Any vegetable, in its proper latitude, will flourish in a soil which will yield it an abundance of food; and decline in a soil which is barren of the proper nutritive ingredients.
A practical, scientific knowledge of these fundamental facts, will give an intelligent farmer, in grain-growing latitudes, almost unlimited power over his crops. A good
cook knows what things are required for bread; he selects these materials, compounds them to definite proportions—adding, if any one is deficient; subtracting, if any one is in excess. Raising a crop is a species of slow cooking. Here is a compound of such materials (called wheat) to be made. Nature agrees to knead them together, and produce the grain, if the farmer will supply the materials. To do this he must understand what these materials are. Suppose a cook perceiving that the bread was wretched, did not know exactly what was the matter; and should add, salt, or flour, or yeast, or water at hap-hazard? Yet that is exactly what multitudes of farmers do. They find that their fields yield a small crop of wheat. They do not know what the matter is. Is the soil deficient in lime, or sand, or clay? Is magnesia or potash lacking? Perhaps they do not even know that these things are requisite to this crop. “The land must be manured.” Now, manure on an impracticable soil, is medicine. Of course if the farmer prescribes, he must tell what medicine, i. e. what manure. Is it vegetable matter or phosphates? alumina or silica? Suppose a doctor says: “You are sick and must take medicine,” without knowing what the disease is, or what the appropriate remedy; and so should pull out a handful of whatever there was in his saddle-bags and dose the wretch? That’s the way farming goes on. “The ten acre lot wants manure.” To the barn yard he goes, takes the dung heap, plows it under, and gets an enormous crop of—straw. Nitrogenous manure was not what the soil wanted. He has added materials which existed in abundance already; but those elements, from the want of which his crop suffered, have not been given it. The land is sicker than it was before. It languishes for want of one element, it suffers from a surfeit of another. We are prepared to sustain these observations by a reference to authentic facts.
Massachusetts, a few years ago, was not a wheat-growing State. Cautious farmers had given up the crop, because
neither soil nor climate was supposed to favor it. How then have both soil and climate been persuaded to relent, and permit from twenty to forty bushels to grow to the acre? It was no accident, and no series of blind but lucky blunders, that effected the change. It was thinking that did it. It was a change wrought by science. Elliot (in Connecticut), Deane (both clergymen), Dexter, Lowell, Fessenden, and many others, all men of science, were pioneers. 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.
The average crop of wheat in great Britain is twenty-six bushels to the acre, but forty and fifty are common to good farmers; sixty, seventy, and even eighty have been raised by great care.
In the whole United States it will not average much more than fifteen. A comparison of the two countries will show a corresponding inferiority on our part in the application of science to agriculture. Scotland, formerly, hardly raised wheat. Since the formation of the Highland Agricultural Society in Scotland, wheat has averaged fifty-one bushels to the acre!—Ellsworth’s Report for 1844, p. 16.
Lord Hardwicke stated, in a speech before the Royal Agricultural Society of England, that fine Suffolk wheat had produced seventy-six bushels per acre; and another and improved variety had yielded eighty-two bushels per acre! This was the result of “book farming” in a country where anti-book farmers raise twenty-six bushels to the acre.
Those very operations which farmers call practical, and upon which they rely in decrying “book farming” were first made known by science, and through the writings of scientific men.
These views have an immediate and practical bearing on the cultivation of wheat in the Western States.