426 



NEW ENGL.VND FARIVIER. 



Sept. 



March, I may believe that grass will turn into 

 hay packed solid and close in large masses. 

 S. H. Farnsworth. 

 China, Me., July 12, 1870. 



THE DAM'S RELATIONS "WITH DIF- 

 FERENT SIRES. 



A notion in regard to the effects of a first 

 impregnation of domestic animals has been 

 promulgated, mostly I think by English theo- 

 rists, in which it has been gravely announced 

 that a blood mare or heifer first impregnated 

 by a scrub, is forever thereafter rendered im- 

 pure or no better than a grade ; that no off- 

 spring from them, however pure the subse- 

 quent sire, is to be relied on as pure. 



In America we have an unanswerable dem- 

 onstration of tie utter fallacy and falsehood 

 of any such theory, in the fact that the mule 

 breeders of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mi.^sou- 

 ri, Kentucky and Tennessee, where the great 

 bulk of the supply is bred, breed their mares 

 indiscriminately to jacks and horses, changing 

 them first to one and then the other as the 

 market demand for either horses or mules 

 may dictate ; in thousands of instances taking 

 the first foal from a jack, and following im- 

 mediately by a horse. This system is an- 

 nually practiced in the regions 1 have named, 

 is there carried out this very year, and has 

 been in full practice for the last fifty years in 

 nearly every township in all those States ; yet 

 we have the very first practical breeder to re- 

 port to the agricultural press that any mare 

 has been damaged in the least, in her availi- 

 bility to breed perfect colts from a horse. 



I can establish, by legal testimony, in any 

 court of law, that a mare in Kentucky has 

 produced twins at one birth — one a perfect 

 mule, the other a perfect liorse; and to de- 

 scend to individual cases, my neighbor has 

 this spring as tine a smooth, clean-limbed, 

 evenly-colored, nicely-bred filly, as ever was 

 foaled, from an old blood mare that has pro- 

 duced 15 mules in 17 years' breeding, without 

 ever having been bred, except in the last in- 

 stance, to a horse. I have myself bred as 

 many as ten colts in one season, from mares 

 that had been used by myself exclusively in 

 mule breeding previously. 



In the early days in mule breeding in Ken- 

 tucky and Virginia, the practice generally ob- 

 tained with the most careful breeders, of 

 breeding even blood fillies for the first time 

 to a jack, and the practice even now in Ken- 

 tucky, is very common, and it is a practice 

 worthy of attention. The foal of a jack is 

 generally smaller than from a horse, and bet- 

 ter adapted to the first breeding of a filly ; and 

 a filly at two years old is as available in breed- 

 ing a mule as she would be at three years old 

 from a horse, and to-day thousands of the 

 best and most successful brood mares used for 

 colt breeding, were first bred to a jack and 

 produced a mule. 



Let the practical mule breeder in all the 

 country I have named, who has damaged his 

 mares as horse breeders by breeding mules, 

 speak out through your columns, giving hig 

 name and residmce and the experience of his 

 whole vicinity. I venture the prediction, Mr. 

 Editor, that no such man can he found. — An- 

 thony KlUgore, in Country Oent. 



What the Soil is to the Farmer. — 

 For the husbandman the soil has the para- 

 mount of importance that is the home of the 

 roots of his crops and the exclusive theatre of 

 his labors in promoting their growth. Through 

 it alone can he influence the amount of vege- 

 table production, for the atmosphere and the 

 light and heat of the sun are altogether be- 

 yond his control. Agriculture is the culture 

 of the field. The value of the field lies in the 

 quality of its soil. No study can have a 

 grander maternal significance than the causes 

 of fertility and barrenness, a knowledge of the 

 means of economizing the one and overcoming 

 the other, a knowledge of those natural laws 

 which enable the farmer so to modify and 

 manage his soil that all the deficiences of cli- 

 mate cannot deprive him of suitable reward 

 for his exertions. The atmosphere and extra 

 terrestrial influences that effect the growth of 

 plants, are indeed in themselves beyond our 

 control. We cannot modify them in kind or 

 amount ; but we can influence their subservi- 

 ency to our purpo.ses through the medium of 

 the soil by a proper understanding of the 

 characters of the latter. — ProJ". Johnson''s 

 "How Crops Feedy 



IN EUROPE. 



give us sketches of their 



FENCES 

 Americans who 

 travels in Europe, ofcen speak of farming sec- 

 tions in which there are few or no fences. 

 But it appears from the following statement 

 of a correspondent of the Country Gentleman 

 that the absence of fences is far from universal : 



In some parts of Europe the live stock is 

 cared for by "tenders" and dogs; but in 

 P^ngland it is not so, as the "open-field" par- 

 ishes in England were reduced to a very few 

 before the writer left that country ; and, so 

 far from any "open-field" system being de- 

 sirable, in every instance where enclosures 

 took place and hedges were planted in the 

 vales, or walls built on the hills, and the own- 

 ers had their ppoperty all within "ring fences" 

 and subdivided too for the tenants, there the 

 value of the land was enhanced far above the 

 cost of apportioning and fencing. In no 

 country in tbe world are there such fences as 

 in England, and most of the living ones pay 

 for themselves — the wood cut out, selling (for 

 firing) at more than pays the scientific "hedg- 

 er and ditcher." The writer of this article 

 had the hedges around twenty-three fields cut 



