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(VIII, 460) on the domestication of wild ducks!]
[Footnote 76: Saserna's rule would be the equivalent of one hand to
every five acres cultivated. With slave labour, certainly with negro
slave labour, the experience of American cotton planters in the
nineteenth century very nearly confirmed this requirement, but one of
the economic advantages of the abolition of slavery is illustrated by
this very point. In Latimer's First Sermon before King Edward VI,
animadverting on the advance in farm rents in his day, he says that
his father, a typical substantial English yeoman of the time of the
discovery of America, was able to employ profitably six labourers in
cultivating 120 acres, or, say, one hand for each twenty acres, which
was precisely what Arthur Young recommended as necessary for high
farming at the end of the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the
twentieth century the American farmer seldom employs more than one
hand for every eighty acres cultivated, but this is partly due to the
use of improved machinery and partly to the fact that his land is not
thoroughly cultivated.]
[Footnote 77: This example of Roman cost accounting is matched by
Walter of Henley in thirteenth century England.
"Some men will tell you that a plough cannot work eight score or nine
score acres yearly, but I will show you that it can. You know well
that a furlong ought to be forty perches long and four wide, and the
King's perch is sixteen feet and a half: then an acre is sixty-six
feet in width. Now in ploughing go thirty-six times round to make
the ridge narrower, and when the acre is ploughed then you have made
seventy-two furlongs, which are six leagues, for be it known that
twelve furlongs are a league. And the horse or ox must be very poor
that cannot from the morning go easily in pace three leagues in length
from his starting place and return by three o'clock. And I will show
you by another reason that it can do as much. You know that there are
in the year fifty-two weeks. Now take away eight weeks for holy days
and other hindrances, then are there forty-four working weeks left.
And in all that time the plough shall only have to plough for fallow
or for spring or winter sowing three roods and a half daily, and for
second fallowing an acre. Now see if a plough were properly kept and
followed, if it could not do as much daily."]
[Footnote 78: Stolo is quibbling. Cato's unit of 240 jugera was based
on the duodecimal system of weights and measures which the Romans had
originally derived from Babylon but afterwards modified by the use
of a decimal system. The enlightened and progressive nations of the
modern world who have followed the Romans in adopting a decimal system
may perhaps approve Stolo's remarks, but it behooves those of us who
still cling to the duodecimal system to defend Cato, if only to keep
up our own courage.]
[Footnote 79: Here, in a few words, is the whole doctrine of
intelligent agriculture. Cf. Donaldson's Agricultural Biography,
tit. Jethro Tull. "The name of Tull will ever descend to posterity as
one of the greatest luminaries, if not the very greatest benefactor,
that British agriculture has the pride to acknowledge. His example
furnishes the vast advantages of educated men directing their
attention to the cultivation of the soil, as they bring enlightened
minds to bear upon its practice and look at the object in a naked
point of view, being divested of the dogmas and trammels of the craft
with which the practitioners of routine are inexpugnably provided and
entrenched."]
[Footnote 80: Pliny quotes Cato: "What ever can be done by the help
of the ass costs the least money," which is the philosophy of modern
power machinery on the farm, as elsewhere. It is largely a question of
the cost of fuel, as Varro says.]
[Footnote 81: Green manuring is one of the oldest, as it is one of
the best, of agricultural practices. Long before Varro, Theophrastus
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