CHAPTER X 



The Judging of Farms, Crops, and Plants. Exhibition and 

 Nomenclature Rules. Emblematic Plants and Flowers 



In recent years there has been great development of the desire to 

 standardize knowledge in agriculture ; and to this end many formal 

 plans have been devised to enable one to set numerical measures to the 

 various attributes of an object or an establishment or an operation. 

 One is thereby able " to judge," and to score the object by com- 

 parison with an ideal scale of j)oints rather than with other objects like 

 itself, (lood scoring eliminates the old method at fairs, for example, 

 of giving a first prize to the best of several competitors : it gives it only 

 to those that score sufficiently high in a scale of grades of perfection. 



The making of score-cards has now come to be a popular practice in the 

 colleges of agriculture, in fairs, and in societies, and the number of pub- 

 lished cards is very large. In this chapter only a few representative 

 scores can be given ; score-cards for animals are given in Chap. XXI. 

 If the reader wants score-cards of the different breeds of animals, he 

 may find them in Vol. Ill of the Cyclopedia of American Agriculture. 



Farms and Farm Practices 



The " agricultural virtues " (Pearson). 



Better prices, more than anything else, have put new life into our 

 agriculture, and have brought about a disposition on the part of some 

 farmers to adopt better methods, and have emphasized the greater 

 opportunity open to all farmers and the need of the general adoption of 

 the best methods, such as are well known to the few. These best 

 methods include the following : — 

 1 Conservation of fertility. 

 2. Thorough cultivation. 



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