1871 .] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
51 
high-farming from the good old way, 1 have 
gathered a bit of information from my English 
agricultural paper. Mrs. Millington, to whom 
was awarded last year the Royal Agricultural 
Society’s prize for the best managed farm, (profit 
of the business being a chief test in the compe¬ 
tition,) spends $6,000 a year for cattle food— 
most of it linseed cake from America—the con¬ 
sumption of which on her farm secures an 
abundant supply of good manure, by which she 
raises large and profitable crops from a poor, 
light soil. How about “overstocking” in this 
case? And how long before American farmers 
will learn that they too can make money by 
securing in this way a large addition (in quality 
as well as quantity) to their stock of manure? 
As I drive along the road, I daily meet able- 
bodied men crawling along beside snail-like ox- 
teams with loads of stained straw from the pri¬ 
vate stables in which the summer residents of 
Newport keep their horses “ up to their knees” 
in litter. The cart holds about a cord of the 
stuff, (128 cubic feet,) for which $5 or more have 
been paid in town, and to get which, occupies 
the best part of a day’s labor of man and team. 
If these same men would take their money out 
of the Savings Bank and invest it in well-pur- 
chased beef cattle or wether sheep, and in rich 
food, they would make manure at home which 
would cost them nothing, and of which one 
cord would be worth more than five cords of 
the dirty straw they haul from town. Of course 
it pays them to buy and haul the town manure, 
or they would not do it; but this only proves that 
it would pay them five times as well to make 
manure at home. Some of them understand 
this; and I have several neighbors who feed 
out from 500 to 1,000 bushels of purchased corn 
every winter. I remarked to one of them, 
“ That makes manure.” He replied, “It makes 
land; I am getting my farm so that it will grow 
a good crop of any thing I seed it to.” 
I received a letter a short time ago from Iowa, 
suggesting that I give less attention to the ques¬ 
tion of manure and more to the processes of 
farming. Bless your soul, my good man, I am 
not writing for you, but for your children, and 
for the very large class farther East, whose 
fathers thought as you do—men who now have 
to pay for the paternal squandering. The time 
is not very far distant when the question of 
manure will be the important question in Iowa 
itself. If you do n’t believe it, just read the 
agricultural history of the whole world to the 
eastward of you, until you come to the great 
wall of China. Read the census reports of our 
own Western Country itself, or look at your local 
agricultural papers, and see what complaints 
are made of weevil and other grain-destroying 
insects. Weevil is another name for weak plants, 
and weak plants mean a weak soil. You are 
soming to it faster than you imagine, and if 
you live to be a hale, old man you will see that 
I am right. 
The farmers of the East begin to see it now, 
and many a man is straining every nerve to re¬ 
place the fertility that his ancestorshave allowed 
to go to waste; many a man is, and many a 
one is not; for I see in my own immediate neigh¬ 
borhood piles of manure accumulating under 
the eaves of barns, sending their most valuable 
parts to the nearest brook with the drenching 
water of every rain ; and so long as this lasts 
you must excuse a much younger farmer than 
yourself if he takes frequent occasion to remind 
you that “ you can’t have your cake and eat it 
too,” If you squander the heart-blood of your 
rich soil, it will be a poor soil before you know 
it. It is infinitely easier to keep land rich than 
to make it rich, and infinitely cheaper too. 
As Winter comes again, there comes with it 
the perennial question of colonng butler. I 
thought I had, last winter, hit upon the best 
plan, in the use of annotoine, or an extract of 
annotto, from which the cruder parts are ex¬ 
cluded. It certainly did work very well, and 
the color was rich and good. Still, on compar¬ 
ing it with some grass butter, laid down in June, 
it became evident that though a good color 
in itself, it was not a good color for butter; and 
I have made a new series of experiments, and 
have now much the best result, both in color 
and in flavor, that I have yet attained. The 
new system is by no means new to many dai¬ 
ries. It consists simply in grating a few per¬ 
fectly clean, deep-colored carrots, the Orange 
carrot will not do nearly so well as the Altring- 
liam or the French horn, and squeezing the 
juice into the churn with the cream before the 
churning commences. We use for each churn¬ 
ing (of about 20 lbs.) a dozen medium-sized 
carrots; and it makes color enough for winter, 
not the rich gold tint of summer, but still a 
gold-like color that is much more attractive 
than the reddish-yellow hue annotoine gave. 
So far as color and flavor are concerned, I judge 
that a bushel of carrots used in this way has as 
much effect as 50 bushels fed to the cows. How¬ 
ever, they have no effect on the appetite and the 
condition of the animals, and are not allowed to 
supersede the feeding of roots, which is, in our 
case, regularly carried on. We give from a 
peck to a half-bushel daily to each milking an¬ 
imal. Just now, we are using carrots; they 
will be followed by ruta-baga turnips, and these, 
later in the season, by mangels. Both of the 
last-named roots are often objected to as affect¬ 
ing the taste of the milk and butter—the turnips 
being much the worse of the two. All diffi¬ 
culty on this score may be avoided by feeding 
only at milking time, or immediately thereafter. 
What becomes of the taste I do not know, but 
the fact is obvious that turnips fed in the morn¬ 
ing will not be tasted in the evening’s milk, 
while if fed at noon they will be. Even when 
fed, as directed, too much must not be given at 
once, (say not more than a peck at each milking 
time,) and even then their use must be occasion¬ 
ally abandoned for a few days, so that their 
flavor may not accumulate in the animal’s sys¬ 
tem, (if this is the true explanation.) My obser¬ 
vation is, that it is best to leave them off for 
three days about twice a month. 
I hear much complaint this year of the fail¬ 
ure of cows to get with calf; and I have suf¬ 
fered somewhat in this way myself, especially 
in the case of a very flue imported Jersey cow, 
which has recently come in heat for the fourth 
time since May. Some writers have ascribed 
the difficulty to the extreme heat of the sum¬ 
mer. If this is the case the remedy must now 
be provided, for at this writing it is as cold as 
though it never meant to be warm again. 
Mr. J. Preston Thomas, in a communication 
to the Country Gentleman , expresses surprise at 
my statement in the November Agriculturist 
“ that corn raising would not pay on Ogden 
Farm.” He thinks my trouble was that I did 
not have a good sward to turn under. My pre¬ 
cise statement was, “ I do not think the corn 
crop pays so well as other things would, and 
every thing cannot be grown by a farmer who 
has only a limited supply of labor;” and this 
was followed by a computation of the compar¬ 
ative profit of ruta-bagas and mangels or hay. 
I did not say that corn would not pay—only 
that I thought other things would pay better. 
Most of my cornfield did have a very fine 
sward, and there was a very heavy growth of 
grass turned under in the spring. 
Mr. Thomas says they are, in Chester Co., Pa., 
most sure of a crop of from 80 to 100 bushels 
to the acre for the whole field. He would prob¬ 
ably be satisfied to have the money return of 
the crop set down at $100. This is more than 
it costs, and is profitable. Now, let us see; On 
such a soil as that of Chester County—where 
shall we look for better?—roots can be raised 
easily and enormously. The manuring rec¬ 
ommended for the corn crop is 16 3-horse 
loads of well-rotted manure, 60 bushels of 
lime, 3 years for them to act in producing 
a good sward, and a compost of hen ma¬ 
nure, ashes, and scrapings in the hill. With 
this manuring an acre of Chester County laud 
would produce 1,200 bushels (or more) of man¬ 
gels, worth at least a Yankee shilling (16 2 | 3 cents) 
per bushel to feed out on the farm (or more to 
sell). This would give $200, and if the crop is 
raised by transplanting, the whole cost, includ¬ 
ing harvesting, would not be $25 more than the 
cost of the corn crop. This leaves a difference 
of $75 in favor of the mangels, which is what I 
meant when I used the expression “ pays so 
well.” As an additional advantage, a good 
crop of mangels leaves the land absolutely 
clean—more free from weeds than the best kept 
crop of corn can possibly do. I am aware that 
the suggestion will be made that “ Beets draw 
the land.” So they do, but what of that? I 
would as soon have a pound of potash in my 
root cellar (on duty) as in my soil (inactive), for 
if will get back to the soil in time for the next 
crop, if I feed my roots; if I sell them, they 
will enable me to buy manure. If any plan 
could be devised by which we could each year 
exhaust (in our crops) every ounce of fertilizing 
matter from our soils, farming would be a sim¬ 
pler business than it now is; for we could apply 
it all every year in our manure, just when we 
want it, where we want it, and as we want it— 
and what crops we would grow ! We would 
have the full benefit of the “nimble sixpence.” 
If any man were to make a business of raising 
mangels, selling them off the farm, and invest¬ 
ing the money in bank-stocks, he would be on 
the straight road to the poor-house—and serve 
him right. But if he fed them on the place— 
or if sold, brought back their manurial equiva¬ 
lent—he would not fail to prosper, so far as 
prosperity can be compassed by good cropping. 
A correspondent in Monmouth County, N. J., 
asks whether the same benefit can be obtained 
from transplanting in the case of carrots and 
parsnips, as with ruta-bagas and mangels—his 
land being very weedy. Probably not. I have 
never known it to be done; and although there 
may be some way to make a carrot or a parsnip 
grow when transplanted, I have never succeeded 
in doing it, and judge it to be nearly or quite 
impossible. Land may be well cleaned and 
prepared for these roots by growing and plow¬ 
ing in three successive crops of buckwheat the 
previous season—which is, in my opinion, much 
the best kind of summer fallowing—unless the 
soil naturally produces a good growth of rag¬ 
weed, which is probably as good as buckwheat. 
If the buckwheat has been preceded by a heavy 
and well-manured clover lea, the preparation for 
a good crop of roots will be nearly perfect, 
