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learned as he went to profit by any probable mistakes he 

 might make. 



In concluding these remarks upon the choice of a 

 farm for the purpose of dairying, some especial reference 

 ' should be made to a greatly neglected portion of the 

 country, which offers unusual facilities for enterprise in 

 this direction. This is that region, blessed with a most 

 favorable climate and abundance of cheap land, in the 

 midst of good markets for the produce, commonly called 

 *'the South." From Virginia southward to the Gulf of 

 Mexico stretches a country which has been for a century 

 given up to the exhaustive culture of tobacco and cotton, 

 and which has procured its principal food supplies, and 

 all its butter and cheese, from the North and West. 

 Yet no other part of the United States is better adapted 

 for the growth of feeding crops, and for the keeping of 

 cows for dairy purposes; while its mild winter climate 

 renders it most especially fitted for winter dairying and 

 the production of fine butter at a season when the 

 northern part of the country is buried under snow or 

 frozen solid with the intense cold. In the very center of 

 the Southern States is the southern mountain region, 

 where the excessive heat of the South in the summer 

 and the intense cold and the snows of' the North are 

 both unknown. It is an elevated, undulating plateau 

 averaging in hight 2,500 feet above sea level, and in 

 some localities reaching 3^700 feet to the base of the still 

 higher mountains which rear their tops from 5,000 to 

 6,500 feet above the level of the sea. The whole region 

 produces all the grasses, corn, wheat, clover, roots, and 

 every kind of fodder crop, to perfection. It is abun- 

 dantly watered with innumerable streams and springs of 

 the purest water ; the air is pure ; mosquitoes and other 

 noxious insects are unknown. Cattle can find subsist- 

 ence m the forest ranges the whole year, thus affording 

 a specially favorable climate for open pasturage during 



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