504 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 
Mr. D.S. Curtiss, in a brief article, urges the keeping and feeding of all 
stock in yards or stables, on the “ soiling” system. Animals thus reared 
are tamer and more approachable at all times, and are conseqyently 
more salable at better prices, whether horses, oxen, cows, or colts. 
Being handled daily from infancy, the dangers and difficulties of break- 
ing colts, steers, and heifers are avoided; they are secure from many 
accidents incident to roaming, and require less food to sustain the same 
conditions of flesh, milk, or toil; expense is saved in fencing; and, by 
the mode of cropping required, lands produce larger yields annually, 
and, liberally manured, will yield much more in bulk and a better qual- 
ity of feed, when this crop is frequently gathered during the season, than 
if left to grow until ripe. ; 
Mr. N. J. Coleman, in a lecture before the Illinois Industrial University, 
on breeding horses, (copied into the Wisconsin report,) pleads for kinder 
and more judicious treatment of these noble animals. Their stables are 
frequently too close, with too little light and air; the horse has lungs, 
and consumes a great deal of oxygen; he is often confined in a close 
stall, which hardly permits him to lie down; he requires abundance of air 
and light, dark stables being the cause of diseased eyes in many horses. 
Stables require windows as well as houses. Brood mares (of which the 
lecturer keeps forty) should be worked or-exercised a little every day; 
after foaling the work should be very moderate. They require com- 
fortable stables, and they and their colts should be frequently handled ; 
otherwise the celt may be as wild as a deer and not easily controlled at 
breaking time; colts thus handled from the first are very easily broken. 
The horse has more intelligence than he is credited for; he can see and 
hear better than a man, and smeli and feel just as well. These facts 
should be borne in mind in taming him; convince him that you are his 
friend, and will not hurt him; approach him by degrees; let him smell 
of your whip and bridle; put on his bridle, and when that is in your 
hand you are his master, and in ten minutes he will lie down completely 
your slave. With a few lessons of this kind he will know his plage, and 
obey your voice. 
Mr, Jonathan Periam, in a lecture before the same institution, recont- 
mends a more general attention to the culture of root crops, both for 
the table and for stock. Too many farmers are content to live for 
three-fourths of the year on bread and meat, with a scanty and precari- 
ous supply of vegetables, when fifty or one hundred dollars expended 
in seed and labor upon a single acre would produce more healthful and 
palatable sustenance than double the amount spent in pork, flour, and 
doctors’ bills, besides the enhanced pleasure produced by a table laden 
with various vegetable products. For stock, four bushels of carrots are 
as good for feeding as one bushel of corn meal; their chief value, how- 
ever, is in feeding with grain, from their peculiar pectine and their 
action on the digestive organs, which enable cattle more readily to 
assimilate their food. Half an acre in beets should produce seven 
hundred bushels; the mature leaves, stripped off from time to time, will 
feed a cow at night and four hogs principally during the summer and 
fall, and give four bushels per day for feeding for six months in the 
year—enough to fattén one cow, and feed another for milk. One-fourth 
of an acre of parsnips will fatten four hogs, besides feeding four more 
growing ones until the next spring. Even the rich soil of the West, as 
now cultivated, does not produce of wheat and other cereals half as 
much per acre as is grown by English farmers, under the system of root 
culture in that country, with its attendant necessity, deep plowing. 
To keep up the fertility of the West, more mixed husbandry is requisite; 
