What I know of farming:. Greeley Horace
though moderate increase of her volume of waters, that the equilibrium of rain-fall with evaporation in the Great Basin has been fully restored – or rather, that the rain-fall is now taking the lead.
I have a firm faith that all the great deserts of the Temperate and Torrid Zones will yet be reclaimed by irrigation and tree-planting. The bill which Congress did not pass, nor really consider, whereby it was proposed, some years since, to give a section of the woodless Public Lands remote from settlement to every one who, in a separate township, would plant and cherish a quarter-section of choice forest-trees, ought to have been passed – with modifications, perhaps, but preserving the central idea. Had ten thousand quarter-sections, in so many different townships of the Plains, been thus planted to timber ten to twenty years ago, and protected from fire and devastation till now, the value of those Plains for settlement would have been nearly or quite doubled.
A capital mistake, it seems to me, is being made by some of the dairy farmers of our own State. One who has a hundred acres of good soil, whereof twenty or thirty are wooded, cuts off his timber entirely, calculating that the additional grass that he may grow in its stead will pay for all the coal he needs for fuel, so that he will make a net gain of the time he has hitherto devoted each Winter to cutting and hauling wood. He does not consider how much his soil will lose in Summer moisture, how his springs and runnels will be dried up, nor how the sweep of harsh winds will be intensified, by baring his hill-tops and ravines to sun and breeze so utterly. In my deliberate judgment, a farm of one hundred acres will yield more feed, with far greater uniformity of product from year to year, if twenty acres of its ridge-crests, ravine-sides, and rocky places, are thickly covered with timber, than if it be swept clean of trees and all devoted to grass. Hence, I insist that the farmer who sweeps off his wood and resolves to depend on coal for fuel, hoping to increase permanently the product of his dairy, makes a sad miscalculation.
Spain, Italy, and portions of France, are now suffering from the improvidence that devoured their forests, leaving the future to take care of itself. I presume the great empires of antiquity suffered from the same folly, though to a much greater extent. The remains of now extinct races who formerly peopled and tilled the central valleys of this continent, and especially the Territory of Arizona, probably bear witness to a similar recklessness, which is paralleled by our fathers' and our own extermination of the magnificent forests of White Pine which, barely a century ago, covered so large a portion of the soil of our Northern States. Vermont sold White Pine abundantly to England through Canada within my day: she is now supplying her own wants from Canada at a cost of not less than five times the price she sold for; and she will be paying still higher rates before the close of this century. I entreat our farmers not to preserve every tree, good, bad, or indifferent, that may happen to be growing on their lands – but, outside of the limited districts wherein the primitive forest must still be cut away in order that land may be obtained for cultivation, to plant and rear at least two better trees for every one they may be impelled to cut down. How this may, in the average, be most judiciously done, I will try to indicate in the succeeding chapter.
VIII.
GROWING TIMBER – TREE-PLANTING
In my judgment, the proportion of a small farm that should be constantly devoted to trees (other than fruit) is not less than one-fourth; while, of farms exceeding one hundred acres in area, that proportion should be not less than one-third, and may often be profitably increased to one-half. I am thinking of such as are in good part superficially rugged and rocky, or sandy and sterile, such as New-England, eastern New-York, northern New-Jersey, with both slopes of the Alleghenies, as well as the western third of our continent, abound in. It may be that it is advisable to be content with a smaller proportion of timber in the Prairie States and the broad, fertile intervales which embosom most of our great rivers for at least a part of their course; but I doubt it. And there is scarcely a farm in the whole country, outside of the great primitive forests in which openings have but recently been made, in which some tree-planting is not urgently required.
"Too much land," you will hear assigned on every side as a reason for poor farming and meager crops. Ask an average farmer in New-England, in Virginia, in Kentucky, or in Alabama, why the crops of his section are in the average no better, and the answer, three times in four, will be, "Our farmers have too much land" – that is, not too much absolutely, but too much relatively to their capital, stock, and general ability to till effectively. The habitual grower of poor crops will proffer this explanation quite as freely and frequently as his more thrifty neighbor. And what every one asserts must have a basis of truth.
Now, I do not mean to quarrel with the instinct which prompts my countrymen to buy and hold too much land. They feel, as I do, that land is still cheap almost anywhere in this country – cheap, if not in view of the income now derived from it, certainly in contemplation of the price it must soon command and the income it might, under better management, be made to yield. Under this conviction – or, if you please, impression – every one is intent on holding on to more land than he can profitably till, if not more than he can promptly pay for.
What I do object to is simply this – that thousands, who have more land than they have capital to work profitably, will persist in half-tilling many acres, instead of thoroughly farming one-half or one third so many, and getting the rest into wood so fast as may be. I am confident that two-thirds of all our farmers would improve their circumstances and increase their incomes by concentrating their efforts, their means, their fertilizers, upon half to two-thirds of the area they now skim and skin, and giving the residue back to timber-growing.
In my own hilly, rocky, often boggy, Westchester – probably within six of being the oldest Agricultural County in the Union – I am confident that ten thousand acres might to-morrow be given back to forest with profit to the owners and advantage to all its inhabitants. It is a fruit-growing, milk-producing, truck-farming county, closely adjoining the greatest city of the New World; hence, one wherein land can be cultivated as profitably as almost anywhere else – yet I am satisfied that half its surface may be more advantageously devoted to timber than to grass or tillage. Nay; I doubt that one acre in a hundred of rocky land – that is, land ribbed or dotted with rocks that the bar or the rock-hook cannot lift from their beds, and which it will not as yet pay to blast – is now tilled to profit, or ever will be until it shall be found advisable to clear them utterly of stone breaking through or rising within two feet of the surface. The time will doubtless arrive in which many fields will pay for clearing of stone that would not to-day; these, I urge, should be given up to wood now, and kept wooded until the hour shall have struck for ridding them of every impediment to the steady progress of both the surface and the subsoil plow.
Were all the rocky crests and rugged acclivities of this County bounteously wooded once more, and kept so for a generation, our floods would be less injurious, our springs unfailing, and our streams more constant and equable; our blasts would be less bitter, and our gales less destructive to fruit; we should have vastly more birds to delight us by their melody and aid us in our not very successful war with devouring insects; we should grow peaches, cherries, and other delicate fruits, which the violent caprices of our seasons, the remorseless devastations of our visible and invisible insect enemies, have all but annihilated; and we should keep more cows and make more milk on two-thirds of the land now devoted to grass than we actually do from the whole of it. And what is true of Westchester is measurably true of every rural county in the Union.
I have said that I believe in cutting trees as well as in growing them; I have not said, and do not mean to say, that I believe in cutting everything clean as you go. That was once proper in Westchester; it is still advisable in forest-covered regions, where the sun must be let in before crops can be grown; but, in nine cases out of ten, timber should be thinned or culled out rather than cut off; and, for every tree taken away, at least two should be planted or set out.
We have pretty well outgrown the folly of letting every apple-tree bear such fruit as it will; though in the orchard of my father's little farm in Amherst, N. H., whereon I was born, no tree had ever been grafted when I bade adieu to it in 1820; and I presume none has been to this day. By this time, almost every farmer realizes that he can't afford to grow little, gnarly, villainously sour or detestably bitter-sweet apples, when, by duly setting a graft at a cost of two dimes, he may make that identical tree yield Greenings or Pippins