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Nelson Evening Mail, 9 March 1872, Page 4

Gekman Farmers — A correspondent of the Springfield Republican writes from Dresden : — " Of the two and a half million inhabitants of Saxony two thirds live in the country (platt land) and 130,000 are landowners, 80,000 possessing each more than two acres, and 100,000 being their own farmers, viz., working their own soil. The valuation of the land outside of the cities reaches nearly 600,000,000d015. and an annual harvest is valued at 45,000,000. The 50,000 farms in Massachusets, with a valuation in land of less than one-fifth as much, get more than two-thirds as much for their crops as the Saxon farmers. The Saxon farmers, however, never ask whether farming pays. They maintain a slow but sure prosperity, and during the last third of a century have advanced the rate of production proportionately with an increase of nearly 60 per cent, ia population. This advance has not been through the American avenue of introducing new methods, but probably by a closer and more desperate forcing of the old and settled methods of farming. The railway recently took me over thousands of crops in the process of harvesting, in the Kingdom, and Prussian Provinces of Saxony, a region for the most part that would delight the eye of even an American farmer, lying as level and mellow to the plough as the gentle rolling billows of Illinois. Oftet, as far as the eye could reach on either side of the railroad, stretched one cultivated expanse, unraarred by fences, but chequered all over with the infinite interchange of crops, scarcely any one field or one crop being more than oue or two acres in extent. Yet in all these thousands of 'flurs' (certainly here a field is a 'floor') not a mowing or reaping machine or horserake was to be seen. Every swatch had been haggled off and tumbled together by the old-fashioned scythe, every winrow of hay had been collected with a puttering handrake, every sheaf of grain bound by a woman's arms, and when the crop had finally gone off upon wheelbarrows or drawn by harnessed cows, the serried rows of stubble exposed the antiquity of the mower's tools, and his or her unskilfulnees in using even those. Imagine a scythe only three feet in length, four inches broad at the heel, fixed in a straight sheath, and a handrake with a young sapling stripped of its bark for a handle, and you have specimens of the outfit of a German haymaker."