1866.1 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
19 
VVhenevei' I expect a visit from him, I am careful 
to have my cons all iu the barns. 
He lectured me a few weeks ago, for feeding com 
iu the ear. " But it is soft corn," I rcmarlied " iu ex- 
cuse." " No matter," he said, " keciJ it a few weeks, 
when it will dry, and then you cau shell aud grind 
it. Do not I beseech you fall into this miser.ablo 
habit of feeding grain whole. You lose one-third 
its value." I believe he is right; it had never oc- 
curred to me that I could shell and grind the soft 
corn, but on trying to shell it I found no difficulty. 
There may an ear occasionally that will not shell 
clean, but I am satisfied that nine-tenths of what is 
ordinarily termed " soft corn" if kept in a good 
airy corn house, or even a crib of rails, for a month 
or six weeks, can be shelled and ground. It is less 
trouble to throw it by the basketful to the pigs, 
and in parts of the West where corn is cheap the 
practice may not be so objectionable, but in this 
section wc cannot afford to waste grain merely to 
save a little labor and forethought. 
But I was going to tell you about the Doctor's 
system of feeding his cows. He buys a new milch 
cow every spring, aud keeps her two years. She 
■will give milk all the time, and when he turns her 
off, she is fit for the butcher and commands a high 
price. But this is not all ; he gets the richest of 
milk and a good deal of it. " I tell you, it pays," 
he said the other day, " to feed well. It requires a 
certain amouut of food to support the animal, and 
the milk and butter is obtained from the food given 
in excess ol this amount. To give only just enough 
to keep the cow alive is of course absurd, as you 
would get no return at .all for the food. It would 
all be consumed to keep up the animal heat aud the 
vital functions. Now .as the milk is derived from 
the extra food, the more you can get the cow to 
eat and digest, the more profitable will she prove." 
The Doctor got this argument in favor of high 
feeding from me. It is one of my pet ideas, but I 
did not interrupt him. " You know," he continu- 
ed, "I have a large ilimily." "Of course," I said, 
"all clerygmen have." "Well," he continued, 
" -we not only get all the butter and milk we need 
from these two cows, but we are still packing down 
butter every week." 
On a farm we cannot, perhaps, adopt the system 
of keeping farrow cows. But iu the cities it has 
many advantages, not the least of which is that 
you are sure of milk all the year round. When we 
lived in the city, we had a cow (a thorough bred 
Devon) that gave milk winter .and summer for five 
years in succession. She did not give much, but all 
that we needed, aud it was very rich. She finally 
got so fat that, though still giving milk, I sold her 
to the butcher. But one thing is true of city and 
country ; it pays to feed cows all the food that 
they can turn into butter. 
I need a Root Cell.ar, adjoining my basement 
cattle stable. It is almost impossible to get along 
without one, and farm to advantage. I am fully 
convinced that we must raise more succulent food, 
either cabb.age, mangold wurzel, sugar beets, ruta- 
bag,as, or turnips, for our stock in winter; but this 
system cannot be .adopted without a good cellar to 
store them in, so arranged that they can bo fed out 
with little labor. 
Our hens are on a " strike." They refuse to lay 
a single egg. They have plenty of food, comfortable 
quarters, a good range, and have had the best treat- 
ment we know how to give them, aud yet they 
persistently refuse to go to work ! I have not heard 
a cackle for two months. The grocers are clamorous 
for eggs, and offer the highest prices, but all to no 
purpose. If I could ascertain who are the ring- 
leaders iu the combination, they would soon find 
themselves in hot water. 
A city friend, who keeps a few hens and gets all 
the eggs he wants, suggests that probably my hens 
are too fat, aud that they do not get flesh meat. 
He had a self-regulating feeding trough, but g.ave it 
up as he thought his hens got too much grain. He 
now feeds them less grain and gives them sheep's 
pluck, which he gets for a trifle from the butchers, 
and the hens lay every day. He puts the plucks in 
boiliug water to coagulate the blood, and then chops 
them up flue, aud the hens cat them with a relish. 
Last spring I cut an underdrain through a wet 
portion of a field. Tbere is high ground on each 
side of it. This fall I found the land on each side 
of the drain perfectly dry for a rod or more, but 
further up the hill it w.as quite wet, and this was 
the case for several weeks before the drain com- 
menced to discharye any water ! I suppose the reason 
is this : The earth on each side of the drain. Last 
spring, .as the water left it, cracked into innumer- 
able little fissures, aud these after the rains came 
iu the fall, absorbed the water like a sponge, to the 
depth of the drain, say three feet. So the sur- 
face was perfectly dr}', even though no water run 
into the drain. — In the spring I shall carry some 
Lateral drains up the sides of the hill, for I am satis- 
fied that the high land, on my farm at least, needs 
draining more than the vallej-s. If the side hills 
were thoroughly underdrained, the low land would 
need little more than a few main drains. 
My friend G. W. takes mo to task for asserting 
th.it good prices of farm produce stimulate agricul- 
tur.al improvements. " Did you ever," he tisks, 
" know a farmer, other than an amateur, who in- 
vested his profits in making improvements on his 
farm?" Yes I have. Last spring I thought of 
building a shed on the west side of the barn-yard, 
with a loft for fodder. I thought it would not only 
be useful iu itself, but would protect the barn yard 
from our severe west winds. One of my neighbors 
has one twenty-two feet wide, with .an alley in front 
for feeding cows, which are fastened up with 
stanchions. It is bo.arded up on both sides aud is 
therefore not properly a shed. I thought of build- 
ing merely an open shed, as I have an idea that 
cattle do better when not so closely confined, pro- 
vided you have a warm, comfortable yard. I went 
to see our old friend John Johnston and consulted 
him on the subject. I told him I thought of build- 
ing a shed twenty-four feet wide. " Don't you do 
it," he quickly replied. "Never build a shed less 
than forty feet wide. It is a great mistake. Nar- 
row sheds are little use. The rain frequently 
drives iu eight or ten feet, and the master-cattle 
st.and on the far side, where it is warm, and keep 
the rest out in the cold. M.any years ago, I built 
some sheds twenty feet wide, but I did not like 
them. Three or four years afterwards I happened 
to have a good wheat-crop aud sold it 2)relty well, so 
I pulled down these sheds and built new ones 
thirty-two feet wide. If I had to do it again, I 
would build them forty feet. Mr. Swan biiilt his 
forty feet and they are splendid." 
The good wheat crop aud the good prices built 
the sheds ; .and these sheds have sheltered some of 
the best flocks of fat sheep that ever graced the 
New York market. The sheep made rich manure, 
and the manure made big crops of wheat, and the 
sheep and the whe.at together have made Mr. John- 
ston rich— without making any one poorer. 
I did not build the shed. J/y wheat crop "hap- 
pened " not to be very good, and besides I thought 
th.it if it needed to bo forty feet wide, I had better 
build a barn with a good shed under it. This I 
shall do after my land is drained, and I have h.ad 
two or three of John Johnston's wheat crops. I 
am looking forward with much interest to the 
publication of the best plan of a b.arn, for which 
such a liberal prize was offered iu the Agriculturist. 
I understand thatagreat many excellent plans have 
been sent in, aud I hope we shall get not only the 
Prize plan, but several of the others, and then we 
can all judge for ourselves which plan is best suited 
to our particul.ar situation and wants. 
But after all, what most of us are interested in is, 
not what is the best kind of barn to build, but how 
we can alter, improve or add to the buildings we 
already have. When I bought this flrrm, there 
were but two small barns on it, one for grain, with 
a cattle cellar underneath, and one venerable but 
not very picturesque institution standing on the 
side of the road, designed for horses. It is very 
convenient for posting bills of Auction Sales, and 
there is a pump close by that is liberally patronized. 
The horse litter is thrown out over a fence into the 
field and forms a loose, smoking, conical heap of 
brown m.atter that is a favorite resort for chickens, 
and which gives off ammoniacal gases th.at I hope 
descend on the Deacon's land near by. 
The pig pen was at one corner of the barn-yard, 
as far remote as possible from the cow stable, and 
still further from the sheep sheds. Now, you know, 
pigs eat corn and drink milk, .and they extract from 
these articles a small amount of nitrogen and a 
good deal of carbon which they convert into pork. 
The remainder, comprising nearly all the mineral 
ingredients of the corn and about four-fifths of the 
nitrogen, with more or less water, is left in a finely 
comminuted state and .affords excellent pabulum for 
cabbages and onions. Well, this material was 
thrown out, like the horse litter, into a heap by it- 
self, but it is of a cold and sluggish temperament 
,and does not give off any ammonia for the Deacon's 
use. It is not lost, however. There is consider- 
able w.ater which finds its way into this p.articnliir 
corner of the barn-yard, aud after staying a few 
days, aud loading itself with whatever is soluble, 
wends its way slowly to the brook, and so on to 
the Genesee river aud Lake Ontario, and comes 
b.ack to us in the shape of a nice pickerel ! 
Now the Deacon is an excellent neighbor, and 
pickerel are quite toothsome, but my land needs 
ammonia as much as the Deacon's, and it is by no 
means certain that the pickerel will not fall into 
other hands than mine. 
To prevent this escape of ammonia and the loss 
of soluble ingredients is of the first importance. 
It can be accomplished with little trouble. The 
first requisite is to h.avo all the buildings together. 
In the gr.aiu districts, where straw is .abundant, it 
is to my opinion better to have them arranged on 
three sides of a barn-yard, rather tli.au to have 
grain barn, horse and cow stables, pig pens, etc., 
all in one building. A barn-yard surrounded witji 
buildings and sheds on the West, North, .and East, 
■and open only to the South, or if more convenient 
to the South-East, is a pleasant place to winter 
young stock, store pigs, etc. The centre shonldbe 
concave, .and round this hollow there should be a. 
road, in front of the buildings, wide enough to 
drive a wagon. This should be dry .and firm. The 
dirt taken out from the centre can usually be dis- 
posed of to advant.age in r.aising this road and level- 
ling any inequalities. It should slope a little from 
the buildings towards the centre, so that the w.ater 
cau run off readily. This is very importafit. 
Nothing is so unplcas.ant as a wet barn-yard, where 
you cannot go from one building to another with- 
out getting ankle-deep in mud. A man with a 
plow, a dirt scraper, and a pair of horses, can soon 
do all that is necessary ; of course the side towards 
the g.atc, where the manure is drawn out, should 
h.ave only a gentle slope. 
Into this hollow, or as it is called in some sec- 
tions of England, the " mixer," all the m.anure 
should be thrown and mixed together. This is the 
essenthal point. Pig manure is cold and sluggish, 
and cow dung does not ferment readily, while horse 
litter and sheep droppings are very active. But in 
the case of the latter the treading of the sheep 
prevents auy serious loss from too rapid fermenta- 
tion ; but a loose heap of horse manure will soon 
lose half its value. Let all be mixed together and 
there will be no loss of ammouia. 
The loss from drainage is much more serious 
than is generally supposed— far greater than from 
the escape of ammonia. Tlie hnildings should be all 
spouted to carry off the water. Then, if we have 
wide sheds, and the barn-yard is not too large, the 
manure will absorb all the liquid and the little rain 
which falls ou the surface. But it is better to have 
a tank in which any excess of liquid there m.ay bo 
after heavy rains, can be preserved, and pumped 
back when the heap is dry. This is the simplest, 
the cheapest, and the best method of saving ma- 
nure I have ever seen, 
