A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the WayBurritt, Elihu
History
A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the Way
Burritt, Elihu
Agriculture -- Great Britain; England -- Description and travel
But does it augment the yearly production of the farm by this
amount? To say that it is the only process by which the baky and
chappy soil of Tiptree can be thoroughly fertilised, would not
suffice to prove its necessity or value to other soils of different
composition. One fact, however, may be sufficient to determine its
virtue. The fields of clover, and Italian rye-grass, etc., are mown
three and even four times in one season, and afterwards fed with
sheep. Certainly, no other system could produce all this cropping.
The distinctive difference it makes in other crops cannot, perhaps,
be made so palpable. The wheat looked strong and heavy, with a fair
promise of forty-five bushels to an acre. The oats, beans, and
roots showed equally well.
The irrigation and deep tillage systems were going on simultaneously
in the same field, affording me a good opportunity of seeing the
operation of both. Two men were plying the hose upon a portion of
the field which had already been mowed three times. Two teams were
at work turning up the other, which had already been cropped once or
twice. One of two horses went first, and, with a common English
plough, turned an ordinary furrow. Then the other followed, of
twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil
plough held to the work beam-deep. The iron-stones and ferruginous
clods turned up by this "deep tillage" would make a prairie farmer
of Illinois wonder, if not shudder, at the plucky and ingenious
industry which competes with his easy toil and cheap land in
providing bread for the landless millions of Great Britain.
The only exceptional feature or arrangement, besides the irrigating
machinery and process, that I noticed, was an iron hurdling for
folding sheep. This, at first sight, might look to a practical
farmer a little extravagant, indicating a city origin, or the notion
of an amateur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of the
necessary. Each length of this iron fencing is apparently about a
rod, and cost 1 pound, or nearly five dollars. It is fitted to low
wheels, or rollers, on an axle two or three feet in length, so that
it can be moved easily and quickly in any direction. It would cost
over fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose an
acre entirely with this kind of hurdling. Still, Mr. Mechi would
doubtless be able to show that this large expenditure is a good
investment, and pays well in the long run. The folding of sheep for
twenty-four or forty-eight hours on small patches of clover,
trefoil, or turnips, is a very important department of English
farming, both for fattening them for the market and for putting the
land in better heart than any other fertilising process could
effect. Now, a man with this iron fencing on wheels must be able to
make in two hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more of
busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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