ut not so
many of them. This is what I am trying to do on my own farm. I am aiming
to get 35 bushels of wheat per acre, 80 bushels of shelled corn, 50
bushels of barley, 90 bushels of oats, 300 bushels of potatoes, and
1,200 bushels of mangel-wurzel per acre, on the average. I can see no
way of paying high wages except by raising large crops _per acre_. But
if I get these large crops it does not necessarily follow that I am
practising 'high farming.'"

To illustrate: Suppose I should succeed in getting such crops by
adopting the following plan. I have a farm of nearly 300 acres, one
quarter of it being low, alluvial land, too wet for cultivation, but
when drained excellent for pasturing cows or for timothy meadows.
I drain this land, and after it is drained I dam up some of the streams
that flow into it or through it, and irrigate wherever I can make the
water flow. So much for the low land.

The upland portion of the farm, containing say 200 acres, exclusive of
fences, roads, buildings, garden, etc., is a naturally fertile loam, as
good as the average wheat land of Western New York. But it is, or was,
badly "run down." It had been what people call "worked to death;"
although, in point of fact, it had not been half-worked. Some said it
was "wheated to death," others that it had been "oated to death," others
that it had been "grassed to death," and one man said to me, "That field
has had sheep on it until they have gnawed every particle of vegetable
matter out of the soil, and it will not now produce enough to pasture a
flock of geese." And he was not far from right--notwithstanding the fact
that sheep are thought to be, and are, the best animals to enrich land.
But let me say, in passing, that I have since raised on that same field
50 bushels of barley per acre, 33 bushels of Diehl wheat, a great crop
of clover, and last year, on a part of it, over 1,000 bushels of
mangel-wurzel per acre.

But this is a digression. Let us carry out the illustration. What does
this upland portion of the farm need? It needs underdraining, thorough
cultivation, and _plenty of manure_. If I had plenty of manure, I could
adopt high farming. But where am I to get plenty of manure for 200 acres
of land? "Make it," says the Deacon. Very good; but what shall I make it
of? "Make it out of your straw and stalks and hay." So I do, but all the
straw and stalks and hay raised on the farm when I bought it would not
make as much manure as "high farm