What I know of farming:. Greeley Horace
with a wood-lot on the rear or not far distant, and clumps or belts of timber irregularly lining brook and ravine, or lurking in the angles and sinuosities of walls and wooden fences, and a ragged, mossy orchard sheltered in some quiet nook, or sprawling over some gravelly hill-side. A brook, nearly dry in August, gurgles down the hill-side or winds through the swamp; while fields, moderately sloping here and nearly level there, interposed as they can be, have severally been devoted, for a generation or more, alternately to Grain and Grass – the latter largely preponderating. We will suppose this farm to measure from 50 to 150 acres.
Now, the young man who has bought or inherited this farm may be wholly and consciously unable to enter upon any expensive system of improvement for the next ten years – may fully realize that four or five days of each week must meantime be given to the growing or earning of present bread – yet he should none the less study well the capacities and adaptations of each acre, and mature a comprehensive plan for the ultimate bringing of each field into the best and most useful condition whereof it is susceptible, before he cuts a living tree or digs a solitary drain. He is morally certain of doing something – perhaps many things – that he will sadly wish undone, if he fails to study peculiarities and mature a plan before he begins to improve or to fit his several fields for profitable cultivation.
And the first selection to be made is that of a pasture, since I am compelled to use an old, familiar name for what should be essentially a new thing. This pasture should be as near the center of the farm as may be, and convenient to the barns and barn-yard that are to be. It should have some shade, but no very young trees; should be dry and rolling, with an abundance of the purest living water. The smaller this pasture-lot may be, the better I shall like it, provided you fence it very stoutly, connect it with the barn-yard by a lane if they are not in close proximity, and firmly resolve that, outside of this lot, this lane, this yard and the adjacent stable, your cattle shall never be seen, unless on the road to market. Very possibly, the day may come wherein you will decide to dispense with pasturing altogether; but that is, for the present, improbable. One pasture you will have; if you live in the broad West, and purpose to graze extensively, it will doubtless be a large one; but permitting your stock to ramble in Spring and Fall all over your own fields – (and perhaps your neighbors' also) – in quest of their needful food, biting off the tops of the finer young trees, trampling down or breaking off some that are older, rubbing the bark off of your growing fruit-trees, and doing damage that years will be required to repair, I most vehemently protest against.
The one great error that misleads and corrupts mankind is the presumption that something may be had for nothing. The average farmer imagines that whatever of flesh or of milk may accrue to him from the food his cattle obtain by browsing over his fields or through his woods, is so much clear gain – that they do the needful work, while he pockets the net proceeds. But the universe was framed on a plan which requires so much for so much; and this law will not submit to defiance or evasion. Under the unnatural, exceptional conditions which environ the lone squatter on a vast prairie, something may be made by turning cattle loose and letting them shift for themselves; but this is at best transitory, and at war with the exigencies of civilization. Whoever lives within sight of a school-house, or within hearing of a church-bell, is under the dominion of a law alike inexorable and beneficent – the law that requires each to pay for all he gets, and reap only where he has sown.
You can hardly have a pasture so small that it will not afford hospitality to weeds and prove a source of multiform infestations. The plants that should mature and be diffused will be kept down to the earth; those which should be warred upon and eradicated will flourish untouched, ripen their seed, and diffuse it far and wide. Thistles, White Daisy, and every plant that impedes tillage and diminishes crops, are nourished and diffused by means of pastures.
I hold, therefore, that the good farmer will run a mowing-machine over his pasture twice each Summer – say early in June, and then late in July – or, if his lot be too rough for this, will have it clipped at least once with a scythe. Cutting all manner of worthless if not noxious plants in the blossom, will benefit the soil which their seeding would tax; it will render the eradication of weeds from your tillage a far easier task; and it will prevent your being a nuisance to your neighbors. I am confident that no one who has formed the habit of keeping down the weeds in his pasture will ever abandon it.
I think each pasture should have (though mine, as yet, has not) a rude shed or other shelter whereto the cattle may resort in case of storm or other inclemency. How much they shrink as well as suffer from one cold, pelting rain, few fully realize; but I am sure that "the merciful man" who (as the Scripture says) "is merciful to his beast," finds his humanity a good paying investment. I doubt that the rule would fail, even in Texas; but I am contemplating civilized husbandry, not the rude conditions of tropical semi-barbarism. If only by means of stakes and straw, give cattle a chance to keep dry and warm when they must otherwise shiver through a rainy, windy day and night on the cold, wet ground, and I am sure they will pay for it.
In confining a herd of cattle to such narrow limits, I do not intend that they shall be stinted to what grows there. On the contrary, I expect them to be fed on Winter Rye, on Cut Grass, on Sowed Corn, Sorghum, Stalks, Roots, etc., etc., as each shall be in season. With a good mower, it is a light hour's work before breakfast to cut and cart to a dozen or twenty head as much grass or corn as they will eat during the day. But let that point stand over for the present.
VII.
TREES – WOODLAND – FORESTS
I am not at all sentimental – much less mawkish – regarding the destruction of trees. Descended from several generations of timber-cutters (for my paternal ancestors came to America in 1640), and myself engaged for three years in land-clearing, I realize that trees exist for use rather than for ornament, and have no more scruple as to cutting timber in a forest than as to cutting grass in a meadow. Utility is the reason and end of all vegetable growth – of a hickory's no less than a corn-stalk's. I have always considered "Woodman, spare that tree," just about the most mawkish bit of badly versified prose in our language, and never could guess how it should touch the sensibilities of any one. Understand, then, that I urge the planting of trees mainly because I believe it will pay, and the preservation, improvement, and extension, of forests, for precisely that reason.
Yet I am not insensible to the beauty and grace lent by woods, and groves, and clumps or rows of trees, to the landscape they diversify. I feel the force of Emerson's averment, that "Beauty is its own excuse for being," and know that a homestead embowered in, belted by, stately, graceful elms, maples, and evergreens, is really worth more, and will sell for more, than if it were naked field and meadow. I consider it one positive advantage (to balance many disadvantages) of our rocky, hilly, rugged Eastern country, that it will never, in all probability, be so denuded of forests as the rich, facile prairies and swales of the Great Valley may be. Our winds are less piercing, our tornadoes less destructive, than those of the Great West. I doubt whether there is another equal area of the earth's surface whereon so many kinds of valuable trees grow spontaneously and rapidly, defying eradication, as throughout New England and on either slope of the Alleghenies; and this profusion of timber and foliage may well atone for, or may be fairly weighed against, many deficiencies and drawbacks. The Yankee, who has been accustomed to see trees spring up spontaneously wherever they were not kept down by ax, or plow, or scythe, and to cross running water every half mile of a Summer day's journey, may well be made homesick, by two thousand miles of naked, dusty, wind-swept Plains, whereon he finds no water for fifty to a hundred miles, and knows it impossible to cut an ax-helve, much more an axle-tree, in the course of a wearying journey. No Eastern farmer ever realized the blessedness of abundant and excellent wood and water until he had wandered far from his boyhood's home.
No one may yet be able fully to explain the inter-dependence of these two blessings; but the fact remains. All over "the Plains," there is evidence that trees grew and flourished where none are now found, and that springs and streams were then frequent and abiding where none now exist. A prominent citizen of Nevada, who explored southward from Austin to the Colorado, assured me that his party traveled for days in the bed of what had once been a considerable river, but in which it was evident that no water had flowed for years. And I have heard that since the Mormons have planted trees over considerable sections of Utah, rains in Summer are no longer rare, and Salt