A SYSTEM OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION.
[An Address before the Barnstable Agricultural Society, Oct. 8, 1857.]
In the month of February, 1855, a distinguished American, who has read much, and acquired, by conversation, observation, and travels in this country and Europe, the highest culture of American society, wrote these noticeable sentences: "The farmers have not kept pace, in intelligence, with the rest of the community. They do not put brain-manure enough into their acres. Our style of farming is slovenly, dawdling, and stupid, and the waste, especially in manure, is immense. I suppose we are about, in farming, where the Lowlands of Scotland were fifty years ago; and what immense strides agriculture has made in Great Britain since the battle of Waterloo, and how impossible it would have been for the farmers to have held their own without!"[10]
It would not be civil for me to endorse these statements as introductory to a brief address upon Agricultural Education; but I should not accept them at all did they not contain truth enough to furnish a text for a layman's discourse before an assembly of farmers.
Competent American travellers concur in the opinion that the Europeans generally, and especially our brethren of England, Ireland, and Scotland, are far in advance of us in scientific and practical agriculture. This has been stated or admitted by Mr. Colman, President Hitchcock, and last by Mr. French, who has recently visited Europe under the auspices of the National Agricultural Society.
There are good reasons for the past and for the existing superiority of the Old World; and there are good reasons, also, why this superiority should not much longer continue. Europe is old,—America is young. Land has been cultivated for centuries in Europe, and often by the same family; its capacity tested, its fitness or unfitness for particular crops proved, the local and special effects of different fertilizers well known, and the experience of many generations has been preserved, so as to be equivalent to a like experience, in time and extent, by the present occupants of the soil.
In America there are no family estates, nor long occupation by the same family of the same spot. Cultivated lands have changed hands as often as every twenty-five years from the settlement of the country. The capacity of our soils to produce, when laboriously and systematically cultivated, has not been ascertained; there has been no accumulation of experience by families, and but little by the public; and the effort, in many sections, has been to draw as much as possible from the land, while little or nothing was returned to it. Farming, as a whole, has not been a system of cultivation, which implies improvement, but a process of exhaustion. It has been easier for the farmer, though, perhaps, not as economical, if all the elements necessary to a correct opinion could be combined, to exchange his worn-out lands for fresh soils, than to adopt an improving system of agriculture. The present has been consulted; the future has been disregarded. As the half-civilized hunters of the pampas of Buenos Ayres make indiscriminate slaughter of the myriads of wild cattle that roam over the unfenced prairies of the south, and preserve the hides only for the commerce and comfort of the world, so we have clutched from nature whatever was in sight or next at hand, regardless of the actual and ultimate wrong to physical and vegetable life; and, as the pioneers of a better civilization now gather up the bones long neglected and bleaching under tropical suns and tropical rains, and by the agency of trade, art, and industry, extort more wealth from them than was originally derived from the living animals, so we shall find that worn-out lands, when subjected to skilful, careful, scientific husbandry, are quite as profitable as the virgin soils, which, from the day of the migration into the Connecticut valley to the occupancy of the Missouri and the Kansas, have proved so tempting to our ancestors and to us. But there has been some philosophy, some justice, and considerable necessity, in the course that has been pursued. Subsistence is the first desire; and, in new countries where forests are to be felled, dwellings erected, public institutions established, roads and bridges built, settlers cannot be expected, in the cultivation of the land, to look much beyond the present moment. And they are entitled to the original fertility of the soil. Europe passed through the process of settlement and exhaustion many centuries ago. Her recovery has been the work of centuries,—ours may be accomplished in a few years, even within the limits of a single life. The fact from which an improving system of agriculture must proceed is apparent in the northern and central Atlantic states, and is, in a measure, appreciated in the West. We have all heard that certain soils were inexhaustible. The statement was first made of the valley of the Connecticut, then of the Genesee country, then of Ohio, then of Illinois, and occasionally we now hear similar statements of Kansas, or California, or the valley of the Willamette. In the nature of things these statements were erroneous. The idea of soil, in reason and in the use of the word, contains the idea of exhaustion. Soil is not merely the upper stratum of the earth; it is a substance which possesses the power, under certain circumstances, of giving up essential properties of its own for the support of vegetable and ultimately of animal life. What it gives up it loses, and to the extent of its loss it is exhausted. It is no more untrue to say that the great cities of the world have not, in their building, exhausted the forests and the mines to any extent, than to say that the annual abundant harvests of corn and wheat have not, in any degree, exhausted the prairies and bottom lands of the West. Some lands may be exhausted for particular crops in a single year; others in five years, others in ten, while others may yield undiminished returns for twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years. But it is plain that annual cropping without rotation, and without compensation by nature or art, must finally deprive the soil of the required elements. Nor should we deceive ourselves by considering only those exceptions whose existence is due to the fact that nature makes compensation for the loss. Annual or occasional irrigation with rich deposits,—as upon the Nile and the Connecticut,—allowing the land to lie fallow, rotation of crops and the growth of wood, are so many expedients and provisions by which nature increases the productiveness of the earth. Nor is a great depth of soil, as two, five, ten, or twenty feet, any security against its ultimate impoverishment. Only a certain portion is available. It has been found in the case of coal-mines which lie at great depths, that they are, for the present, valueless; and we cannot attach much importance to soil that is twenty feet below the surface. Neither cultivation nor vegetation can go beyond a certain depth; and wherever vegetable life exists, its elements are required and appropriated. Great depth of soil is desirable; but, with our present knowledge and means of culture, it furnishes no security against ultimate exhaustion.
The fact that all soils are exhaustible establishes the necessity for agricultural education, by whose aid the processes of impoverishment may be limited in number and diminished in force; and the realization of this fact by the public generally is the only justification necessary for those who advocate the immediate application of means to the proposed end.
And, gentlemen, if you will allow a festive day to be marred by a single word of criticism, I feel constrained to say, that a great obstacle to the increased usefulness, further elevation, and higher respectability, of agriculture, is in the body of farmers themselves. And I assume this to be so upon the supposition that agriculture is not a cherished pursuit in many farmers' homes; that the head of the family often regards his life of labor upon the land as a necessity from which he would willingly escape; that he esteems other pursuits as at once less laborious, more profitable, and more honorable, than his own; that children, both sons and daughters, under the influence of parents, both father and mother, receive an education at home, which neither school, college, nor newspaper, can counteract, that leads them to abandon the land for the store, the shop, the warehouse, the professions, or the sea.
The reasonable hope of establishing a successful system of agricultural education is not great where such notions prevail.