The enquirer southerner., 1874-07-31
The Cultivation of the Grasses.

In some sections of our country
the cultivation of the grasses has
not attracted that care and atten.,
tion to which they are entitled, but
the time has now arrived that this,
as we'll as other productions of the
soil, is becoming necessity to our
landholders, lnasmuch as the com.
petition of the Great West in the
production of the cereals requires a
greater diversity in our husbandry
than we have heretofore considered
necessary. The labor question also
presses upon US, both in regard to
scarcity and high price, and We are
obliged to consider the remedies at
our command for the difficulties
with which we are encompassed.-
Fruit growing for the supply of our
own as we'll as distant lands, is
looming up largely in sections of
our own and adjacent States, and
this business, with the aid of can~
ming and fruit drying, is taking up
large tracts of land which have
heretofore been mainly devoted to
the production Of wheat and corn.
With the same assistance the grow
ing of early vegetables must soon be
business requiring large tracts of
land; the extent of this latter pur~
suit may be imagined from the fact
that single farm in Pennsylvania,
in addition to the immense fields
employed in the growing of seeds,
for the cultivation Of which steam
engines have been introduced, have
a farm Of six hundred acres on the
Rappahannock, in Virginia, for the
growing of vegetable seeds alone.
Other sections, again, require pas
ture lands, for the supply of the
immense demand made for the milk
and butter required for the support
of the multitudes of non-producers
of these necessaries of life, espe-
cially in our cities and towns and
when it is considered that in city
like Baltimore, with population
rising three hundred thousand souls,
every individual requires to be sup
piled with either one or both of
these productions of the dairy, the
imagination can form some concep,
ton of the amount of land required
upon which to feed the cattle that
are necessary for the supply, to
say nothing of the other stock also
to be led from the same source ;
and these demands are supplements
ed in some of the States by the res
quirements of the cheese dairies ;
in come Of which the milk of as
many as two thousand COWS is ems
ployed. The hay crop is conse,'
quently one of the most important
Of any of the crops raised in this
country, and, great as it now is, all
the tendencies are to a still more
extended demand to supply the
necessities of this progressive age
So important is this conceived to be
that philosophers remark that he
who could make two blades of grass
grass grow where but one grew be-
fore, is a greater benefactor to hi:
race than the whole host of politi'
clans, is accepted as a truism il
every civilized land. All the light
consequently, that can be throw
upon the subject of the cultivation
os the grasses, it is the boundel
duty of the controllers of the pres:
} to present to their readers, and it i
one in which we have ever felt
our peculiar privilege and duty t.
) keep prominently before the public
and oh! that we could only induc
more of the tillers of the soil to rea'
and reflect, and to experiment, $