THE SOUTHERN CULTIVATOR. 
75 
This received one single plowing^ but did not 
produce grass high enough to cut. These facts 
led me to leflect upon the cause of the differ- 
ence between the product of the two pieces, with- 
out intending it as a comparative experiment. 
The result, together with the attending circum- 
stances, satisfied me that the superior yield of 
the piece could be attributed alone 
to the thorough and deep plowing it received in 
the spring. Very respectfully, 
Willi AJ is Rutherford, Jr. 
CoiepenSj Walton Co., March2l, 1845. 
For the Southern Cultivator. 
Bread~Stuffs— A Contrast. 
SVte consequences of an abundance of Bread-Stuffs on the 
prosperity of a Country, contrasted with an absence of 
that plenty and cheop^iess. 
.Arty one who has occasion to visit the North- 
ern States, observes, on returning homeward, a 
fact that startles him, in the difference presented 
to the eye, in the two sections ol country. There, 
he sees an appearance of comfort; men of very 
moderate means live in neat houses; those of 
greater wealth in splendid ones ; there seems to 
be a place for every thing, and every thing is in its 
place. Here, the picture is altogether different ; 
people seem to regard their places of abode as ne- 
cessary evils, and pay as lit le attention to ma- 
king them either neat or comfortable as possible. 
They seem to esteem a house and its fixtures 
like an Arab does his tent, as something that is 
to be occupied for only a brief moment, and any 
pains and expense in adapting it to comfortable 
living, as an unnecessary wmste of time and mo 
ney. As to ornamenting the grounds around it, 
with trees and shrubbery, such an idea does not 
seem to have occurred to the occupant. 
There, if you have occasion to stop at a house 
in the country, you find at the table, food prepared 
properly; and butter, milk, and seasonable vege- 
tables are set before you. Here, you have that 
eternal dish— fried bacon, or pork, if it is winter, 
swimming in grease, “and nothing else,” ex- 
cept “ long coi/artfs” and bread. Theownermay 
have his principal wealth in cattle, to the amount 
of many hundred, as is the case in some places, 
and if it is winter or spring, he has not an ounce 
of butter to offer you, and rarely even milk 
enough to put in your coffee. 
Inquire the price of building a house there, and 
the amount is small. Hete, the cost is so great, 
as to deter any one from building a good one, any 
where else than in a large towm. It would be 
thought extravagance to entertain the idea in the 
country. 
There is a cause ior this disparity in the condi- 
tion and appearance of these two sections of the 
same country. What is that cause I This ques- 
tion has been often asked in our presence, and 
the answer has always involved some abstrusity 
wholly irrelevant to the subject, in our view of the 
case. Are we less intelligen t than our neighbors I 
Has a genial sun rendered us less capable of the 
use of our mental faculties than they I This 
will hardly be admitted. The' real cause, from 
its very ooviousness, seems to have been over- 
looked, in searching after remote ones. It is be- 
cause they produce bread and meat in abundance, 
and we do not. That there are other auxiliary 
causes, in the way of unequal revenue law^s, &c. 
which tend to raise one section and depress an- 
other, we doubt not ; but the radical cause is the 
one we have stated, we believe. 
In order to see its effect readily, let us suppose 
you have a house to build. Yon must have lum- 
ber, brick and lime ; a carpenter is to be employ- 
ed to build the house, a bricklayer to make the 
chimnies and plaster the walls. The sawyer 
asks you a price for the lumber that appears high, 
when taken in connection with the plenty and 
cheapness of water power and pine timber, but 
he solves the difficulty very soon, by telling you 
the price he has to pay for corn, to subsisfhim- 
self, his hands, and his mules, which haul th.- 
stocks to the mill and the lumber away from it. 
Each mule, purchased from a Kentuckian, costs 
him $75 or $30, and the corn to feed them costs 
him, to assume the current rates in Macon at this 
date, 75 cents per bushel. It is easy to see the 
effect of this on lumber, The same reasons ap- 
ply with the brick-maker, and lime-burner, pre- 
cisely. Then go to the carpenter and bricklayer 
and tell them the price of building a house and 
a chimney and of plastering at the North, and 
ask them why they cannot afford to work at the 
same rates. They will tell you that living is 
cheap at the North, it is dear here. And you 
have a solution of the whole mystery, and build 
your house at twice the cost which would be ne- 
cessary, i^ you lived in a country where provis- 
ions were plenty andcheap. 
But here the farmer turns upon us, and asks. 
What is to become of me if I can get but 25 cents 
for my corn'? We answer, that with an abun- 
dance of corn at that price, and every thing else 
at a proportionate rate, you will live more plenti- 
fully, more comfortably and independently in 
every respect ; yourself, and the whole face of 
the country and its population, from the petti- 
fogger to the pig, inclusively, will be better off 
and happier. What is the difference to the far- 
mer in dollars and cents, if he gets 25 cents for 
his>forn, and can build a house for S4C0, or if he 
gets 75 cents, and the house costs him $1200? 
It is as broad as it is long, so far as cost is con- 
cerned. But as to his comfort and the general 
prosperity of the country, there is a great dif- 
ference. 
There is this essential difference in the habits 
of a Northern and a Southern man. The one, 
whether in Connecticut or in Georgia, if he re- 
moves here permanently, thinks in the first place 
of making himself, as Baillie Nicol Jarvie says, 
“what he calls comiortable.” Then he looks out 
as keenly as other men for the ways and means 
of getting rich, but he must be comfortable while 
he is doing it. Every thing must be neat and 
tidy about him. The other, without any syste- 
matic econom)', is indifferent about the present, 
and lives altogether in the hope of realizing a 
fortune in the future, when he expects to live as 
he pleases. And when that time arrives, habit 
has grown to be second nature, and as to the 
enjoyments of life he is no better off than when 
he began — “Always to be, but never blest. — 
Frequently careless even in his personal altiie, 
and*always slovenly in the arrangement of his 
house, out-houses, gates, fences and grounds. 
With every element^of prosperity a country 
could ask, we of the Southern States are the 
most dependant on others, of any people within 
our knowledge ; and the face of the land pre- 
sents to a stranger the most poverty-stricken 
aspect of any that meets his eye anywhere. — 
This is a humiliating confession from a son of 
the soil, “one to the manner born,” but however 
disagreeable, it is a truth that must be known 
and felt by all before the evil can be obviated. 
We scourge ourlands by continuous crops of cot- 
ton, without a year of rest or rotation, and buy 
everything; while others improve their lands 
atid make every thing at home they can. Not to 
speak of wearing apparel, and other like articles 
of necessary use, every one of which, coarse 
and fine, is made elsewhere, and is a source of 
drain to the industry of this section. But look 
on your tables and see if y'our meat does not 
come rom Tennessee; look at your plows and see 
if every mule that draws them is not bought of 
Kentucky; even the horses which draw your 
carriages come from there. 
Many pursue a line of policy on this subject, 
the very reverse of their own interests, from a 
mistaken idea of what their true interest is; 
others do so from sheer inertness and a w'ant of 
reflection ; some from being deluded by maxims 
applicable to particular situations and necessi ies, 
and not capable of general application. The Is 
land of Malta imports all its bread stuffs, and 
why ? Because it is a rock, and incapable, from 
its want of soil, as well assize, to raise them. Is 
that the case here? England impoits bread 
stuffs and yet prospers ; and what is the reason ? 
By her gigantic power having, through a credit 
systemof her own, made herself the heart of the 
monetary wmrld, she can display an appearance 
of prosperity, in despite, and not by reason, of 
that deficie.icy, in the capacity of the realm, to 
produce provisions sufficient for its accumulated 
population. Some of the West India Islands, 
and some plantations on the Mississippi, do not 
raise their provisions, but the reasons which may 
be good there, do not hold here. We, to he pros- 
perous, must make bread and meat plenty and 
cheap. Turn the question as you will, it re 
solves itself into this. 
In a succeeding article, we discuss the ques- 
tion of raising our own meat, and endeavor to 
show that it is the present, as well as prospective 
interest of the far.mer to do so. J. B. I,. 
Macon, Ga. 
For the Southern Cultivator. 
Can a farmer buy his meat cheaiier than he 
can raise It at home I 
It is a common place remark with a class of 
slip-shod sort of planters, that “ a man can buy 
his meat cheaper than he can raise it.” At some 
particular junctures, when corn is high and meat 
low, this may be momentarily the case, if cotton 
happens to bear a fair price at the time. Taken 
for a series of years, this maxim is devoid of 
4 iuth, and ruinous to individuals and the coun- 
try in its effects. And what guaranty has he 
that the supply of meat from abroad may not fall 
short, as has been the case this year with mules? 
And no circumstance tends more to bring about 
that result, than the late very low prices^which 
are calculated to dishearten the Tennesseean, 
and prevent his bringing the former quantity to 
market. This year” meat has been unusually 
low, and that very fact may add 50 per cent, to 
its price another year, and the meat buying farm- 
er will find himself at^the mercy of the Tennes- 
sean. To reason by analogy this will very likely 
happen. Any one can recollect that in 1843, 
good mules sold here for SIO to $35, and the same 
description brought $75 this past winter. What 
safeguard has the planter who raises neither 
meat or mules, against these periodical revulsions 
in the market of those articles? — revulsions de- 
pendant on the laws of supply and demand, 
which his helpless situation prevents him from 
averting from his own door. A planter who 
raises corn, near a large market town, may some- 
times make money by selling his cor.n at a high 
price, which usually happens once or so in a sea- 
son, and buying his meat. But the great mas.s 
of farmers live at a distance from a marke', and 
have no such advantages. But if even this one 
turns speculator and sells corn to buy meat, he 
will find, in an average of years, he will make but 
little by it. 
Let us examine the question of meat-buying 
closely. Say two acres of land will produce a 
bag of cotton weighiir? 400 pounds; this, at five 
cents, will be $20. What would this same two 
acres of ground produce, if cultivated in corn and 
fed to four hogs of a year old ? We have estima- 
ted that it produces 600 weight of seed cotton to 
the acre, according to the above calculation, and 
land which yields that muchco'ton will bring 
•^0 bushels of corn. Well, that would be 40 
bushels of corn, which, fed to four hogs of a year 
old, at the rate of ten ! ushels to each, would 
make each one weigh certainly 175 pounds net. 
Multiply this by four, and we have 700 pounds 
of pork as the result, which, at three cents per 
pound, is $21 — a difference of a dollar against the 
theory of “it is cheaper to buy than to raise,’'i^ 
with the additional advantage of placing the 
farmer above the contingencies of a short supply 
and high prices. 
Since we began this article, in looking over 
our papers, the following apposite remarks of the 
Albany Cultivator, on the subject of the po.fk 
market, has met our eye, and we transfer it here 
as a corroboration of our suppositions. We had 
supposed, in the usual course of things, thisfluc- 
tuatio.i might take place, and it seems that in 
{act it has taken placi sooner than eve expected: — 
“ DeFICIEN'CY ly THE SupPLY OF PoRK FOR 
1344. — We are not surprised at the falling off in 
the amount of pork slaughtered in the West last 
season. From 1838 to 1841, it is well known 
that an excitement, amounting almost to a ma- 
nia, prevailed through the country in relation to 
hogs. Improved breeds were sough' after with 
great avidity, and in many instances very high 
prices were paid, particularly for Berkshires.— 
The natural consequence of this excitement was, 
first, that unusual numbers of hogs were reared 
and fattened, and of course the pork market was 
glutted. The unprecedentedly low prices of 
pork in the western markets, for the years 1811 
to 1343, proved almost ruinous to those farmers 
who relied on that article for their chief income. 
Many farmers were forced to sell their hogs for 
no more than a dollarand fifty cents per hundred, 
' dead weight,’ and in some instances for less. 
They could not stand such low prices, and 
hence followed the second result of the former 
'Let practical farmers examine all the above calcu- 
lations, and make such alterations as may .suit the 
yield of their land, and accord \vi ih Iheir e.xperience, 
and they will find that we are not far from right in the 
main. 
