THE AMERICAN CROPS.

Patea Mail, 4 June 1881, Page 3

THE AMERICAN CROPS.

The season is now at hand for the farmer to prophesy ruin for the country and himself during the coming summer, and accordingly the premonitory croak of total disaster is heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A month ago we heard from Delaware that there was not a peach bud left alive ; the early wheat is reported killed in Pennsylvania and New-Jersey; and from the great West, which must always have a gluts even of ruin, comes the announcement that there is a depth of two feet of snow over the whole of the land devoted to cereals, and beneath that three feet of frozen soil. Cattle are dying by the thousands from Michigan to NewMexico, and the wheat crop will be an utter failure. In consequence of these reports, prices in grain have advanced, though only slightly. Buyers know the exact value of this cry of wolf which they hear every March, and though they know there is ground for alarm, by no means concede that the emergency is likely to be so extreme as the farmers of the West would have us to suppose.

The fact is that in the Atlantic States the frost, coming early this year and while a long drought had dried up springs and watercourses, has hardened and held the ground to greater depth and for a longer time than usual. All the rain-falls of February and the vast body of melted snow have not yet succeeded in penetrating the frozen earth. The traveller through the farming districts of New York and Pennsylvania, who at this time last year would have passed between green fields of winter wheat, now travels past swamps or stretches of shallow ponds through which last year’s stubles rises grimly enough. The same conditions exaggerated exist in the Northwest. But we shall hope for the best. If Yernor’s prophecy prove true, and March ends in melting suns and warm rains, the farmer will yet reap a plentiful though perhaps late harvest. The demand for our breadstuff's from Europe will not probably be so great as it was last year, and there is an enormous supply of grain stored in the West, quite enough to go into market with for the first calls.—New York Tribune.