BEEF FATTENING. 81 



making of beef, even from our native and home-grown stock, 

 may be made a profitable enterprise. 



The Chairman. Shall we hear from Mr. Parsons of 

 Northampton ? 



Mr. Parsons. I am surprised to be called upon to speak 

 before this audience, for I certainly could not expect to instnict 

 them in regard to raising beef. But as this is something in 

 my line, I can give my experience and what I am doing in 

 it. We live on the Connecticut River, and raise corn and 

 hay principally, and our lands, of course, have been run so 

 long that we have to take the manure back on to them ; and 

 as I raise perhaps a thousand bushels of corn, and cut some- 

 times a hundred tons of hay, more or less, I must do something 

 with it to get the manure back again. Our way is, in the 

 fall of the year, to buy perhaps twenty-five or thirty head of 

 two and three year old steers, feed them with corn-stalks 

 and the coarser qualities of hay through the winter, and in 

 the spring turn them out to pasture on the hills some ten 

 miles west of our place for the season, and turn them for 

 beef, about the first of November ; then go to Albany or 

 into the country somewhere and pick up another lot of 

 cattle, take them home, and go through the same process 

 another year. In that way we feed out our corn-stalks and 

 coarser feed, and take the manure back on to the land. "We 

 may feed in the winter one stable of these steers, seven or 

 eight, and turn them in the spring for beef. I hear some 

 men ask. What do you do with your corn ? We feed it to 

 horses. As we live close by the village, we keep horses, 

 and do a good deal of team work in one way and another. 

 As to going into this thing as the paper this forenoon sug- 

 gested, I think we should prefer to "go it alone ; " I think 

 that we should do about as well as anybody. I do not know 

 about this co-operative plan, or how it would work. Take 

 my case. We can hire pasture land for our stock, with a 

 wall around it, for $50 for the season. That is not a very 

 dear rate for pasture. If we have fair luck with those steers 

 from one year's end to another, they will give us $25, $35, 

 and $50 apiece, as the market may be. 



Mr. Burgess. I would like to say a few words more in 

 regard to this question. Our practice on our farm is to buy 



