FARMING IN ENGLAND.
Thomas Median, the agricultural editor of the Philadelphia 'Press, who is now on a visit to England, has written several interesting letters to his paper, from the last of which we copy the following ; —As to farming in England, I was astonished to find how little it had progressed in the last half-century. Over the whole country men were mowing grass with old-fashioned scythes, sometimes in a string of a dozen together, hired at so much a day, “ and their beer,” as they were iu the olden time. Once iu a while an American mowingmachine would be seen in us 6, and more commonly a “hay tedder,” a machine for scattering the hay after it had been mowed in the swaths. This scattering is all avoided by our mowers, but saves the hand-scattering necessary after hand mowing ; but we found quite a prejudice against these tedders, “ for,” said a quiet intelligent farmer, “it shakes out the seed, and we lose that in weight when selling the hay.” The hay crop in England is rather an important one, as sheep and cattle are of more consequence to them than grain. There is an immense breadth of country under grass, and, as their sun is “ not so warm” as ours, it takes several days and much turning over to dry it enough to store safely. The average weight per acre is greater than onrs, but the extra labor they put on it brings up the cost. The hay is mostly drawn away from the fields in one-horse carta—the carts of the old heavy pattern, enough for an ordinary horse to draw alone, just as wo might have seen fifty years ago. Men and women are seen everywhere at work in the hay-fields, and it did seem to me that there were enough of them at it throughout the kingdom to move the whole harvest of our Middle States. There are some few very large farms, operated by very wealthy owners, where I saw steam-ploughs, steam-threshers, and other labor-saving farm machines, but they are not generally diffused—indeed, not at all diffused—among the general cultivators. I asked a farmer of some 250 acres why he had not some of these machines, and he thought his farm was too small. He was astonished when I told him that farmers of much less than 100 acres with us depended mainly on these machines. Another farmer told me he would have long ago had some of them, but he was afraid the laborers would buru down his stacks and barns if he introduced them. The farmers, X find, are very much at the mercy of the farm laborers, much more so than they are here. They hesitated to introduce machinery out of sympathy with the laborer, and now they have not any sympathy for him. I was on one farm, looking about with the owner, when three hired laborers came in a halt-hour after the time agreed on for work, and the farmer expostulated, but iu quite mild terms, I thought; but as we were at tea he was called out by the men, who wanted their immediate pay. They were “ not going to work for a man who talked to them in that way/ They were paid, and my friend declared that he had said that “as long as he could get one man in England to mow ho would never have a Yankee mower about.” Xle is cured now, and the mower is iu his hands.
Still, the influence of good example tells. Sir Robert Peel once told his tenantry he would give them iron ploughs i£ they would discard their old clumsy wooden ones. He found them a year or two after rusting in waste places. They excused themselves : “ They make the weeds grow. They went deeper than the old ploughs, and brought up old seeds that had been waiting for years a chance to grow.” But I was pleased to see on a visit to Tamworfch that Sir Robert’s efforts had done good—for certainly the farming here is above the average ©f English farming—especially in the matter of freedom from weeds. In the mater of cleanliness—freedom from weeds —American farming is far ahead of English. Thousands of acres are so tilled by buttercups, which no cattle will touch, that not a tenth part of the ground can be grazed by cattle. The yellow charlock, a sorb of mustard, is bo abundant that grain fields are of such a golden yellow with them that the lustre can be seen for many miles away, and the person not knowing that grain was jbeneath would think the weeds were the crop, and the crop the weeds that should be torn out. Poppies, blue-bottles, and corn-coc-kles, with numerous other things, abound, and I am nob wrong in saying that one-tenth of all tho farm land is given up to weeds. The American would admit of the hoe or harrow, and in this way in a season or two get rid of the whole stock, but here such machinery would interfere too much with the rights of labor. In many cases wncre these weeds had been cleaned from the growing grain, they had been taken out by the hand labor of women and children. I cannot go into details in a short letter like this, but I will say that, except in a few cases, not enough to be perceptible on the whole to the general looker-on, English farming is a long, long way behind American fanning. With the same amount of land, and the same amount of cash capital per acre, the American farmer will produce double the results. And I say this after going to England with a contrary impression. There are a great many excellent things we might copy from the English to advantage ; but English beer-drinking, English railroading, and English farming are surely not among them.
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New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5267, 9 February 1878, Page 6 (Supplement)
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985FARMING IN ENGLAND. New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5267, 9 February 1878, Page 6 (Supplement)
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