Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/303

Rh home. They asked us about the wheat-farms of America, and were inclined to shake their heads when we told them of fields so large that a plough could only turn a single furrow around one of them in a day's time.

"'Do you really mean it?"' said one of them, with an emphasis of surprise.

"Doctor Bronson assured them of the correctness of the statement, and added that on the Dalrymple farm in Dakota, or rather on one of the Dalrymple farms, there was a single field of thirteen thousand acres. 'That makes,' said he, 'about twenty square miles, and I doubt if you have any team that could plough more than one furrow around such a field in a day.'

"They acknowledged that such was the case, and though they had fields containing hundreds of acres inside a single fence, they had nothing that approached the wheat-fields of Dakota. We were sorry afterwards that we mentioned our enormous wheat-fields, as we thought it set them to thinking of American competition, and the effect it might have on their own business in future; but of course we couldn't resist our national tendency to 'brag' a little.

"Afterwards, when we were visiting a dairy-farm, a matter-of-fact Scotchman who owned the place remarked that he presumed we had much larger dairy-farms in America, as he had heard of one where they had a saw-mill which was propelled by the whey that ran from the cheese-presses, and also a grist-mill operated by buttermilk!

"In the wheat-growing belt of South Island there is a scarcity of timber, the forests being mainly in the hilly and mountain region. The scarcity of timber has led to the planting of forests. Considerable attention is given to this both by the authorities and by individuals, and good results are predicted at no distant day. There is also a scarcity of water, and to meet it irrigation-works have been constructed, as already stated.

"Wheat-farmers are troubled by rabbits, and also by sparrows, which were introduced to kill off caterpillars and other insect pests. The sparrows increased in numbers almost as rapidly as the rabbits; they changed their habits, and from carnivorous taste turned to eating fruits and grains. The New Zealand sparrow shuns the caterpillars and worms he was imported to devour, and feeds on the products of the garden and the field. The same is the case in Australia, where the sparrows are now in countless millions, the descendants of fifty birds that were imported about 1860. The colonial governments have offered