66

66

many ignorant illiterate farmers has often been adduced to prove their superiority over what they style book farmers; it must, however, be allowed, too many of the latter description have deserved this title, though a rational theory should be the foundation, yet too many find, when too late, that experience gained by an extensive practice is also absolutely necessary. Dr. Hales says: "Though I am sensible, that from experience "chiefly we are to expect the most certain rules of practice; yet the likeliest method for making the most judicious observations, and for improving any 66 art, is to get the best insight we can into the nature "and properties of what we are desirous to cultivate " and improve." Is this the case with Connaught farmers? Certainly not; for how few take even the Farmers Journal, though the annual expense is only thirty shillings. It requires little argument to shew that many of those rich farmers owe their success to several causes—to their living little better than their labourers, whatever their increase of income may have been, an increase that has arisen from having rich lands at very low rents, and a very great and sudden rise in the price of every article of agricultural produce, and not unfrequently they are money lenders to their poorer neighbours, from whom they extort illegal interest, which is often paid in labour at a low rate, &c. &c. Little argument is required to prove that repeated corn crops exhaust the soil; we see but too many proofs of it in every part of Ireland. It requires as little to prove, that alternate green crops, manured, give an increased fertility to the ground.

It is too generally imagined that green crops pay a very small proportion of what could be obtained for corn crops. I shall endeavour to prove, under the head"Course of Crops," that this opinion is the re

sult of ignorance of the subject. It is not an easy matter to give the quantity of each grain produced on the acre; but I imagine, from an increase of the potato culture, the average is higher than when Mr. Arthur Young, so very beneficially to this country, travelled through it in 1779. I think it may be stated per acre, wheat, six to ten barrels, of twenty stones each; oats, twelve to twenty barrels, of fourteen stones each; barley, fourteen to twenty barrels, of sixteen stones each; potatoes, thirty-two to eighty barrels, of thirty-two stones each, sixteen pounds to the stone.*

A considerable quantity of fine wheat is produced in the baronies of Dunkellin and Athenry, also in the neighbourhood of Ardrahan, Gort, Caeggclare and Kirvara, which is mostly sent by water to Galway for home consumption and for exportation; many other

• By the following statement from Mr. Young, it is seen what may be done by a high state of cultivation; it has been accommodated to the Irish

Do.

Vol. II. p. 243, Wheat per A. 183 of 20 st. each.

In my survey of the County of Clare, it is stated from good authority that Mr. Singleton and his father have had on rich Corcass lands 40 barrels of Bere, of 16 stones each, and 30 barrels of Beans, of 20 stones each, per Irish acre.

parts of the county also furnish a supply for exportation, as there are few gentlemen that have not some tillage; but there is no such thing in this county, (at least I have not been fortunate enough to meet him,) as an extensive tillage farmer; many have occasionally a large haggard, produced by lands thrown on their hands, lands unset, or from some other accidental circumstance, but they are not what would be called farmers in the counties of Meath, Kildare, Kilkenny, or Fingal. Some of the greatest haggards I have seen in this county were produced by a very wretched system, that of fallowing a worn out soil, taking a crop of wheat, preparatory to throwing it on the landlords hands in that very impoverished state.

SECTION II.

COURSE OF CROPS.

THIS, although the most material branch of agriculture, is in general the least understood; without a change in our mode of cropping, little improvement can be made; we may continue to import English and Scotch ploughs, and ploughmen, but unless we import at the same time their good practices, and resolve steadily to pursue them, it only tends to bring them into disrepute with those who are but too ready to catch at every opportunity to decry practices they do not understand, or are too indolent to adopt. It is nothing uncommon to hear some gentlemen, after having been a few months in England, enlarge with rapture on the superiority of the agricultural practices of Great Britain; this may, in some measure, be ac

counted for, from their associating only with those English gentlemen who have made improved husbandry their pursuit. But had they made excursions into some of the remote counties, they would perceive practices to the full as reprehensible as our very worst. I need only desire them to read the Annals of Agriculture, and the Agricultural Reports of Counties, &c. &c. to convince them that we want English capital even more than their skill; this shews how necessary it is for our travelled countrymen to discriminate. That the improved practices of Great Britain are superior to any in the world, will, I imagine, be readily granted; but cæteris paribus, they are not universally so very far before us as their improvement in other branches of science would lead us to think, or as those who only take a prejudiced peep at agricultural practices would have us believe. In this county there is not much variation in the course of cropping; that of the sinall farmer and cottier adjoining Banagher, is, 1st, Pare and burn, or manure for potatoes;-2d, Rye ;-3d, Oats, and manure for potatoes again. In the vicinity of the bay and coast of Galway the usual course is, 1st, One, or perhaps two crops of potatoes manured with sea weed of various kinds;-2d, Wheat;-3d, Oats. Often, whether from poverty of soil, scantiness, or bad quality of the sea weed, only one crop of potatoes and one of oats are taken, perhaps two of oats. The wheat produced by this manure, added to the usual effects of a calcareous soil, of which the southern coast consists, is generally of a very superior quality, and in great estimation at the flour mills; and the potatoes, if planted early, are usually of the best quality, and produced in great abundance; if planted late they are generally wet and soft, but are reckoned best for seed. In every other part of the county the too general mode is, to hire land if they can

get it, and pare and burn for potatoes, of which it is customary to take two crops in succession; if the ground is good, and every thing as they could wish, the second is better than the first; then wheat or oats as they can agree for the ground; it is then given up to the landlord, who is generally a middleman, and he frequently takes as many crops of oats as it will probably produce, and in this impoverished state it is permitted to lie for several years, until it in some measure recovers its former fertility, which, if it has been originally of a good quality, it will do in a period that would astonish an Englishman. As to laying it down with grass seeds or clover, (which must be done in most parts of England or they would have nothing,) sowed with the last crop, it is scarcely ever practised, especially as this ruinous system generally takes place during the last five or six years of the lease.*

If this wretched course (if course it can be called) was pursued only by small farmers or cottiers, they might well plead ignorance of better practices in extenuation; but when we see them constantly in use by those who from their education and fortune have no such excuse, they are, in their consequences, highly pernicious and reprehensible: what improvement can be expected from tenants, when landlords are guilty of those wretched modes of cultivation? I have frequently expostulated with farmers on the ultimate ruin they would bring on their families by such a system of de

There are some great land sharks in this county who are all their lives in a constant scene of bustle and litigation with their landlords, from pursuing a knavish system of breaking up ground they have no right to do; they lay their plans so dexterously, and they have their creatures so very well trained, and so dependant on them, that they too generally succeed, especially where the land belongs to an absentee, or a non-resident agent acts for him.