XXXIX.
SCIENCE IN AGRICULTURE
I am not a scientific farmer; it is not probable that I ever shall be. I have no such knowledge of Chemistry and Geology as any man needs to make him a thoroughly good farmer. I am quite aware that men have raised good crops – a good many of them – who knew nothing of science, and did not consider any acquaintance with it conducive to efficiency or success in their vocation. I have no doubt that men will continue to grow such crops, and to make money by agriculture, who hardly know what is meant by Chemistry or Geology; and yet I feel sure that, as the years roll by, Science will more and more be recognized and accepted as the true, substantial base of efficient and profitable cultivation. Let me here give briefly the grounds of this conviction:
Every plant is composed of elements whereof a very small portion is drawn from the soil, while the ampler residue, so long as the plant continues green and growing, is mainly water, though a variable and often considerable proportion is imbibed or absorbed from the atmosphere, which is understood to yield freely nearly all the elements required of it, provided the plants are otherwise in healthful and thrifty condition. Water is supplied from the sky, or from springs and streams; and little more than the most ordinary capacity for observation is required to determine when it is present in sufficient quantity, when in baleful excess. But who, unaided by Science, can decide whether the soil does or does not contain the elements requisite for the luxuriant growth and perfect development of Wheat, or Fruit, or Grass, or Beets, or Apples? Who knows, save as he blindly infers from results, what mineral ingredients of this or that crop are deficient in given field, and what are present in excess? And how shall any one be enlightened and assured on the point, unless by the aid of Science?
I have bought and applied to my farm some two thousand bushels of Lime, and ten or a dozen tuns of Plaster; and I infer, from what seemed to be results, that each of these minerals has been applied with profit; but I do not know it. The increased product which I have attributed to one or both of these elements may have had a very different origin and impulse. I only grope my way in darkness when I should clearly and surely see.
An agricultural essayist in Maine has recently put forth a canon which, if well grounded, is of great value to farmers. He asserts that the growth of acid plants like Sorrel, Dock, etc., in a field, results from sourness in the soil, and that, where this exists, Lime – that is, the ordinary Carbonate of Lime – is urgently required; whereas the application of Plaster or Gypsum (Sulphate of Lime) to that field must be useless and wasteful. If such be the truth, a knowledge of it would be worth millions of dollars to our farmers. But I lack the scientific attainment needed to qualify me for passing judgment thereon.
There is great diversity of opinion among farmers with regard to the value of Swamp Muck. One has applied it to his land to good purpose; so he holds Muck, if convenient, the cheapest and best fertilizer a farmer can add to his ordinary barn-yard manure; another has applied cords upon cords of Muck, and says he has derived therefrom no benefit whatever. Now, this contrariety of conclusion may result from imperfect judgment on one side or the other, or from the condition precedent of the diverse soils: one of them requiring what Muck could supply, while the other required something very different from that; or it may be accounted for by the fact that the Muck applied in one case was of superior quality, and in the other good for nothing. Where Muck is composed almost wholly of the leaves of forest-trees which, through thousands of years, have been blown into a bog, or shallow pond, and there been gradually transformed into a fine, black dust or earth, I do not see how it can possibly be applied to an upland, especially a sandy or gravelly soil, without conducing to the subsequent production of bounteous crops. True, it may be sour when first drawn from the stagnant pool or bog in which it has lain so long, and may need to be mixed with Lime, or Salt, or Ashes, and subjected to the action of sun and frost, to ripen and sweeten it. But it seems to me impossible that such Muck should be applied to almost any reasonably dry land, without improving its consistency and increasing its fertility. But all Muck is not the product of decayed forest-leaves; and that which was formed of coarse, rank weeds and brakes, of rotten wood and flags, or skunk cabbage, may be of very inferior quality, so as hardly to repay the cost of digging and applying it. Science will yet enable us to fix, at least approximately, the value of each deposit of Muck, and so give a preference to the best.
The Analysis of Soils, whereof much was heard and whence much was hoped a few years since, seems to have fallen into utter discredit, so that every would-be popular writer gives it a passing fling or kick. That any analysis yet made was and is worthless, I can readily concede, without shaking in the least my conviction that soils will yet be analyzed, under the guidance of a truer, profounder Science, to the signal enlightenment and profit of their cultivators. Here is a retired merchant, banker, doctor, or lawyer, who has bought a spacious and naturally fertile but worn-out, run-down farm, on which he proposes to spend the remainder of his days. Of course, he must improve and enrich it; but with what? and how? All the manure he finds, or, for the present, can make on it, will hardly put the first acre in high condition, while he grows old and is unwilling to wait forever. He is able and ready to buy fertilizers, and does buy right and left, without knowing whether his land needs Lime, or Phosphate, or Potash, or something very different from either. Say he purchases $2,000 worth Of one or more of these fertilizers: it is highly probable that $1,500 might have served him better if invested in due proportion in just what his land most urgently needs; and I unflinchingly believe that we shall yet have an analysis of soils that will tell him just what fertilizers he ought to apply, and what quantity of each of them.
Science has already taught us that every load of Hay or Grain drawn from a field abstracts therefrom a considerable quantity of certain minerals – say Potash, Lime, Soda, Magnesia, Chlorine, Silica, Phosphorus – and that the soil is thereby impoverished until they be replaced, in some form or other. As no deposit in a bank was ever so large that continual drafts would not ultimately exhaust it, so no soil was ever so rich that taking crop after crop from it annually, yet giving nothing back, would not render it sterile or worthless. Sun and rain and wind will do their part in the work of renovation; but all of them together cannot restore to the soil the mineral elements whereof each crop takes a portion, and which, being once completely exhausted, can only be replaced at a heavy cost. Science teaches us to foresee and prevent such exhaustion – in part, by a rotation of crops, and in part by a constant replacement of the minerals annually borne away: the subtraction being greater in proportion as the crop is more exacting and luxuriant.
What I know of Science applicable to Farming is little indeed; but I know that there is such Science, and that each succeeding year enlarges, improves, and perfects it. I know that I should thus far have farmed to far better purpose, if I had been master even of so much Science as already exists.
Understand that I am not a teacher of this Science – I stand very low in the class of learners. I began to learn too late in life, and have been too incessantly harassed by a multiplicity of cares, to make any satisfactory progress. Any tolerably educated boy of fifteen may know far more of Agricultural Science by the time he has passed his eighteenth birthday than I do. What I know in this respect can help him very little; my faith that there is much to be known, and that he may master it if he will, is all that is of much importance. If I can convince a considerable number of our youth that they may surely acquire a competence by the time they shall have passed their fortieth year, without excessive labor or penurious frugality, by means of that knowledge of principles and laws subservient to Agriculture which their fathers could not, but which they easily may attain, I shall have rendered a substantial service alike to them and to our country.
XL.
FARM IMPLEMENTS
A good workman, it is said, does not quarrel with his tools – which, if true, I judge is due to the fact that he generally manages to have good ones. To work hard throughout a long day under a burning sun, is sufficiently trying, without rendering the labor doubly repugnant by the use of ill-contrived, imperfect, inefficient implements.
The half-century which nearly bounds my recollection has witnessed great improvements in this respect. The Plow, mainly of wood, wherewith my father broke up his stony, hide-bound acres of New-Hampshire pebbles and gravel, in my early boyhood, would now be spurned if offered as a gift to the poorest and most thriftless farmer among us; and the Hoes which were allotted to us boys in those days, after the newer and better had been assigned to the men, would be rejected with disdain by the stupidest negro in Virginia. Though there is still room for improvement, we use far better implements than our grandfathers did, with a corresponding increase in the efficiency of our labor; but the cultivators of Spain, Portugal, and the greater part of Europe, still linger in the dark ages in this respect. Their plows are little better than the forked sticks which served their barbarian ancestors, and their implements generally are beneath contempt. With such implements, deep and thorough culture is simply impossible, unless by the use of the spade; and he must be a hard worker who produces a peck of Wheat or half a bushel of Indian Corn per day by the exclusive use of this tool. The soil of France is so cut up and subdivided into little strips of two or three roods up to as many acres each – each strip forming the entire patrimony of a family – that agricultural advancement or efficiency is, with the great mass of French cultivators, out of the question. Hence, I judge that, outside of Great Britain and Australia, there is no country wherein an average year's work produces half so much grain as in our own, in spite of our slovenly tillage, our neglect and waste of fertilizers, and the frequent failures of our harvests. Belgium, Holland, and northern France, can teach us neatness and thoroughness of cultivation; the British isles may fairly boast of larger and surer crops of Wheat, Oats, Potatoes, and Grass, than we are accustomed to secure; but, in the selection of implements, and in the average efficiency of labor, our best farmers are ahead of then all.
Bear with me, then, while I interpose a timid plea for our inventors and patentees of implements, whose solicitations that a trial, or at least an inspection, be accorded to their several contrivances, are too often repelled with churlish rudeness. I realize that our thriving farmers are generally absorbed in their own plans and efforts, and that the agent or salesman who insists on an examination of his new harrow, or pitchfork, or potato-digger, is often extravagant in his assumptions, and sometimes a bore. Still, when I recollect how tedious and how back-breaking were the methods of mowing Grass and reaping Grain with the Scythe and Sickle, which held unchallenged sway in my early boyhood, I entreat the farmer who is petitioned to accord ten or fifteen minutes to the setting forth, by some errant stranger, of the merits of his new horse-hoe or tedder, to give the time, if he can; and that without sour looks or a mien of stolid incredulity. The Biblical monition that, in evincing a generous hospitality, we may sometimes entertain angels unawares, seems to me in point. A new implement may be defective and worthless, and yet contain the germ or suggest the form of a thoroughly good one. Give the inventor or his representative a courteous hearing if you can, even though this should constrain you to make up the time so lost after the day's work would otherwise have ended.
I suspect that the average farmer of our completely rural districts would be surprised, if not instructed, by a day's careful scrutiny of the contents of one of our great implement warehouses. So many and such various and ingenious devices for pulverizing the earth applying fertilizers to the soil, planting or sowing rapidly, eradicating weeds, economizing labor in harvesting, etc., will probably transcend not merely his experience, but his imagination; and every one of these myriad implements is useful in its place, though no single farmer can afford to buy all or half of them. It will yet, I think, be found necessary by the farmers of a school-district, if not of a township, to meet and agree among themselves that one will buy this implement, another that, and so on, until twenty or thirty such devices as a Stump or Rock-Puller, a Clod-Crusher, Thrashing-Machine, Fanning-Mill, etc., shall be owned in the neighborhood – each by a separate farmer, willing to live and let live – with an understanding that each shall be used in turn by him who needs it; and so every one shall be nearly as well accommodated as though he owned them all.
For the number and variety of useful implements increase so rapidly, while their usefulness is so palpable, that, though it is difficult to farm efficiently without many if not most of them, it is impossible that the young farmer of moderate means should buy and keep them all. True, he might hire when he needed, if what he wanted were always at hand; but this can only be assured by some such arrangement as I have suggested, wherein each undertakes to provide and keep that which he will most need; agreeing to lend it whenever it can be spared to any other member of the combination, who undertakes to minister in like manner to his need in return.
I think few will doubt that the inventions in aid of Agriculture during the last forty years will be far surpassed by those of the forty years just before us. The magnificent fortunes which, it is currently understood, have rewarded the inventors of the more popular Mowers, Reapers, etc., of our day, are sure to stimulate alike the ingenuity and the avarice of clever men throughout the coming years, and to call into existence ten thousand patents, whereof a hundred will be valuable, and ten or twelve eminently useful. Plowing land free from stumps and stones cannot long be the tedious, patience-trying process we have known it. The machinery which will at once pulverize the soil to a depth of two feet, fertilize and seed it, not requiring it to be trampled by the hoofs of animals employed in subsoiling and harrowing, will soon be in general use, especially on the spacious, deep, inviting prairies of the Great West. – But I must defer what I have to say of Steam and its uses in Agriculture to another chapter.
XLI.
STEAM IN AGRICULTURE
As yet, the great body of our farmers have been slow in availing themselves of the natural forces in operation around them. Vainly for them does the wind blow across their fields and over their hill-tops. It neither thrashes nor grinds their grain; it has ceased even to separate it from the chaff. The brook brawls and foams idly adown the precipice or hillside: the farmer grinds his grain, churns his cream, and turns his grindstone, just as though falling water did not embody power. He draws his Logs to one mill, and his Wheat, Corn, or Rye to another, and returns in due season with his boards or his meal; but the lesson which the mill so plainly teaches remains, by him unread. Where running or leaping water is not, there brisk breezes and fiercer gales are apt to be. But the average farmer ignores the mechanical use of stream and breeze alike, taxing his own muscle to achieve that which the blind forces of Nature stand ready to do at his command. It may not, and I think it will not, be always thus.
Steam, as a cheap source of practically limitless power, is hardly a century old; yet it has already revolutionized the mechanical and manufacturing industry of Christendom. It weaves the far greater part of all the Textile Fabrics that clothe and shelter and beautify the human family. It fashions every bar and every rail of Iron or of Steel; it impels the machinery of nearly every manufactory of wares or of implements; and it is very rapidly supplanting wind in the propulsion of vessels on the high seas, as it has already done on rivers and on most inland waters.
Water is, however, still employed as a power in certain cases, but mainly because its adaptation to this end has cost many thousands of dollars which its disuse would render worthless.
I am quite within bounds in estimating that nine-tenths of all the material force employed by man in Manufactures, Mechanics, and Navigation, is supplied by Steam, and that this disproportion will be increased to ninety-nine hundredths before the close of this century.
For Agriculture, Steam has done very much, in the transportation of crops and of fertilizers, but very little in the preparation or cultivation of the soil. Of steam-wagons for roads or fields, steam-plows for pulverizing and deepening the soil, and steam-cultivators for keeping weeds down and rendering tillage more efficient, we have had many heralded in sanguine bulletins throughout the last forty years, but I am not aware that one of them has fulfilled the sanguine hopes of its author. Though a dozen Steam-Plows have been invented in this country, and several imported from Europe, I doubt that a single square mile of our country's surface has been plowed wholly by steam down to this hour. If it has, Louisiana – a State which one would not naturally expect to find in the van of industrial progress – has enjoyed the benefit and earned the credit of the achievement.
Of what Steam has yet accomplished in direct aid of Agriculture, I have little to say, though in Great Britain quite a number of steam-plows are actually at work in the fields, and (I am assured), with fair success. Until something breaks or gives out, one of these plows does its appointed work better and cheaper than such work is or can be done by animal power; but all the steam-plows whereof I have any knowledge seem too bulky, too complicated, too costly, ever to win their way into general use. I value them only as hints and incitements toward something better suited to the purpose.
What our farmers need is not a steam-plow as a specialty, but a locomotive that can travel with facility, not only on common wagon-roads, but across even freshly-plowed fields, without embarrassment, and prove as docile to its manager's touch as an average span of horses. Such a locomotive should not cost more then $500, nor weigh more than a tun when laden with fuel and water for a half-hour's steady work. It should be so contrived that it may be hitched in a minute to a plow, a harrow, a wagon, or cart, a saw or grist-mill, a mower or reaper, a thresher or stalk-cutter, a stump or rock-puller, and made useful in pumping and draining operations, digging a cellar or laying up a wall, as also in ditching or trenching. We may have to wait some years yet for a servant so dexterous and docile, yet I feel confident that our children will enjoy and appreciate his handiwork.
The farmer often needs far more power at one season than at another, and is compelled to retain and subsist working animals at high cost through months in which he has no use for them, because he must have them when those months have transpired. If he could replace those animals by a machine which, when its season of usefulness was over, could be cleaned, oiled, and put away under a tight roof until next seeding-time, the saving alike of cost and trouble would be very considerable.
When our American reapers first challenged attention in Great Britain, the general skepticism as to their efficiency was counteracted by the suggestion that, even though reaping by machinery should prove more expensive than reaping by hand, the ability to cut and save the grain-crop more rapidly than hitherto would over-balance that enhancement of cost. In the British Isles, day after day of chilling wind and rain is often encountered in harvest-time: the standing Wheat or Oats or Barley becoming draggled, or lodged, or beaten out, while the owner impatiently awaits the recurrence of sunny days. When these at length arrive, he is anxious to harvest many acres at once, since his Grain is wasting and he knows not how soon cloud and tempest may again be his portion. But all his neighbors are in like predicament with himself, and all equally intent on hurrying the harvest; so that little extra help is attainable. If now the aid of a machine may be commanded, which will cut 15 or 20 acres per day, he cares less how much that work will cost than how soon it can be effected. Hence, even though cutting by horse-power had proved more costly than cutting by hand, it would still have been welcome.
So it is with Plowing, here and almost everywhere. Our farmers have this year been unable to begin Plowing for Winter Grain so early as they desired, by reason of the intense heat and drouth, whereby their fields were baked to the consistency of half-burned brick. Much seed will in consequence have been sown too late, while much seeding will have been precluded altogether, by inability to prepare the ground in due season. If a machine had been at hand whereby 15 or 20 acres per day could have been plowed and harrowed, thousands would have invoked its aid to enable them to sow their Grain in tolerable season, even though the cost had been essentially heavier than that of old-fashioned plowing. I traversed Illinois on the 13th and 14th of May, 1859, when its entire soil seemed soaked and sodden with incessant rains, which had not yet ceased pouring. Inevitably, there had been little or no plowing yet for the vast Corn-crop of that State; yet barely two weeks would intervene before the close of the proper season for Corn-planting. Even if these should be wholly favorable, the plowing could not be effected in season, and much ground must be planted too late or not planted at all. In every such case, a machine that would plow six or eight furrows as fast as a man ought to walk, would add immensely to the year's harvest, and be hailed as a general blessing.
I recollect that a German observer of Western cultivation – a man of decided perspicacity and wide observation – recommended that each farmer who had not the requisite time or team for getting in his Corn-crop in due season should plow single furrows through his field at intervals of 3 to 3-1/2 feet, plant his Corn on the earth thus turned, and proceed, so soon as his planting was finished, to plow out the spaces as yet undisturbed between the springing rows of Corn. I do not know that this recommendation was ever widely followed; but I judge that, under certain circumstances, it might be, to decided advantage and profit.
I have not attempted to indicate all the benefits which Steam is to confer directly on Agriculture, within the next half-century. That Irrigation must become general, I confidently believe; and I anticipate a very extensive sinking of wells, at favorable points, in order that water shall be drawn therefrom by wind or steam to moisten and enrich the slopes and plains around them. Such a locomotive as I have foreshadowed might be taken from well to well, pumping from each in an hour or two sufficient water to irrigate several of the adjacent acres; thus starting a second crop of Hay on fields whence the first had been taken, and renewing verdure and growth where we now see vegetation suspended for weeks, if not months. I feel sure that the mass of our farmers have not yet realized the importance and beneficence of Irrigation, nor the facility wherewith its advantages may be secured.