But does it augment the yearly production of the farm by this amount?  To say that it is the only process by which the baky and chappy soil of Tiptree can be thoroughly fertilised, would not suffice to prove its necessity or value to other soils of different composition.  One fact, however, may be sufficient to determine its virtue.  The fields of clover, and Italian rye-grass, etc., are mown three and even four times in one season, and afterwards fed with sheep.  Certainly, no other system could produce all this cropping.  The distinctive difference it makes in other crops cannot, perhaps, be made so palpable.  The wheat looked strong and heavy, with a fair promise of forty-five bushels to an acre.  The oats, beans, and roots showed equally well.

The irrigation and deep tillage systems were going on simultaneously in the same field, affording me a good opportunity of seeing the operation of both.  Two men were plying the hose upon a portion of the field which had already been mowed three times.  Two teams were at work turning up the other, which had already been cropped once or twice.  One of two horses went first, and, with a common English plough, turned an ordinary furrow.  Then the other followed, of twice the force of the first, in the same furrow, with a subsoil plough held to the work beam-deep.  The iron-stones and ferruginous clods turned up by this “deep tillage” would make a prairie farmer of Illinois wonder, if not shudder, at the plucky and ingenious industry which competes with his easy toil and cheap land in providing bread for the landless millions of Great Britain.

The only exceptional feature or arrangement, besides the irrigating machinery and process, that I noticed, was an iron hurdling for folding sheep.  This, at first sight, might look to a practical farmer a little extravagant, indicating a city origin, or the notion of an amateur agriculturist, more ambitious of the new than of the necessary.  Each length of this iron fencing is apparently about a rod, and cost 1 pound, or nearly five dollars.  It is fitted to low wheels, or rollers, on an axle two or three feet in length, so that it can be moved easily and quickly in any direction.  It would cost over fifty pounds, or two hundred and fifty dollars, to enclose an acre entirely with this kind of hurdling.  Still, Mr. Mechi would doubtless be able to show that this large expenditure is a good investment, and pays well in the long run.  The folding of sheep for twenty-four or forty-eight hours on small patches of clover, trefoil, or turnips, is a very important department of English farming, both for fattening them for the market and for putting the land in better heart than any other fertilising process could effect.  Now, a man with this iron fencing on wheels must be able to make in two hours an enclosure that would cost him a day or more of busy labor with the old wooden hurdles.