Sandy or light land, that it will not pay to summer-fallow, should have all the manure you can make, and be plowed and planted with corn. Cultivate thoroughly, and either seed it down with the corn in August, or sow it to barley or oats next spring, and seed it down with clover. I say, theoretically this is the best plan to adopt. But practically it may not be so, because it may be absolutely necessary that we should raise something that we can sell at once, and get money to live upon or pay interest and taxes. But the gentlemen who so strenuously advocate high farming, are not perhaps often troubled with considerations of this kind. Meeting them, therefore, on their own ground, I contend that in my case “high farming” would not be as profitable as the plan hinted at above.
The rich alluvial low land is to be pastured or mown; the upland to be broken up only when necessary, and when it is plowed to be plowed well and worked thoroughly, and got back again into clover as soon as possible. The hay and pasture from the low land, and the clover and straw and stalks from the upland, would enable us to keep a good many cows and sheep, with more or less pigs, and there would be a big pile of manure in the yard every spring. And when this is once obtained, you can get along much more pleasantly and profitably.
“But,” I may be asked, “when you have got this pile of manure can not you adopt high farming?” No. My manure pile would contain say: 60 tons of clover-hay; 20 tons wheat-straw; 25 tons oat, barley, and pea-straw; 40 tons meadow-hay; 20 tons corn-stalks; 20 tons corn, oats, and other grain; 120 tons mangel-wurzel and turnips.
This would give me about 500 tons of well-rotted manure. I should want 200 tons of this for the mangels and turnips, and the 300 tons I should want to top-dress 20 acres of grass land intended for corn and potatoes the next year. My pile of manure, therefore, is all used up on 25 to 30 acres of land. In other words, I use the unsold produce of 10 acres to manure one. Is this “high farming?” I think in my circumstances it is good farming, but it is not high farming. It gives me large crops per acre, but I have comparatively few acres in crops that are sold from the farm.
“High farming,” if the term is to have any definite meaning at all should only be used to express the idea of a farm so managed that the soil is rich enough to produce maximum crops every year. If you adopt the system of rotation quite general in this section—say, 1st year, corn on sod; 2d, barley or oats; 3d, wheat; 4th, clover for hay and afterwards for seed; 5th, timothy and clover for hay; and then the 6th year plowed up for corn again—it would be necessary to make the land rich enough to produce say 100 bushels shelled corn, 50 bushels of barley, 40 bushels of wheat, 3 tons clover-hay, and 5 bushels of clover-seed, and 3 tons clover and timothy-hay per acre. This would be moderate high farming. If we introduced lucern, Italian rye-grass, corn-fodder, and mangel-wurzel into the rotation, we should need still richer land to produce a maximum growth of these crops. In other words, we should need more manure.
The point I am endeavoring to get at, is this: Where you want a farm to be self-supporting—where you depend solely on the produce of the farm to supply manure—it is a sheer impossibility to adopt high farming on the whole of your land. I want to raise just as large crops per acre as the high farmers, but there is no way of doing this, unless we go outside the farm for manure, without raising a smaller area of such crops as are sold from the farm.
I do not wish any one to suppose that I am opposed to high farming. There is occasionally a farm where it may be practised with advantage, but it seems perfectly clear to my mind that as long as there is such an unlimited supply of land, and such a limited supply of fertilizers, most of us will find it more profitable to develop the latent stores of plant-food lying dormant in the soil rather than to buy manures. And it is certain that you can not adopt high farming without either buying manure directly, or buying food to feed to animals that shall make manure on the farm.
And you must recollect that high farming requires an increased supply of labor, and hired help is a luxury almost as costly as artificial fertilizers.