and opposed it have now adopted it to their great advantage, and to the vast augmentation of the value and production of the county. Here, then, is one thing in which he has led, and others have followed to a great practical result.
His next leading was in the way of agricultural machinery. He first introduced a steam engine for farming purposes in a district containing a million of acres. That, too, at the outset, was a fantastic vagary in the opinion of thousands of solid and respectable farmers. They insisted the Iron Horse would be as dangerous in the barn-yard or rick-yard as the very dragon in Scripture; that he would set everything on fire; kill the men who had care of him; burst and blow up himself and all the buildings into the air; that all the horses, cows, and sheep would be frightened to death at the very sight of the monster, and never could be brought to lie down in peace and safety by his side, even when his blood was cold, and when he was fast asleep. To think of it! to have a tall chimney towering up over a barn-gable or barn-yard, and puffing out black coal smoke, cotton-factory-wise! Pretty talk! pretty terms to train an honest and virtuous farmer to mouth! Wouldn’t it be edifying to hear him string the yarn of these new words! to hear him tell of his engineer and ploughman; of his pokers and pitchforks; of six-horse power, valves, revolutions, stopcocks, twenty pounds of steam, etc.; mixing up all this ridiculous stuff with yearling-calves, turnips, horse-carts, oil-cake, wool, bullocks, beans, and sheep, and other vital things and interests, which forty centuries have looked upon with reverence! To plough, thresh, cut turnips, grind corn, and pump water for cattle by steam! What next?
Why, next, the farmers of the region round about
“First pitied, then embraced”
this new and powerful auxiliary to agricultural industry, after having watched its working and its worth. And now, thanks to such bold and spirited novices as Mr. Mechi—men who had the pluck to work steadily on under the pattering rain of derisive epithets—there are already nearly as many steam engines working at farm labor between Land’s End and John O’Groat’s as there are employed in the manufacture of cotton in Great Britain.
His irrigation system will doubtless be followed in the same order and interval by those who have pooh-poohed it with the same derision and incredulity as the other innovations they have already adopted. The utilising of the sewage of large towns, especially of London, has now become a prominent idea and movement. Mr. Mechi’s machinery and process are admirably adapted to the work of distributing a river of this fertilising material over any farm to which it may be conducted. Thus, there is good reason to believe that the very process he originated for softening and enriching the hard and sterile acres of his small farm in Essex will be adopted for saturating millions of acres in Great Britain with the millions of tons of manurial matter that have hitherto blackened and poisoned the rivers of the country on their wasteful way to the sea. This will be only an additional work for the farm engines now in operation, accomplished with but little increased expense. A single fact may illustrate the irrigating capacity of Mr. Mechi’s machinery. It throws upon a field a quantity of the fertilising fluid equal to one inch of rainfall at a time, or 100 tons per imperial acre. And, as a proof of how deep it penetrates, the drains run freely with it, thus showing conclusively that the subsoil has been well saturated, a point of vital importance to the crop.
Deep tillage is another speciality that distinguished the Tiptree Farm regime at the beginning, in which Mr. Mechi led, and in which he has been followed by the farmers of the country, although few have come up abreast of him as yet in the system.
Here, then, are four specific departments of improvement in agricultural industry which the Alderman has introduced. Every one of them has been ridiculed as an impracticable and useless innovation in its turn. Three of them have already been adopted, and virtually incorporated with agricultural science and economy; and the fourth, or irrigation by steam power, bids fair to find as much favor, and as many adherents in the end as the others have done.