246 
AMEEIOA^T AGEICW^TUEIST. 
[June, 
The Creamery and the Farmer. 
PROP. S. R. THOMPSON, NEB. AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE. 
Amons the various ways of diversifying pro¬ 
duction on the farm, the creamery has many ad¬ 
vantages. It yields quick returns. Many creamer¬ 
ies pay cash every month. A farmer who lacks 
capital to stock his farm and must wait for the 
natural increase to give him his return, may, by in¬ 
vesting in cows, get a return in a few months. He 
thus, in a measure, gets the advantage of the 
“nimble sixpence.” The results are more certain 
than in most other lines of farming. Good butter 
is always in demand for cash. The product being 
sold as fast as made, the risk of a falling market 
with a full stock on hand is largely removed. If 
extreme fluctuations in price come, they affect 
only a part of the year’s production. The business 
is fairly remunerative. The profits, as is usual 
with a business in which the. element of risk is 
largely removed, are not excessive, but being 
steady, may in the long run be better for the 
farmer than a more speculative line of work in 
which there is a promise of larger profits. In pre¬ 
senting some points connected with the question 
of profit, I cannot do better than give a statement 
made to me by Mr. S. C. Bassett, of Buffalo Co., 
Neb. The figures are taken from his books, and 
so far as they are an estimate, it is that of an in¬ 
telligent, cautious, and trustworthy farmer. This 
is the summary for 1883 : 
No. of cows milked. 12 
No. of calves raised. 12 
No. of inches of cream. 2271 
Average number of inches per cow ... 1891 
1291 inches of cream, 16 cts.§296.56 
980 . @ 20 cts. 196.00 
Total received for cream.$402.56 
Per cow. $33.54 
It should be stated, that the cows were well fed 
and cared for in the best manner. Besides hay 
and grass, each cow was fed sixty-five bushels of 
corn during the year. The estimated value of the 
food of one cow was as follows: Pasture in sum¬ 
mer, two dollars; hay in winter, three dollars ; 
sixty-five bushels of corn at twenty cents, thirteen 
dollars. Total, eighteen dollars. 
The other sources of income from the cow, be¬ 
sides the cream were the skim-milk and the calf. 
Mr. Bassett estimates that the skim-milk judicious¬ 
ly fed, would produce or be worth eighteen dollars, 
and the calf at three days old would bring five dol¬ 
lars. The skim-milk, properly utilized, will there¬ 
fore pay the cost of feeding the cow, leaving the 
value of the cream sold, thirty-three dollars and 
fifty-four cents, and the calf five dollars, or a total 
of thirty-eight dollars and fifty-four cents, to pay 
for interest, cost of labor, and net profit. 
This it seems ought to be on the whole a satis¬ 
factory showing. A farmer who in addition to his 
other farming operations keeps ten or twelve cows, 
is able to count on a cash income monthly of some¬ 
thing over thirty dollars at the lowest estimate. 
Farmers who have the requisite skill to make good 
butter, and who also live near large towns, can 
often do still better than this, by engaging their 
product to regular customers, and delivering it as 
needed. But where there is one farmer who can 
do this to advantage, there are two or three who 
could sell cream to a creamery with much greater 
profit. It would seem that a well managed cream¬ 
ery ought to be of great advantage to any rural 
community, and the rapid extension of the creamery 
system throughout the West eonflrms this view. 
It is a great mistake to suppose that any kind of 
management will produce such results as are indi¬ 
cated above. The following are some of the es¬ 
sential conditions of success in the business of 
furnishing cream to a creamery : The cows must be 
liberally fed; valuable production comes from 
abundant food. There must be the greatest regu¬ 
larity in feeding, watering, and milking the cows. 
The cows must be good ones. These cannot al¬ 
ways be bought, and the successful dairyman 
should raise his own cows as fast and as far as 
possible. He can thus be in a position to select the 
best to keep, and sell the others. The whole busi¬ 
ness must be under the immedme direction and 
care of the owner, or of some /ainstaking person 
who has a pecuniary interest i« the returns from 
the dairy. It will rarely be possible to have 
the work done successfully by hired help alone. 
A Small Poultry House. 
Mr. L. E. DeGour, Morristown, Pa., sends us 
sketches and description of a small poultry house, 
Fig. 1.— EXTERIOR OF A SMALL POULTRY HOUSE. 
from which the accompanying engravings are 
made. The house is ten by thirty feet, seven feet 
high in front, and five feet at the rear. The boards 
are “ common thirds,” with lath placed over the 
cracks. The roof is tin, with two ventilators. The 
yard for the young chicks has a board floor, to 
keep them from the damp earth. This house will 
accommodate seventy-five birds. The materials 
cost about fifty-three dollars. Mr. DeGour, though 
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Fig. 2.— GROUND PLAN OF THE POULTRY HOUSE. 
not a carpenter, built the structure, and is sure any 
one at all accustomed to the use of carpenter tools, 
can do the same from the accompanying plan. 
Dairy Questions. 
Forest Commissions and Agriculture. 
The outcome of the protracted discussion in the 
New York Legislature on the Adirondack question, 
is a bill which, at this writing, has passed the Sen¬ 
ate, and we hope will pass the Assembly. It 
provides for three Commissioners, to be appointed 
by the Governor with the advice of the Senate, to 
hold office respectively two, four, and six years, 
thus creating a vacancy every two years. They are 
to take charge of the forest lands now belonging 
to the State, and of any 
that may hereafter be ac¬ 
quired ; to prevent damage 
to them by fire, trespass, 
etc., and to report to the 
Legislature each year on 
or before Jan. 15 of their 
doings, together with such 
information “as may be 
useful in preserving the 
forests upon State lands, 
and maintaining the sup¬ 
ply of water derived therefrom for the use of the 
State.” The bill does not, it will be noticed, provide 
for an Adirondack Keservaticn, as did several of 
those which came up in the early part of the session ; 
but simply for a Commission to care for the forest 
lands, and for the waters which flow from them. 
The main feature in the bill, which makes it de¬ 
sirable to have it passed, is in the clause providing 
for a report. The annual value of our forest prod- 
-— ucts, according to the last 
census, was seven hundred 
million dollars—more than ten 
times the value of all the 
gold and silver produced, and 
more than three times that of 
the entire mineral output, 
precious metals, iron, and 
coal. This enormous total is 
merely the value of the raw 
material, and not that of the 
manufactured articles made 
out of it, and therefore the 
lack of forest products means 
stoppage of these vast in¬ 
dustries, all of which create 
a market for farm produce, 
and furnish articles needed 
for farm use. When we remember that we are 
rapidly nearing the exhaustion of the greater 
part of our available supply of forest products, we 
see that farmers have a very direct interest in 
forest preservation. S. W. Powell. 
wur 
1 
Messrs. Waltz & Waener, of Montana Ter., ask 
us several questions on dairy matters. Our an¬ 
swers to some of them will indicate the questions. 
It takes a little over eight “pounds of milk to 
makq a gallon,” and about two gallons of good 
“milk to make a pound of butter.” Yet it will 
require three or even four gallons of some milk for 
a pound of butter. It will not pay to make butter, 
except for your own use, even at sixty cents a 
pound, if you can sell the milk at twenty-five cents 
a gallon, unless indeed you have a sale for sweet 
skim-milk in some form, at eight to twelve cents 
a gallon. Jersey cows are generally below medium 
size, and are no fighters. They would be under¬ 
lings in a herd of “ common ranch cows.” They 
will yield on an average eight or ten quarts of milk 
a day for six to eight months, and during this time 
ought to average a pound to a pound and a 
quarter of butter a day. The “amount of butter 
made from noted cows,” has in some cases ex¬ 
ceeded three pounds a day, week after week. It is 
a very good one that yields fourteen pounds a week. 
Jersey cows fit to ship, would cost you in the East 
two hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars 
each, in carload lots. Orange carrots are better than 
white, because they help to keep up the color of 
the butter in winter, and are nearly as productive. 
Carrots and mangels mixed make excellent food 
for cows in winter, especially if well sprinkled 
after slicing with equal parts by weight of bran 
and corn meal. 
Short Timber and Wood Supply. 
The terrible devastation by the floods in the Val¬ 
ley of the Ohio, the' last winter and spring, is a text 
from which many pf our papers are preaching ser¬ 
mons on the wastelof our woodlands, and prophe¬ 
sying greater evilsiin the future. The case is by no 
means as despeufte as the pessimists would have 
us believe. New ^England is among the oldest set¬ 
tled portions of tne country, and in this section the 
danger is already passed, if it ever existed, and in¬ 
telligent observers assure us that there is more 
woodlaud to-day, than there was fifty years ago. 
More than a quarter of the land is in wood. The 
white pine, ouetof our most valuable timber trees, 
may not be so .plenty or as large as in the olden 
time, but it still! exists, and furnishes large quanti¬ 
ties of lumber, as the shoe trade of Eastern Massa¬ 
chusetts attests. Timber land cleared and left to 
renew its growth, is ready to clear again in twenty- 
five or thirty years. And so far as the holding of 
snow and rain is concerned, it is about as valuable 
as the original forest. The shade is complete, the 
leaves and leafrmould are retained, and floods are 
no more numerous or destructive than they were in 
the early settlendent of the country. There are two 
forces steadily operating to conserve our forests, 
for the most part overlooked by those who prophe¬ 
sy evil from our waning forests. The first is the 
enormous and steady increase of the production of 
coal, and the increase of facilities for its distribu- 
