374 
AMEEiCAK AaEIOELTEEIST. 
[September, 
Among the Farmers. 
New Series. — No. 5. 
BT ONE OF THEM. 
Perhaps some of my readers think I have too 
much to say about Jerseys. This breed is, how¬ 
ever, in many respects only typical of what may be 
made of any one of the favorite breeds of cattle. 
I recently went to Canada, to be present at an “of- 
licial ” test for butter of a little Jersey cow. These 
tests are very much like horse races. The cow is at 
her best, the time selected being only a few months 
after calving. She has either an abundance of 
grass, or the very best winter feed—roots, meal, 
bran, etc. She is, so to speak, trained beforehand, 
so that her appetite, .always good, beeomes almost 
insatiable, and then she is supplied with food well 
adapted to make milk and butter. Every means to 
induce her to make an abundance of rich milk is 
fair, excei)t giving her milk or cream to drink, or 
feeding her abnormal or unusual kinds of food, 
like oil}% or fatty substances. When every thing is 
ready, or supposed to he, the proprietor requests 
the President of the Cattle Club to send a com¬ 
mittee to inspect the test. The committee men 
are expected to report for duty at a fixed day. They 
are entertained at the house of the proprietor, if 
convenient, and their expenses, etc., are paid by 
the Club, so that there is no pecuniary transaction 
whatever between the committee and the pro¬ 
prietor. Milking is usually done at six in the 
morning, and the same hourat night, but occasion¬ 
ally three times a day — eight hours apart. 
The test begins by milking the cow dry, to the 
satisfaction of the coniinitteee. This milk goes as 
usu.al to the dairy. The next milking is at the ap¬ 
pointed hour, and the weight of the milk is taken, 
then under the careful watch of the committee, it 
is set for cream to rise, or to ripen for churning, 
and the “creamer,” or room in which it is set, is 
locked and sealed by the committee, if possible 
with their own lock and with their own seal. If 
the milk is set in a room, the windows as well as 
the doors are sealed, so that the committee is ab¬ 
solutely certain that the milk cannot possibly be 
tampered w'ith, either by accident or design, by of¬ 
ficious servants, or by some one inimical to the 
proprietor. The creamer or room must thus be 
opened, re-locked, and re-se.aled for every milking, 
and wdien the milk is skimmed. The cream iskept 
in the same way, locked and sealed, and neither 
milk, cream, nor butter, until after the fin.al weigh¬ 
ing, is ever out of the sight of the committee when 
it is not thus under the safeguard of lock .and seal. 
The management of the milk, cream, churning, 
etc., is left entirely to the dairy people, excepting 
only the working of the butter, which must be 
done to the satisfaction of the committee. After 
the first working and weighing, it is salted with 
one ounce of salt to the pound, and after proper 
working, weighed again, which is final. To make 
the test satisfactory in all respects, the weight of 
the cow, the date of last calving, and the character 
of the weather should be noted, together with the 
temperature at noon, as giving the most correct 
notion of the day. It is well also to take the in¬ 
ternal temperature of the cow, partly as a guide to 
her feeding and other treatment. A cow thus 
forced, is usually a little above the normal degree 
of heat, viz., one hundred degrees, but one hun¬ 
dred and two to one hundred and four degrees 
clearly indicates a tendency to fever. This under 
the circumstances is not alarming, though it would 
he at ordinary times, for when we consider the 
chemical action involved in the processes of diges¬ 
tion, assimilation, nutrition, and milk secretion, 
which are disposing of such a mass of strong, and 
so to speak, “heating” food in a day, one may 
well wonder that the temperature of the cow docs 
not rise higher. In the matter of feeding, there is 
room for discussion. If all the cows could be 
turned into flush pasture with no other food, or if 
they could have pasture and a certain moderate, 
but abundant ration of special ingredients, they 
would stand on a more nearly equal footing. The 
former would be easy to accomplish theoretically. 
and yet there are comparatively few people who 
could be trusted, without watching, not to give 
extra grain feed. Human nature is hard to deal 
with, and while one breeder and his men could he 
implicitly depended upon, another could not be, 
and this man of doubtful probity would he the 
very one to make a hue and cry about the unreliabili¬ 
ty of the test. It is for this reason that breeders 
content themselves with the “ go-as-you-please 
race,” and look only to the results. The little cow 
referred to above, besides exercising due diligence 
in the grass and clover pastures, consumed during 
the last three days (when the feed was weighed), 
an average of nearly forty-eight pounds of grain 
feed a day. This ration consisted of about nine 
pounds of linseed oil-cake meal, twenty-two of 
crushed oats, twelve of coarse pea-meal, and five 
pounds of wheat bran. 
Another and entirely dilTereut system of testing 
might be productive of still more valuable results. 
It is this. Suppose a tight building, or part of a 
building, to he fitted up to store feed of various 
kinds and to stable one cow. The cow being ac¬ 
customed to the place, and .at home in it, is there 
confined for her week’s test. Her food—more than 
enough of eaeh kind, is weighed out and stored in 
the building with her, except green feed or roots 
which mu.st be weighed daily. The inspecting 
committee, having their own lock and seal upon 
the building, must he present whenever it is open¬ 
ed. The milk and butter test would go on as is 
now the mode. At the end of the test, the amount 
of food consumed could be accurately ascertained, 
and if necessary analyzed, so as to come at its 
exact nutritive value, and the cow’s merit be 
judged not simply by the amount of butter she has 
been able to make, but also by the value of her 
average daily ration. Thus we might find, that 
one cow would make twenty pounds of butter a 
week at an average cost of fifty cents a day, while 
another would yield twenty-five pounds on one 
hundred cents a day. The comparative economy 
would be apparent, the twenty pounds of butter 
would cost but seventeen and one-half cents a 
pound, while the twenty-five pounds would cost 
twenty-eight cents each. No doubt greater differ¬ 
ences than this would be discovered. It seems that 
now’people really want to find out something “for 
sure,” and they are going about it the right way. 
Gates in Wire Fences. 
A cheap and simple form of wire gate is shown 
in the engravings. It consists of the same num¬ 
ber of strands as in the adjoining fence, attached 
to a post in the ordinary way at one end, w'hile the 
other wire ends ar e secured to an iron rod. This 
rod is pointed at the lower end, and when the gate is 
closed (figure 1), this end passes down through a 
Fig. 1.— THE GATE CLOSED. 
loop, and the upper end is secured to a hook. In 
opening the gate (figure 2), the I'od is loosened and 
swings out, when the sharp end is thrust into the 
Fig. 2.— THE GATE OPEN. 
earth, or a hole in a wooden block set in the 
ground at the proper place to receive it. 
A Barrel Barrow. 
Mr. H. W. Clark, Jefferson City, Mo., sends us a 
description of a barrel barrow he uses in w'heeling 
.slops for swine. Tlie barrel with one head removed 
is fastened in the wheel-barrow frame, as shown 
in the engraving. It is kept in place by cleats 
CONVENIENT SWILL BABROW. 
fastened above and below the surrounding parts of 
the wheelbarrow. This barrow is inexpensive, easi¬ 
ly constructed, and while resembling the tub bar- 
row in common use, it holds more, and is more 
substantial. It can also be advantageously employed 
in feeding animals and carrying water for plants. 
--0-0- 
Keeping Cattle in the West. j 
PROPESSOK S. R. THOMPSON. 
The conditions upon which cattle can be kept 
with the greatest profit in Nebraska are changing. 
In at least thirty counties in the eastern part of 
the State, the open range is nearly gone, and in 
most of this region each farmer must depend up¬ 
on his own land for pasture. This condition is 
greatly changing the modes of handling stock. 
Those farmers who are forehanded enough to 
fence in their pasture, and seed at least a part of it ' 
to tame grass, will soon find profit in so doing. A 
boy on a pony is no longer a satisfactory fence. On | 
large tracts, where a little grass more or less is not 
of consequence, the boy and pony do very well, 
but when eattle must be confined to a limited area, 
and to go out of that is to get iuto your own or 
}’our neighbor’s corn-field, some other kind of 
fence is needed. If the large farmers will seed 
most of their land to grass, keep herds of cattle 
and buy their grain for feed, they will do better 
for themselves and indirectly help their poorer 
neighbors, who have not the capital with which to | 
buy cattle or to fence pastures, by furnishing j 
them a market for their corn and oats near home, i 
In most country neighborhoods, corn and oats 
can be bought nearly as cheaply as they can he 
raised, especially where the labor has all to be 
hired. There are incidental advantage.^ in this 
plan. By it a man can keep a larger number of 
cattle than if he raised all the grain he needs. 
Having a larger number to sell every year, he can 
command better prices. He avoids keeping a large 
number of men and teams to carry on his farm, 
and the increased burden on his household, caused 
by the boarding of so many hired men. 
It is well known that eattle kept in pasture will 
thrive much better than when herded. The ani¬ 
mals in a herd have less freedom, are driven about 
more, are not able to get water when they want it, 
and have to submit to other inconveniences, which 
do not occur to cattle in a fenced pasture. Ex¬ 
perience shows.that it is not difficult to convert a 
prairie grass pasture into tame grass. Keep sowing 
tame grass seed wherever the prairie grass becomes 
thin and tramped out, and gradually the one will I 
displace the other. A tame grass sward made in ■ 
this way is much thicker, and will yield more pas¬ 
turage than one made on land that has been cul¬ 
tivated. The difference is quite as great as it was 
in the East between pastures made on the original ‘ 
surface of the soil before it was plowed, and that 
made on land which had been growing crops. 
Hops.— Of the forty-six thousand eight hun¬ 
dred acres devoted to hop culture, nearly forty 
thousand are in New York. Wisconsin stands 
next with about four and one-half thousand; Cali¬ 
fornia has about one thousand acres, and the bal¬ 
ance is scattered through fifteen Slates. The lead¬ 
ing hop-growing New York counties are: Otsego, 
Madison, Oneida and Schoharie. Nearly five- j 
eighths of all our hops are grown in these. j 
