mountains. This soil is excellent for almost any purpose, producing superior wheat, and being better adapted to fruit than the soil of the prairies.
It is a pity that agricultural societies have not thought of giving prizes for model farms. It would be gratifying to know just what the land of Marion County, for instance, would produce, if made to do its best. We find at fairs choice lots of wheat, or oats, which may be the result more of accident than of good farming. We hear many persons say that twenty bushels of wheat to the acre is a fair crop; and others who profess to raise sixty bushels to the acre. Somewhere between the two extremes is the mean product of well-tilled land.
There certainly are some farms which yield fifty bushels to the acre, of wheat weighing sixty-six pounds to the bushel; and oats eighty bushels to the acre, weighing forty-seven pounds to the bushel. If any of these farms can be made to produce this amount of grain year after year, then we shall know what the Wallamet Valley can do toward provisioning the world. But nobody knows what is the greatest capacity of these farms, because almost nobody ever does any thing to improve or to restore the land. Twenty years of grain-raising, without manuring, has been wearing out the oldest land instead of improving it.
We have been assured that nine-tenths of the winter wheat raised in the Wallamet Valley has been sowed in February or March, on ground that had been plowed when saturated with the winter rains, and harrowed when the only effect of the harrow was to make it lumpy. After thus "mudding in" the seed, a crop of eighteen bushels to the acre is the result; while wheat sowed in the fall always produces a full crop. The
