SLIPSHOD PLOUGHING.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 376, 12 June 1889, Page 3

SLIPSHOD PLOUGHING.

The following is good practical writing on a most important subject : — There are a good few kinds of work thar must be done pretty roughly in a new country, some of which even if roughly done are still as good for the purpose they are meant to serve as if they were bettet finished. But that is nob the case with bad ploughing. There are thousands of acres that will yield some bushels of corn or wheat an acre less, just because the first ploughing was badly done. You cross one piece of ploughing so neatly turned over that every line of furrow fits neatly up to the next over the whole field. In six weeks or two months the heat of the sun and the chemical action of the green herbage that was buried will have rotted that turf so much that it will almost crumble in your hand. The same deft hand back-sets the same patch in the =arne skilful way, and next year you see from 20 to 30 bushels on the top of it. Years after the fine crumbling loam of that patch yields liberal crops, skilled observers know why it is so. It was a ploughman who both knew how to plough, and why good ploughing is so important, who left his abiding mark on that soil. Look at perhaps the very next farm. The furrows are not parallel" nor equal in width ; sometimes the furrow is almost sec on edge, sometimes it overlaps a few inches, and when he comes to a finish, it may be one end or both, it may be the middle of the land that wants an extra furrow or two to even up. Put the same man or even a much better man to back-set that, and what does he see ? Part of the upturned sod is rotted, just as in the ocher case, part of it forms a tough hard belt of sod that will last for the next five years ; the whole of it to look at a «?reat source of of annoyance, and an eyesore to skilled farmers. If you will look a little deeper you will see that not over a third of that sod was converted into food for the next year's plants. In spite of all your efforts to bring these hard lumps into subjection you will lose a third of your seed next spring and have an uneven crop, with thriving weeds to adorn the naked spot where the grain did not take hold. You have put twice the work on ohat ugly field that the other man did ; you have" some bushels an acre less that he had, and you have an ample supply of foul seed that will necessitate summer fallowing, the third or fourth year at latest. Those tough dry lumps will be showing up all the time, and it will take a good job of summer fallowing to put them where they will get rotted at last. If those who read this will look quietly over their own and other people's experience they will find there is a marked'difference in the two kinds of ploughing ; and granting that even slipshod ploughing serves to turn over the ground, it will readily be understood that it is decidedly unprofitable, and no sensible farmer will allow his fields to be so ploughed.— Martin's Home and Farm.