[86] 



a morticing chisel, the chisel part coming through the wheel 

 in large numbers, say a hundred or more. These points 

 striking the turnips will rapidly tear them into pulp. It is 

 on the order of an apple-mill. The wheel could be of cast 

 iron, cast with the ragged poiuts to answer the same pur- 

 pose. Meal, oats or bran mixed with the pulp would make 

 a most admirable food for fattening sheep. Oil cake is 

 another food not much used heretofore in this country, but 

 is rapidly coming into favor. So highly is this food es- 

 teemed in England for fattening purposes, that the cotton 

 seed oil factories of Nashville ship all their oil cake to that 

 far-off market, while our home farmers overlook its excel- 

 lence. It abounds in nitrogenous principles, and makes the 

 manure of animals fed from it of the most excellent char- 

 acter. The time, however, is not far distant when this diet 

 will find a market at our own doors. 



On every farm in the State of Tennessee may be seen the 

 effects of careless culture, and this is especially the case on 

 those farms that wholly or in part were devoted to cotton 

 and tobacco in the ante helium days. This effect is seen 

 in galled spots on the slopes of the hills, or in huge gullies, 

 that make the slopes like sinuous ribs. It should be the 

 duty and pride of every farmer to eradicate these evidences 

 of thriftlessness from his place. This is no easy task under 

 ordinary circumstances, but it can be done with comparatively 

 little work by the aid of a large flock of sheep. It is diffi- 

 cult without their aid, from the fact that the earth has been 

 denuded of any soil to give a start to vegetation, and it 

 can be done only by vegetation. There must be enough of 

 soil on the clay to enable the farmer to bind it there by 

 grass or clover, when the soil will soon accumulate by de- 

 cay, and the eyesore will disappear. This, I say, can read- 

 ily be done by the aid of sheep in the following manner : 



Provide a number of portable troughs, made by nailing 

 the edges of two wide planks together,, forming a V shaped 

 trough. Then nail strips either across the top of the trough, 



