CATTLE FOODS. 



37 



on the trees. Each of the forage crops was headed out. and all had 

 attained their full height. Such a system of culture, allows one to 

 work near his home, most of the time, and within hearing of his 

 dinner bell. It saves a vast amount of extra expense in travelino- 

 and teaming, if the work can be kept near the buildings. It makes 

 a man with a twenty-live-acre farm, feel that he has a fifty-aere 

 farm, except when he pavs taxes or interest, and it does enable one 

 to easily keep double the stock, and make double the milk, butter or 

 cheese, that can be made by the old one-crop-a-j-eair system. The 

 farmer who adopts this system to any considerable extent, will find 

 that his farm will be far less infested by grasshoppers and crickets, 

 than when the soil is left undisturbed year after year. These insects 

 hatch from eggs laid in the ground, usually mowing fields, where the 

 young will find suitable food at once, and in abundance, but if the 

 soil is worked often, their family afiairs are so interfered with, that 

 they have poor chance for existence. My own farm of twenty-six 

 acres, has at times, been badly over-run with these voracious insects, 

 but the past year, with tweutj' acres under the plow, a grasshopper 

 has been rarely seen. 



But the one great advantage to be gained by a sj'stem of crop cul- 

 tivation, in [)hice of exclusive pasturing for dairy stock, is from the 

 saving in fences. A fence around a permanent pasture is a thing 

 of necessity, for the present at least, here in New P^ngland. In 

 countries where the land is cultivated better than with us, cattle are 

 sometimes tethered out, or are watched by an attendant ; but here 

 where pastui-e fences are required, as they are on most of our New 

 England farms, I care not how substantial they are built. Good 

 fences make good neighbors, but I find by referring to statistics 

 that our self-imposed fence taxes are b}* far the heaviest taxes we 

 pa}-, unless the tax for tobacco and spirits be excepted. According 

 to the returns of the United States census bureau, the live stock in 

 the whole country in the year 1870, including horses, cattle, mules, 

 sheep and swine, amounted to the sum of $1,095,211,935. The 

 estimated value of the fences required for restraining these animals, 

 was $1,748,529,185, while the value of all the crops gi'own that 

 year, and which had been saved from destruction by those animals, 

 amounted in round numbers to $2,450,000,000. These are large 

 amounts, almost beyond human comprehension, for to count a single 

 million of dollars, counting at the rate of one dollar a second, and 

 ten hours per day, would require a full month, Sundays included, 



