152 BOARD OP AGKICULTURE. 



uow by the skill and care bestowed upon it, has become a crisp, 

 tender, and delicious salid, affording- nutritious vegetable juices, 

 eminently adapted to our wants as winter food. It is also highly 

 ornamental to the table, and is considered as one of the essentials 

 to a fashionable dinner. It is easily raised, and may be had by 

 every family cultivating a small garden, with but trifling care. 



So the effects produced on animals by better care in keeping 

 and breeding, and change of climate, are almost beyond belief. 

 The average yield of wheat in Michigan is fifteen bushels ; in 

 Virginia five, while in the United States it is only nine bushels per 

 acre ; Germany, twenty-nine ; in England it is thirty-two. The 

 difiereuce is not in the climate ; ours is better adapted to that 

 plant ; nor in the soil ; ours is comparatively new, and that of 

 England has been worked for six hundred years. It lies chiefly in 

 improved culture. Oxen were once considered large among us 

 that would girt six and seven feet, and weigh thirty and thirty-five 

 hundred pounds per pair. Now we sometimes see them measuring 

 nine feet and upward, and weighing three thousand pounds each. 

 One hundred dollars was then considered a high price for a pair of 

 fat oxen ; now they frequently sell quick at double that sum ; and 

 during the past year, in an adjoining State, a pair was sold for 

 $500, not as fancy stock, but for beef I Similar improvement has 

 been made in swine and horses ; the flesh of the former being 

 better, and the speed and powers of endurance in the latter 

 enlarged. 



At a former period of our farming, it was the practice to keep 

 sto7'e sivine through the winter for the next year's supply of pork. 

 The expense attending this course now, would be as much as the 

 whole value of the animal when slaughtered, and no profit would 

 be left. It was urged that the animals would grow well through 

 the winter without much to eat. Under this practice they were kept 

 eighteen months — that being the length of time which was sup- 

 posed the most profitable to keep them. But under more recent 

 experiments, and a more careful investigation of the matter, one 

 half that time is ascertained to be the age to which they may be 

 kept and yield the largest profit. 



Here, then, in the management of this animal, one indispensable 

 to the farm, and which enters so largely into the articles of family 

 support, we cut ofiF nine months' keeping and the cost of attend- 

 ance through a winter, and still find a profit greater than u'nder 

 the old practice. The gain to the farmer must be considerable in 

 this particular. 



