The good prices did not hold. Food could be raised cheaply, but markets were costly to reach, even with the new wizardry of the steamboat, and something gigantic was called for in the way of internal improvements. The answer was at first canals, afterwards railroads. At the same time, something had to be done by the farmer himself if the entire structure of American agriculture, now becoming conscious of its own embarrassments, was not to go down. The answer to this was _better farming_. It was in 1819, the panic year, that John S. Skinner founded at Baltimore the _American Farmer_, first of the distinctively farm journals which almost immediately had a small group of successors. Among them were the _New England Farmer_, the _Albany Cultivator_, the _Pennsylvania Farmer_, the _Rural New Yorker_, the _Vermont Farmer_, the _Ohio Farmer_, etc. Yankeedom was a good social soil for these journals. The all but universal literacy of the people, their curiosity, their love of argument and disputation, their habit of experimentation, all tended both to give currency to the new ideas presented and to sift the practical and valuable from the merely theoretic and futile. Thus was introduced, in a period of prevailing “hard times,” a meliorating influence destined to reach a very large proportion of the settlers in those sections, particularly Vermont, western New York, northern Pennsylvania and Ohio, from which the bulk of the Yankee pioneers of Wisconsin were drawn a quarter of a century later. The effect of county and state fairs was to deepen and fructify the influence of the new agricultural press. It will be understood that the actual “shoring up” of agricultural practice came about with relative slowness. Yet, it soon began here and there, and by a kind of mild infection spread gradually over wide areas. Only in crisis periods, with the introduction of new methods to suit new market conditions, was progress ever very rapid. To illustrate, as early as 1820 Josiah Quincy was advocating and practising the summer soiling of cattle, especially milch cows, and demonstrating the profitableness of the system for the region near Boston. It was a long time before soiling became common even in that district, but this experiment engendered better care of livestock. The same careful, experimental farmer demonstrated the economy of using good-sized whole potatoes for seed, as against the practice of planting seed ends and small tubers; other farmers were slow to adopt the idea, which is not yet universally followed, yet some improvement doubtless came from the publication of Quincy’s findings.