"To put the seeds for some time before they are sown amongst flour of sulphur, and sow the sulphur amongst them. The late Mr Airth informed me, that when he farmed the Mains of Dun, Forfarshire, his young turnip crops were often very much affected, and even destroyed, by these insects; but that, after he used the sulphur, he never suffered loss, though his neighbours did who would not use the same precaution, and that for as long as he possessed the farm afterwards, namely, fifteen years."—(Vol. iii. p. 772.)
It is also with regret that we pass over the making of butter and cheese, the chapter upon which we commend to the attention of our dairy farmers. The subjects of hay-making, liming and forming water meadows, we also pass; but we stop a moment at his chapter upon flax and hemp.
The culture of flax is now very much advocated both in Great Britain and Ireland; and we fear very erroneous notions are entertained and propagated regarding both the profit it is likely to yield to the farmer, and the effect it is fitted to produce upon the land. The following passage is not entirely free from objection, but it contains a great deal of truth and much common sense:—
"It has been proposed of late, with a considerable degree of earnestness, to encourage the growth of flax in Britain. The attempt was made some years ago and failed; but in the present instance it is recommended with the view of raising flax-seed for feeding cattle in sufficient quantity to render us independent of foreign oil-cake, of which, no doubt, large quantities are annually imported, but to what extent I have not been able to ascertain. The object of the suggestion is laudable, but the end, I fear, unattainable; for if good seed is raised to make good oil-cake, or compounds with oil, the flax will be coarse, and flax of inferior quality will never pay so well as corn: and it should never be lost sight of, in considering this question, that to raise flax must bring it into competition with white crops, and not green crops, because to raise it as a green crop would be to deteriorate its quality by bringing it into immediate contact with manure; and, on the other hand, if it is raised without manure as a fallow-crop, it must deteriorate the soil materially—no species of crop being more scourging to the soil than flax, not even a crop of turnip-seed. There is, therefore, this dilemma in the matter—the quality of the flax or of the seed must be sacrificed. The seed separately will not pay the expense of culture. Seed is produced from six to twelve bushels per acre. Taking the highest at twelve bushels, that is, one and a half quarter, and taking it also for granted that it all will be fit for sowing, and worth the highest current price of 60s. per quarter, the gross return would only be L.4, 10s. per acre. The flax-crop varies in weight of rough dried fibre, according to season and soil, from three to ten cwt. per acre; and taking the high produce, five cwt. per acre of dressed flax, at the highest price of L.6 per ton, the yield will be L.31, from which have to be deducted the expenses of beetling, scutching, and heckling, and waste and loss of straw for manure, and the profit will not exceed L.8 per acre; but though such a profit would certainly repay the expenses of cultivation, yet it presents the most favourable view that can be taken, even with the sacrifice of the entire loss of seed—the loss, in fact, of the greatest inducement for renewing the culture of the plant. In Ireland the case, I believe, will be the same, though much of the soil of that country, being mossy, is more favourable to the growth of flax than that of England or Scotland; yet even there it will be found impracticable to raise good flax and good seed from the same piece of ground at the same time; and if the seed is not good, the oil-cake will be bad."—(Vol. iii. p. 1046.)
Among the arguments in favour of the extensive culture of flax, now urged by so many, we are sorry to see a scientific one lately put forth by our friend Dr Kane of Dublin, and which has been much vaunted and relied upon by himself, and by those for whose benefit the opinion was propounded. The proposal is, it will be recollected, to carry off the stalk of the flax crop, and to convert the seed into manure. This is the same thing as carrying off the straw of a corn crop, and eating or otherwise converting the grain into manure upon the farm. Every one knows that carrying off the straw will exhaust the land, as will also carrying off the stalk of the lint. But, says Dr Kane, I have analysed the steeped and dressed flax, and find that it contains very little of what the plant peculiarly draws from the soil. This is left for the most part in the pond in which the flax is steeped, or at the mill where the flax is dressed. Therefore, to carry off the flax is not necessarily to exhaust the soil. You have only to collect the shows of the flax mill, and pump out the water from the steeping hole, and apply both to the land, and you restore to it all that the crop has taken off.
Now there is a fallacy in supposing that all that is taken from the land would in this way be restored—one which the advocates of this non-exhausting view are of course not anxious to discover; but, supposing the result and conclusions correct, what are they worth in practice? It is only a little bit of fireside farming. What practical good has come out of it? Put all the steeping water upon the land! Have any of the members of the flax societies tried this? Then let them tell us how it is to be done—what it cost—what was the result and the profit of the application. They use this prescription as an argument to induce men to introduce an exhausting culture, and they take no means to introduce first a general employment of those means by which it is said that the naturally exhausting effect of the culture may be prevented. What our friend Dr Kane has said and done is in perfect good faith; the form which his opinions have assumed upon paper, has arisen solely from the want of a sufficient knowledge of the usages and capabilities of sound and profitable practical husbandry. If we cannot persuade our farmers to collect and apply to the land the liquid manure of their farm-yards, when can we hope to persuade them to empty their flax-ponds for the purpose of watering their fields? Can we ever hope soon to persuade them to preserve and use up the thousands of tons of shows that are now yearly sent down the streams by which our flax mills are set in motion?
We are far from saying that flax or any other crop may not be grown without necessarily exhausting the soil—chemistry, we know, will by-and-by put all this within our power; but we are very much of Mr Stephens' opinion, that our English and Irish flax societies do not as yet clearly see their way to that end, and that unintentionally they will lead many to inflict a permanent injury upon their land, without any adequate compensation to themselves, their landlords, or the country.
We had marked the early cutting of corn in harvest as a subject of general importance to practical men, and that of the smearing of sheep, so interesting especially to our northern agriculturists; and we wished to confirm Mr Stephens' recommendations upon those points by some observations of our own; but we are compelled to leave the chapter which treats upon them to the private consideration of our readers.
We quote the following passage from the chapter on fertilizing the soil by means of manure, as containing much good common sense:—
"Dung is applied at the commencement of every rotation of crops with the fallow green-crops, and with bare fallow; and when applied at any other time, it is near the termination of a long rotation. A rule for the quantity of farm-yard dung to be applied according to the length of the rotation, as given by Dr Coventry, is, that five tons per acre are required every year to sustain the fertility of soil; and, therefore, land which is dunged every four years in a rotation of four courses, should receive with the fallow-crop twenty tons per acre; in a five-course shift, twenty-five tons; in a six-course shift, thirty tons, and so on. These quantities constitute, no doubt, a sufficient manuring to ordinary crops; but it appears to me to be reversing the order of propriety, to give land under the severest shift—a four-course one—the smallest modicum of manure, when it should receive the largest; for there is surely truth in the observation, that land grazed with stock becomes ameliorated in condition—actually increased in fertility. A six-course shift, therefore, having three years of grazing, should require less instead of more manure even at a time than a four-course one on land of similar quality."—(Vol. iii. pp. 1230, 1231.)