ended for corn and potatoes
the next year. My pile of manure, therefore, is all used up on 25 to 30
acres of land. In other words, I use the unsold produce of 10 acres to
manure one. Is this "high farming?" I think in my circumstances it is
good farming, but it is not high farming. It gives me large crops per
acre, but I have comparatively few acres in crops that are sold from the
farm.

"High farming," if the term is to have any definite meaning at all
should only be used to express the idea of a farm so managed that the
soil is rich enough to produce maximum crops _every year_. If you adopt
the system of rotation quite general in this section--say, 1st year,
corn on sod; 2d, barley or oats; 3d, wheat; 4th, clover for hay and
afterwards for seed; 5th, timothy and clover for hay; and then the 6th
year plowed up for corn again--it would be necessary to make the land
rich enough to produce say 100 bushels shelled corn, 50 bushels of
barley, 40 bushels of wheat, 3 tons clover-hay, and 5 bushels of
clover-seed, and 3 tons clover and timothy-hay per acre. This would be
_moderate_ high farming. If we introduced lucern, Italian rye-grass,
corn-fodder, and mangel-wurzel into the rotation, we should need still
richer land to produce a maximum growth of these crops. In other words,
we should need more manure.

The point I am endeavoring to get at, is this: Where you want a farm to
be self-supporting--where you depend solely on the produce of the farm
to supply manure--it is a sheer impossibility to adopt high farming _on
the whole of your land_. I want to raise just as large crops per acre as
the high farmers, but there is no way of doing this, unless we go
outside the farm for manure, without raising a smaller area of such
crops as are sold from the farm.

I do not wish any one to suppose that I am opposed to high farming.
There is occasionally a farm where it may be practised with advantage,
but it seems perfectly clear to my mind that as long as there is such an
unlimited supply of _land_, and such a limited supply of fertilizers,
most of us will find it more profitable to develop the latent stores of
plant-food lying dormant in the soil rather than to buy manures. And it
is certain that you can not adopt high farming without either buying
manure directly, or buying food to feed to animals that shall make
manure on the farm.

And you must recollect that high farming requires an increased supply of
labor, and hired help