Since then, Mr. Sloe has been making and using more manure, and the year before last (1875) his crop of potatoes averaged over 200 bushels per acre, and on the sandy knolls, where more manure was applied, the yield was at least 250 bushels per acre. “Nevertheless,” said the Deacon, “I do not believe in ‘high farming.’ It will not pay.” “Possibly not,” I replied. “It depends on circumstances; and these we will talk about presently. High farming aims to get large crops every year. _Good_ farming produces equally large crops per acre, but 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.