A WARNING TO FARMERS.

Southland Times, Issue 1187, 24 December 1869, Page 2

A WARNING TO FARMERS.

Californian farmers are beginning to re.ilise the fable of killing the goose, yielder of the golden eg2;s. It is dawning on them that, rich, as the soil and climate are in the elements essential to the production of the cereals, the land may be impoverished by frequent consecutive planting in. wheat or barley, and that thousands of acres of the beat alluvium in the country, which a few seasons since yielded fifty bushels to the acre, are not now reliable in the most favorable season for twenty-five. With less experimenting it has bean demonstrated that average uplauds, not subject even in extraordinary floods to overflow, and very good hill lands, capable of producing the very best of grasses and two or three consecutive crops of srain, are not reliable aa grain lands without careful farming, including rotation of crops, rest, and manuring. The Califonuans should have learned these important facts from the fatal experience of the cotton and tobacco farmers of the Southland the wheat farmers of the West ; but, as these did not profit from the experience of older countries, so the Californians would not be convinced short of the lessons of personal experience and the disasters it has in so many instances entailed upon the land. There is less reason to be pleaded in excuse of Californian neglect than in that of the Western farmers. They were almost constrained by necessity to the one staple of wheat as the only commodity their farms would yield, a surplus of which brought them read^ money. Their corn, fed to pigs, was certainly a money crop, but if not so used it was hardly marketable at any price until within the last few years, when the growing consumption of Indian corn throughout Europe, and cheapened transportation from the interior to the seaboard, have increased the outside demand for it. Beside wheat and Indian corn the Western farmer has no other staple. In California both soil and climate favor a i system of varied agriculture. The entire world has no better localities than many of the Califorman const valleys for dairy pursuits, yet nine-tenths of the butter and cheese consumed are imported at enormous prices. The natural home of the grape is to be found everywhere, from the altitude of 2000 feet in the Sierra Nevada and foot hills, and all the intervening valleys, to the edge of the fougy districts along the eastern slope of the Coast Range, yet the larger proportion of the wine is imported from Europe, and ninetynine hundredtlis of the spirituous liquors consumed in California come in from the Atlantic States, the greater bulk of this latter being the most uoxious compounds — poisonous, and spreading disease and death wherever they are used.