360 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



at Greenhead contains 201 acres. The live stock consists of about one hundred head of 

 cattle — thirteen bulls and bull calves, thirty breeding cows, and the remainder heifer 

 and heifer calves of various ages. From 200 to 300 sheep are kept and four work horses, 

 besides pigs, poultry, etc. The crops of the farm this year consisted of seventeen acres 

 of roots, yielding thirty tons per acre, about half an acre in potatoes, thirty-two acres in 

 oats and the remainder in grass. It is stated that all the food required for this stock is 

 grown upon the farm with the exception of a little cake daily, and it is the opinion of 

 English farmers that they can always offord to use cake if they have suitable foods to 

 feed with it. 



Another English exchange, the Agricultural Gazette, gives an interesting account, 

 written by himself, of the farm and operations of Mr. Edwin Ellis, of Guilford, many of 

 the details of which will be of value on this side the water, notwithstanding our differ- 

 ent methods of agriculture. Mr. Ellis' farm embraces some 350 acres, of ^which 

 sixty are meadow and the remainder arable. The area in pasture is not stated, 

 but it is evidently included in the arable lands and forms part of the regular 

 rotation. The soil is light and the farm would not be called rich. Upon it, how- 

 ever, he carries an enormous quantity of live stock, consisting of twenty-five Bates 

 Short Horn cows and thirty of their progeny, a flock of four hundred Southdown ewes 

 and two hundred "tegs," as sheep within a year old are called, and, besides, an average 

 of seventy other cattle purchased outside and undergoing the fattening process. With 

 such an amount of live stock he is able to maintain the farm in the high state of fer- 

 tility necessary in that country without resorting to the use of commercial fertilizers,, 

 the purchase of which is so serious a charge upon most farms, and to conduct a pros- 

 perous and profitable business upon a farm which with ordinary methods would involve 

 him in present or prospective bankruptcy. 



Mr. Ellis' feeding operations are mainly in the direction of buying calves or very 

 young stock and forcing them for "baby beef," which is sold, as the market seems to 

 best favor, at anywhere from twelve to sixteen months, but occasionally, if prices are 

 not to his liking, they are held longer, the advantage being that having his animals 

 ready for beef at one year old they can be sold at any time after that when the market 

 is most favorable ; or, being in the full vigor of early growth, they can be kept another 

 whole year, if necessary, and make profitable gain all the time. The weights, as the 

 stock is usually sold, range from a little over nine hundred to about thirteen hundred 

 pounds, depending upon age, and where held longer mention is made of steers of about 

 seventeen hundred pounds at less than two years old. 



Mr. Ellis says: "I buy the best Shorthorn calves I can get. The dealers in this 

 neighborhood who gather calves from the West of England know when they have got 

 a 'clipper' where to take it, and they naturally require a high price for such. But he 

 must be a good one." It appears that he has had occasion at times to feed three-year- 

 old Irish steers, which would likely compare favorably with those upon which the 

 majority of American farmers are wasting their feed and opportunities, and he 

 declares that "ten bullocks of this latter character consume more food than twenty 

 young steers in good condition at sixteen months old." There is something significant 

 in the fact that wherever there is found a man w^no has achieved anything in the way 

 of exceptional success in the handling of live stock it always turns out that he has 

 done it with the best kind of stock he could get ; that where anyone is disposed to brag 

 of what he has made with live stock he has invariably made it with good stocky 

 that when a high price is paid in the market it is invariably paid to a man who has good 

 stock. 



