TWENTIETH ANNUAL REPORT

OF THE

SECRETARY

OF THE

BOARD OF AGRICULTURE.

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It is now twenty years since the Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture was established. Within that time very considerable changes have taken place, not only in the Board itself but in the condition of the agriculture of the Commonwealth. Though the original organization of the Board, consisting of His Excellency the Governor, His Honor the Lieutenant-Governor, and the Secretary of the Commonwealth, ex officiis, three members appointed by the Governor and Council, and one member from each of the agricultural societies of the Commonwealth that receives an annual bounty from the State, has been preserved, and is believed, all things considered, to be the wisest and the best that could be devised; the number of agricultural societies receiving the bounty of the State has been doubled by the incorporation of fifteen new organizations in various parts of the Commonwealth. As the act of incorporation carried the right to appoint a member of the Board, the number of members elected by the societies has been doubled also. More than half of those who took an active part in the formation of the Board are now no more.

That the record of this department during the past twenty years of its existence has been alike honorable and useful to the Commonwealth, no one who has any intelligence of its operations and the service it has rendered to the farming community, can, for a moment, entertain a reasonable doubt. It has awakened a wide-spread spirit of inquiry and a desire for improvement never known before; it has collected and distributed a vast body of information which has come to be appreciated and universally sought for, and has issued twenty volumes of Reports, which are everywhere admitted to bear comparison with the best Reports of the kind published in the country.

But if it had done nothing else for the State and the country beside the complete extirpation of that dreadful scourg to agriculture, wherever it exists, the contagious pleuropneumonia, it would have paid all the expense of its organization many times over. That the farmers of this Commonwealth are not to-day suffering from the constant dread and the actual visitation of this worst of all forms of contagious diseases among cattle, because the most insidious, is due almost wholly to the existence and persistent efforts of the Board at the time of its outbreak in 1859 and subsequent years. And if it had not been for such efforts, we should now be subjected to a loss of many thousand dollars a year, with no reasonable hope of permanent relief from a tax upon our resources and our patience, the most severe and most difficult to be borne of any that could be imposed upon an agricultural community. The present existence and terrible ravages of this disease in England and other civilized countries where it has become a fixture, causing immense losses every year, and increasing the hazards of stock-farming many fold, is a sufficient proof of the truth of this assertion. And we believe it is not too much to say that England would most gladly pay an amount equal to the whole aggregate cost of our State Board, including all the cost of printing and the bounties to our agricultural societies, for the last twenty years, to purchase exemption from this unmitigated scourge.

The rapid growth of cities and manufacturing villages has led to some change in the chief productions of the farm, and the attention of cultivators has been turned largely to supply the

demands of local markets, in the form of milk, vegetables, small fruits, poultry and eggs, &c.; but this change is not fairly indicated in the statistics of the census of 1870.

The returns of that census wholly omit the production of every description, on more than nine thousand farms of this State, and hence no deductions of any value as to the present condition of our agriculture, or of its condition in 1870 as compared with 1850 or 1860 can be made. The census of 1850, for example, states the number of farms as 34,069; that of 1860, as 35,601; while that of 1870 gives only 26,500,— a difference of 9,101 farms since 1860. Now, apart from the fact that the same causes were operating to increase the number from 1860 to 1870, as from 1850 to 1860, we know that the selectmen and assessors of taxes in each town are far more likely to be correct than the United States marshals, whose jurisdiction extended over many towns, embracing a large area of country. According to the Statistics of Industry of 1865, made up from official returns of the selectmen of each town to the Secretary of the Commonwealth, the number of farms in the State at that date was 46,904, which would leave the number of farms that were overlooked in gathering the census of 1870 still greater than that stated, or more than twenty thousand instead of nine thousand.

But we have a still better means of comparison, so far as a few items are concerned; for the assessors in May, 1870, returned the number of cows taxed in the State as 161,185, and in May, 1871, as 162,782; while the census of 1870, taken at the same time, returns only 114,771,-a discrepancy of very nearly 50,000, which can be accounted for in no other way than on the supposition that a large number of farms were entirely overlooked. Again, the assessors, in 1870, return the number of horses as 107,198, and in 1871, as 112,782; while the United States census of 1870 returns only 41,039. Now if it be said in explanation, that the number given in the census includes only horses kept on farms, it does not help the matter any; for the census states the number of horses not on farms as only 45,227,-making the total number in the State, 86,266 only, still leaving a discrepancy of 26,516, on the large number of farms whose statistics are not included in the census, having been entirely overlooked by the marshals. Moreover,

these gross discrepancies run all through the agricultural productions as given in the census returns for this Commonwealth.

The inference, therefore, that our agriculture has been declining during the last ten years, so readily taken up and reiterated by the public press of the country when the census statistics first appeared, is entirely false, and is not justified by the actual facts, as will clearly appear on a more complete analysis of the census and a comparison with the official returns of the several towns, unquestionably the most reliable and trustworthy authority. So far from this, the aggregate value of the farm-production of the State has largely increased, even though a few of the old staple crops may have fallen off, which is by no means certain.

But the most marked and apparent change is to be found in the methods of conducting farm operations, especially in the extensive use of machinery in the place of hand-labor. Twenty years ago there was not a thoroughly efficient mowing-machine in the State, and probably every machine now used has been patented since that time. The practical economy of the mower was not then fully established, nor had the great mechanical obstacles to its use been fully overcome. Few farmers, indeed, had faith that they could be overcome so far as to relieve them from the necessity of the use of the hand-scythe. The work of these machines at some of the great public trials of that day, was hardly admitted to be good enough to be tolerated in comparison with the scythe, while the draught in them all was very great, with a sidedraught which was destructive to the team.

But the inventive genius of the country had been stimulated to great activity by the partial success attained, and the rapid growth of this important branch of manufactures, so intimately connected with the prosperity of our agriculture, may be dated about the year 1855. At that time the draught in most of the machines had been materially lessened, though most of them still had a side-draught that was so great as to be very objectionable. But they could not mow fine grass without a constant liability to clog, and none of them could start in the grass without backing to get up speed. But from that date improvements rapidly multiplied. The celebrated

Buckeye, now so generally used in New England, was patented in 1856; the Wood, that has also become very popular, in 1859, and others in quick succession, till, by 1864, there were no less than a hundred and eighty-seven establishments in the country devoted to the manufacture of mowers and reapers, many of them of vast extent, thoroughly built, furnished with abundant power, tools and machinery of every description, and the whole business had come to be wisely. systematized, giving employment to sixty thousand men and turning out fifteen millions of dollars worth of machines a year.

At a public trial in 1866, under the auspices of the New York State Agricultural Society, forty-four mowing machines were entered, all but two of which did excellent work, such as would be acceptable to any farmer; and the judges said that the appearance of the whole meadow after it was raked over, was vastly better than the average mowing of the best farmer in the State, though the field itself presented many obstacles. At this trial, too, every machine could stop in the grass and start again without backing to get up speed, and that without any difficulty and without leaving any perceptible ridge to mark where it occurred. And so still later, the trial at the farm of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, where a large number of machines were entered and.. worked on the field, proved clearly that the mower had become a complete success. The workmanship and mechanical finish of all the machines showed a great improvement over the machines of twenty years ago. They had become more compact, simpler in construction, and lighter. They ran with easier draught, less friction and less noise, and cut the grass well on uneven surfaces.

The mowing machine which, it will be seen, has been, practically, the growth of the last twenty years, was an immeasurable step in advance of the old methods of cutting grass. It comes in at a season when the work of the farm is more than usually laborious, when wages are high, when the weather is often fickle, oppressively hot, or "catchy," and it relieves the severest strain upon the muscles.

The tedder has come into use entirely within the last twenty years, and its practical use on our farms is wholly