Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/449

Rh SMALL FAKMING.] AGRICULTURE 413 quantity, will belong to themselves, they generally do their utmost to make the increase as large as possible. Not, indeed, always. Industry, in common with other virtues, is greatly influenced by example ; and small leaseholders, or even small freeholders, thinly interspersed among numerous tenants- at- will, are much more likely to accept as their standard of becoming exertion the habitual list- lessness of the latter than to set up an independent standard of their own. Where, however, small farmers are in a decided majority, they are, unless some extraordinary circumstances are in operation to depress their energy, sure to appear as models of dili gence. Their activity is not then restricted within set hours of work. Whenever a thing requires to be done is with them the proper time for doing it, and early and late, consequently long before the hired journeyman comes in the morning and long after he has gone home in the evening they may be seen afield, doing, too, whatever they do, not only with all their might, but with all the heed which people usually bestow on their own affairs, even though they bestow it on nothing else. In particular, they waste nothing least of all anything that can be used as manure. Now, there arc no crops which would not be the better for such special attention, and there are some to which it is an almost indispensable condition of excellence. Flax, hemp, hops, wine, oil, and tobacco furnish instances of culture in which the individual plants require, or at any rate abundantly repay, separate care. But such minute attention no supervision can ensure no rate of hire can command. It is habitually rendered by those only who are directly interested in rendering it, or otherwise directly stimulated by the small farmer and the small farmer s wife and children all working with their own hands for their own behoof, and by his servants, if he have any ; for that must be a pitiful creature indeed who, with his employer working by his side, will let his employer work harder than himself. Herein, then (in the greater quantity and better quality of work which the same number of persons will do in small as compared with large farming) consisting the distinctive excel lence of the former system, how far does this counterbalance the superiority of large farming in regard to the saving of labour and implements ? There can be no more conclusive mode of answering this question than by contrasting the substantial results of the two systems, adopting as tests the respective amounts both of gross and of net produce. Now, in England the average yield of wheat per acre M as in 1837 only 21 bushels, the highest average for any single county being no more than 26 bushels. The highest average since claimed for the whole of England is 32 bushels ; but this is pro nounced to be much too high by the best, perhaps, of all authori ties, Mr Caird, who gives 26^ bushels as &quot;the average of figures furnished to him by competent judges in all parts of the kingdom,&quot; adding, as the result of his own observation, that 32 bushels, as an average produce, is to be met with only on farms where both soil and management are superior to the present average of England.&quot; In Jersey, however, where the average size of farms is only 16 acres, the average produce of wheat for the five years ending with 1833 was, by official investigation, ascertained to be 40 bushels. In Guernsey, where farms are still smaller, 32 bushels per acre was, according to Inglis, considered, about the same time, &quot;a good, but still a common, crop ; &quot; and the light soil of the Channel Islands is naturally by no means particularly suitable for the growth of wheat. That of Flanders, originally a coarse silicious sand, is par ticularly unsuitable, and accordingly little wheat is sown there, but of that little the average yield, at least in the Waes district, is, according to a very minute and careful observer, from 32 to 36 bushels. Of barley, a more congenial cereal, the average is in Flanders 41 bushels, and in good ground 60 bushels ; while in England it is probably under 33, and would certainly be over stated at 36 bushels. Of course the English averages are consider ably exceeded in particular localities on such farms, for instance, as those of Mr Paget, near Nottingham, and of Mr Stansfeld, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, wheat crops of 46 bushels per acre being not extraordinaiy, and of 56 bushels not unknown ; but these exceptional cases may be more than matched in Guernsey, where the largest yield of wheat per acre, in each of the three years ending^ with 1847, was proved to the satisfaction of the local agricultural society to have been not less than 76, 80, and 72 bushels respec tively. Of potatoes, 10 tons per acre would anywhere in England, even on the rich &quot;warp lands&quot; bordering the tidal affluents of the Humber, be considered a high average crop ; but in Jersey the average is reckoned at 15 tons, and near Tamise, in eastern Flanders, Mr Eham found a cultivator of 8 acres of poor land rais ing nearly 12 tons from one of them. Clover, again, &quot;the glory of Flemish farming,&quot; &quot;is nowhere else found in such perfect luxuri ance&quot; as in Flanders, where it exhibits &quot;a vigour and weight of produce truly surprising,&quot; especially when it is discovered &quot;that such prodigious crops are raised from 6 ft of seed per acre.&quot; Most of the other green crops, and also most of the root crops, grown in Flanders deserve to be spoken of in similar terms ; and to the extraordinary number of cattle fed upon these green and root crops reference has already been made. If any reliance may be placed on these statistics, it cannot, however startling at first hearing, be too much to affirm that in the Channel Islands and in Flanders the average of gross produce is greater than in England by fully one- fourth, or say by the equivalent of 9 bushels of wheat per acre. Gross produce, however, is not the only thing to be considered, for there is no doubt that on equal areas small farming employs more hands than large ; and it might be that the entire produce of a small farm was not more than sufficient to feed the extra mouths. This would not necessarily be an evil, unless on the assump tion that the condition of agricultural labourers is neces sarily so wretched that an increase in their number is tantamount to an increase of wretchedness. Possibly, however, the extra produce might be less than sufficient to feed the extra mouths, so that the quantity of net pro duce remaining available for sale to the non-agricultural portion of the community would be diminished ; and, if this were really the fact, it might be conclusively con demnatory of small farming. Nor, to prove that it is not the fact, will it suffice to urge that land, when divided among numerous occupants, commonly fetches a much higher rent than when united into a few extensive hold ings that whereas, for example, 30s. an acre would in England be considered a fair and even a high rate for middling land, it must be very middling land indeed which in Guernsey will not let for at least 4, while in Switzerland, another territory of petite culture, the average rent is 6. For these higher rents might be the results of an incident, not of culture, but of tenure of that excessive competition for land which is unhappily a too frequent accompaniment of small farming. Neither will it suffice to show that, although the agricultural popula tion of a minutely-divided territory is always far denser than that of one of large farms, certain territories of the former description are nevertheless among those which maintain the largest manufacturing and commercial popu lation Belgium, for instance, being second to England alone in that respect, and Switzerland and Rhenish Prussia being likewise cases in point. For it may obvi ously be replied that the non-agricultural classes of a community need not be entirely dependent for food on home produce, but may derive part of their supplies from abroad, and it may generally be impossible to ascertain what is the proportion imported. This objection does not, indeed, apply to the Channel Islands ; and Mr W. T. Thornton has, in a new edition of his Plea for Peasant Proprietors, been at considerable pains to prove that in Guernsey two, and in Jersey four, non-agricultural inhabi tants are maintained on the produce of every acre and a half of cultivated land, whereas in England only one such person is so fed. Be this as it may, a preferable, or at any rate more generally applicable, test is the propor tion between the extra production of small farming and the consumption of the extra labourers therein employed. Now, in Flanders and in the two principal Channel Islands the agricultural population is about four times as dense as in England, being at the rate of about one person for every 4 acres, instead of one for every 1 7 ; but cause has also been shown for believing that in Flanders and in the same islands the average produce of the soil is greater than in England by the equivalent of 9 bushels of wheat per acre, or of 153 bushels for every 17 acres. But 153 bushels, or say 19 quarters, of wheat is much more than three persons and these not all adult males, but, more likely, a man, a woman, and a child would consume, even if it were supplied to them, and there were nothing else for them to eat, and is fully three times as much as three such persons of the farm labourers class in any part of Europe have the means of procuring. After deduction, therefore, of their consumption, there would still remain available for sale to non-agriculturists, from the produce of