1882.1 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
247 
corn; It consists of a combination of bells, 
pieces of bright tin, etc., kept ringing and in 
motion by the windmill attachment. It is 
much more effective than paper, twine, etc. 
Tethering or Picketing Animals. 
It is not the most economical use of a 
pasture to allow animals to roam over it at 
will, picking up the best bits and trampling 
down as much as they eat. In some Euro¬ 
pean countries, where the grass is much 
more luxuriant than with us, it is found 
profitable to confine the animals to a given 
spot, by hurdles or tethering, and when this 
is cleared, to move them to a fresh place. In 
our hot summers the frequent trampling in¬ 
jures the grass much more than one would 
suppose. After a breadth has been eaten off, 
keeping hoofs from it will greatly aid in the 
recovery of the grass. In tethering animals 
care should be taken to so place them that 
they can not interfere with one another, and 
to provide such a tether that they can not 
become entangled with it. On the Island of 
Jersey, where every cow is tethered from her 
youth, accidents are not known. There a 
rope is used with a chain at each end, which 
A TETHER USED IN FRANCE. 
is attached by a swivel. In France the tether 
for horses is of rope, arranged as shown in 
the engraving. The picket pin of hard-wood 
has an iron band carrying a ring, and loose 
enough to revolve. Midway of the rope is 
an oblong ring of iron, at each end of which 
is a swivel, and there is another swivel at 
the end which is attached to the halter. An 
iron pin is preferable to the wooden one. 
-- 
Milk the Year Round. 
With good tub butter at forty to fifty cents 
in the country markets, it is a question in 
the dairy districts whether six or seven 
months milking is, on the whole, the best 
method. The general practice is to have all 
the cows drop their calves in early spring, 
get what milk out of them one can on grass, 
and dry them off as the pasturage fails. They 
go dry four or five months, and there is fre¬ 
quently no milk in the dairyman’s family fox- 
months in the winter. The demand for fresh 
butter in the cities and villages is so great 
that more of our best farmers are turning 
their attention to the problem of making- 
winter butter economically. The competition 
is so lively that they can make their own 
prices for a gilt-edged ai-ticle. Of course it 
takes a little more capital to do this, but if it 
can be made to pay a fair interest, it will be 
well invested. The barns will have to be 
made tighter, so that a third of the fodder 
will not be wasted in keeping up animal heat. 
Winter milk and butter cannot be made 
economically with feeding in an open stack 
yai-d, or in an old rickety barn. There is 
needed a cellar for storing roots, and manu¬ 
facturing manure. Spi-ing or cistern water 
must be supplied under cover, and no need¬ 
less exposure of the cows to the chilling blasts 
of winter. A variety of food, and that of 
the best quality for producing milk, must be 
supplied in liberal measux - e. Hay should be 
made of June cut grass, rather than of grass 
gone to seed in August and September. Hay 
alone will not give the best results. It should 
be supplemented by rations of com meal, or 
linseed and cotton-seed meal; also beets, 
mangolds, cabbage, or other succulent forage. 
The time to prepare for winter milk is 
in the season of seeding and cultivating. 
When the dairyman has control of the 
calving time of his cows, and a portion 
or all of them can be made t come ixx 
late in the season, they will give their 
largest yield of milk in the winter, when 
butter and milk bi-ing neai’ly two prices. 
With a little enterpi-ise and proper fixtures, 
the production of winter milk and butter can 
be made to pay handsomely. Pi-ices show 
a new and pressing want. Let the dairymen 
meet it. Connecticut. 
Improvements in the Harvest Field. 
Does the reader recollect his feeling when 
he fii-st saw the horse-reaper, move into the 
field and actually “knock” the grain into 
sheaves so rapidly that the smartest binder 
could not keep xxp with the work. The first 
great Exhibition or “ World’s Fair” was held 
in London in 1851, and 
there the first l-eally 
successfxil Reaper was 
shown. We recollect a 
letter from a sprightly 
American lady'which 
reached us — of all 
places in the world—in what is now Arizona. 
She said, ‘ When I saw the surpi-ise of the Eng¬ 
lish farmers at the woi-king of our American 
reaper, I felt a little disappointed that the 
machine had not an attachment to turn oxxt 
hot biscuits.” But American ingenuity was 
soon at work upon an “attachment” com¬ 
pared with whiclx the production of “hot 
biscuits ” would be mere child’s play. When 
the Reaper could throw off the grain in gavels 
ready for the binder, the next step was to 
make an automatic binder, so that the ma¬ 
chine could deliver the grain in sheaves. ! 
We shall probably never know the vast 
amount of inventive genius that was de¬ 
voted to the production of a binder, or 
of the many failures that preceded the day 
when, at the fair, we saw a Reaper bind 
its grain and thi-ow the sheaf aside to be 
i-eady for the next. It seemed then that pei-- 
fection had been reached. The gx-ain was 
not only cut, bxxt it was bound so securely 
with wire that the machine threw off its 
sheaves, as if to show how thoroughly they 
were bound. But the reaping and binding 
is not all of the wheat harvest. The thi-eslx- 
ers had a word to say, and threshers are for 
a time the masters of the situation. They 
found the wires difficult to cut; the pieces 
of wire would get into and derange the 
thresher, and more than all, cattle would die 
from eating straw and bits of wire together. 
The wire binder was a great thing, but it 
was plain that twine must take the place of 
wire before the Reaper could fill the measure 
of its usefulness. Now, after many trials 
and many failures, the Twine or Cord 
Binder has come. It came in 1881 with the 
“ Champion Harvester ” to sevei-al fai-ms, but 
in the now coming harvest, it will be in use 
over a vast extent of territory. The prob¬ 
lem :—How to tie up a bundle of wheat or 
other grain with a cord is solved. Like all 
great inventions, the Cord Binder is simple ; 
exactly how the knot is made can only be 
learned by closely watching the binder in 
operation. The knot, when finished, is shown 
in figui-e 1, which represents the cord at about 
its actual size. The knot is of a kind that, 
when the sheaf swells, as it naturally will 
after it is bound, the tighter it will hold. 
In the mechanism that makes the knot, the 
“Bill Hook Knot-Tie” (fig. 2)plays an im¬ 
portant part, and pulls the loop to its place 
as readily as if it had an intelligence behind 
it, Indeed this, and all other machines that 
seem to think, as well as work, do have be¬ 
hind them the intelligence of the inventor, 
which has been imparted to iron and steel 
to endow them, as it almost seems, with in¬ 
telligent motion. In attaching the Auto¬ 
matic Cord Binder to the “Champion,” it 
has been found necessary to make several 
impi-ovements in the machine itself. Among 
these is “The Tucker,” which brings the 
grain into a compact, round bundle, ready 
for the cord to be put about it; another is the 
contrivance for ejecting the bound sheaf and 
getting it out of the way of its successors. 
All these movements and others are illus¬ 
trated in the publications issued by the pro¬ 
prietors of the harvester. The general 
use of the Cord Binder will soon make a 
demand for cord that may not be readily 
met. The culture of flax is yet vei-y much 
restricted. We have no doubt that the ex¬ 
tensive demand for twine to use with bindei-s 
will give a new impetus to the production of 
flax, especially as machines have been in¬ 
vented to utilize the crude flax fibre. We do 
not know that cotton cord has been tried 
upon the Self-binding Reapers, but as that is 
Fig. 2 . —the “bill hook knot-tie.” 
one of the things that must follow, the sooner 
that inventors give their attention to the use 
of cotton cord, the nearer will the Self-bind¬ 
ing Reaper reach perfection. 
'ETGiiixiiiisg-. —In sowing, experience has 
shown, that it is better to use an abundance 
of seed, many times more than is needed to 
give the desired number of plants. This is 
done, not mei-ely to make sure of a good 
stand, but to help break through the surface 
of the soil. In many cases, the cari-ot for 
example, the young plant is very small and 
weak, and were the seed sown singly at some 
inches apart, vei-y few plants would foi-co 
