I am an intense believer in Home Production. We send ten thousand miles for Guano, and suffer the equally valuable excretions of our cities to run to waste in rivers and bays, poisoning or driving away the fish, and filling the air with stench and pestilence. No farmer ever yet intelligently _tried_ to enrich his land and was defeated by lack of material. He may not be able to do all he would like to at first; but persistent effort cannot be baffled. 11. Shallow culture is the most crying defect of our average farming. Poverty may sometimes excuse it; but the excuse is stretched quite too far. If a farmer has but a poor span of horses, or a light yoke of thin steers, he cannot plow land as it should be plowed; but let him double teams with his neighbor, and plow alternate clays on either farm; or, if this may not be, let him buy or borrow a sub-soil plow, and go once around with his surface plow, then hitch on to the sub-soil, and run another furrow in the bottom of the former. There are a few intervales of rich, mellow soil, deposited by the inundations of countless ages, where shallow culture will answer, because the roots of the plants run freely through fertile earth never yet disturbed by the plow; but these marked and meagre exceptions do not invalidate the truth that nine-tenths of our tillage is neither so deep nor so thorough as it should be. As a rule, the feeding-roots of plants do not run below the bottom of the furrows, though in some instances they do; and he who fancies that five or six inches of soil will, under our fervid suns, with our Summers often rainless for weeks, produce as bounteous and as sure a crop as twelve to eighteen inches, is impervious to fact or reason. He might as sensibly maintain that you could draw as long and as heavily against a deposit in bank of $500 as against one of $1,500. 12. Finally, and as the sum of my convictions, we need more thought, more study, more intellect, infused into our Agriculture, with less blind devotion to a routine which, if ever judicious, has long since ceased to be so. The tillage which a pioneer, fighting single-handed and all but empty-handed with a dense forest of giant trees, which he can do no better than to cut down and burn, found indispensable among their stumps and roots, is not adapted to the altered circumstances of his grandchildren. If our most energetic farmers would abstract ten hours each per week from their incessant drudgery, and devote them to reading and reflection with regard to their noble calling, they would live longer, live to better purpose, and bequeath a better example, with more property, to their children. * * * * *