410 
[November, 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 1 
Ogden Farm Papers.—No. 22. 
I have received the following: “Thinking of 
trying your plan of farming, I think a few de¬ 
tails would be of benefit to me as well as to 
many others. 
“ 1st. How many hands would you recommend 
keeping to do general farm work and to till the 
following crops (and take care of four horses, 
five cows, calves, pigs, etc., all soiling), six acres 
drilled and hill corn, three acres potatoes, one 
acre sweet corn, two and a half acres of the 
following, cabbages, tomatoes, Lima beans, 
beets, onions, egg plants, etc., three acres wheat 
to harvest, twelve acres oats to put in and 
harvest, and other work pertaining to a run¬ 
down farm of fifty acres? In addition to the 
above, two acres of beets, mangolds, etc., and 
drawing all the above seven miles to market. 
If not asking too much of you, how many 
hands do you employ on your farm ? Now, you 
must not think me too inquisitive, since I have 
not asked a balance-sheet, but only such ques¬ 
tions as will be of benefit to many beginners as 
a guard to not doing too much with little help. 
“2J. Would you advise keeping cows for 
butter when bran is worth $22 to $35 per ton, 
hay $10 to $25, corn 85 cents and upward per 
bushel, and butter bringing20 cents to 50 cents 
per pound, not averaging more than 35 cents 
the year round? Is 15 pounds of hay, 6 quarts 
of bran, 0 quarts of meal, too much feed for a 
cow per day, in a raw state?” 
I do not exactly know what my friend’s idea 
of inquisitiveness may be. In the sense of ask¬ 
ing questions, he certainly has that qualiLy. In 
the sense of asking improper questions, he is en¬ 
tirely blameless. Nor do I mean by this to imply 
that the request for my balance-sheet, to which 
lie refers, was in any-respect improper, though, 
having spent a good share of my time, first and 
last, gossiping with brother farmers in stores 
and grist-uylls, I am not at all blind to the fact 
that even simpler questions than these lead 
1o my being hauled over the coals and chaffed 
about in a sufficiently uncomplimentary way to 
satisfy any modest man’s highest ambition. 
But, unless one has a particularly tender hide, 
the skiving that he gets in a few years’ expe¬ 
rience of the twaddle of country neighbor¬ 
hoods wi]l turn his cuticle to leather, and, un¬ 
less his wits are unusually dull, will teach him 
the art of chaffing back again sufficiently for 
his own protection. I generally know, when I 
write, just about what sort of comments I shall 
elicit from a class of numbskulls that collects 
at the Four Corners store on a rainy afternoon 
for the discussion of book-farmers such as I; 
and I am sufficiently used to the process not to 
be deterred by it from writing whatever I think 
more intelligent men may be glad to read. 
Therefore, no one need apologize for asking 
whatever questions lie pleases. If the\ r are an¬ 
swered at all, it will be simply from a desire to 
give, not to him alone, but to many, informa¬ 
tion that may be of practical value to them. 
In the case at hand, I fear that the desire 
must remain in a great measure unfulfilled; for 
it is not only beyond the scope of a newspaper 
article—it is beyond the ability of man to give 
a satisfactory reply to the all-embracing ques¬ 
tions that are propounded. There are so many 
circumstances that affect the requirement for 
manual labor on such a farm as is described, 
and so much depends on the executive ability 
of the farmer himself, that no rule can be laid 
down which would be applicable to any two 
places or to any two men. To answer the per¬ 
sonal question first: I employ, all the year 
round, about an average of four men and two 
boys. But we have a hard, old farm to renovate, 
not far from one hundred head of horses and 
horned cattle, beside the smaller animals, to take 
care of, and much soiling and steaming to do. 
Yet, with all this help, though tve do make 
some progress in the general effect, we are much 
more often behindhand in our work than in 
advance of it, and it would be difficult to find a 
farm where the conveniences for the care of 
stock in winter and in summer are better adapted 
for economical working. 
In the case before us there is the equivalent 
of about twenty head of stock. To feed these, 
and to take proper care of them (soiling), I 
should consider to'be about half-duty for a man. 
The hauling seven miles to market and back 
will spoil the time of another man, so far as 
the farm work is concerned. A third, with the 
unoccupied time of the stock tender, might be 
sufficient. The market-garden item is still more 
difficult to calculate for. Peter Henderson says 
that fully one man to the acre throughout the 
year will be required for such gardening as is 
done near New York City. I find that in my 
market-garden, of about ten acres, I need five 
men in summer and three in winter. If it were 
not for my greenhouses I could get on with two 
men in winter. My work is perhaps a little 
more complete than that my correspondent con¬ 
templates, and he may be able to get on with 
one gardener employed by the year, and another 
to help him out in April, May, and June. If the 
land is fertile, clean, and easily worked, he may 
be able to accomplish everything he describes 
with considerably less help than I have named, 
but, as I said before, it is only guess-work at the 
best, and I might almost as well undertake to 
tell him whether he had better, in going to 
market, drive around by the north road or go 
straight over the hill. That is to say, I have 
not the knowledge of his location and circum¬ 
stances necessary to give value to my opinion, 
except in a very general way. I will venture, 
however, to say, as a fixed fact from which 
there is no escape, that if he attempts all he 
proposes with an insufficient working force, he 
will wish that he were something else than a 
high farmer and market-gardener. 
In the manufacture of butter at the prices 
named for fodder and for the product, the most 
that can be said in favor of it is that it affords 
a fair home market for home products, and 
gives a fair return for money spent in buying 
food. For the profit of the operation we must 
look to the value of the manure. But if this is 
duly appreciated the profit will not be consid¬ 
ered insignificant, especially so if it is used in 
the gardening operations, at least so far 
as the farming lands can be made to do 
tolerably well without it. Fifteen pounds 
of hay is not too much for the daily rations 
of an average sized cow, but in my judg¬ 
ment G quarts of meal and G quarts of bran 
would be about right for two such cows. I 
should prefer to give 10 quarts of bran and no 
meal, unless my object were to force fresh 
cows to their utmost product, and have them 
dry off in condition for the butcher. In that 
case, all the corn-moal they can be made to eat, 
with a little bran for “condition’s” sake, will 
not be too much—the more the better. If I 
were to advise you in the matter, I would sug¬ 
gest that as you are near to a very good market 
for butter (Philadelphia), it will pay you to de¬ 
vote yourself to the manufacture of an extra 
quality of butter, such as you can readily sell 
for considerably more than the price you 
name. You may be helped in this by the intro¬ 
duction of some Jersey blood into your herd, 
and still more by adopting the best processes 
for butter-making, and giving all their details 
your personal attention. 
It is rarely advisable to use the personal let¬ 
ters of a friend in public communications, but 
the following so completely takes away the 
glory I was hoping to achieve, that it would be 
hardly fair to withhold it: 
“ I was made aware two years ago by Dr. 
Potter, the inventor of a milk-cooler, that if milk 
be immediately deprived of its animal heat, the 
cream will rise through any bight; ‘ten feet,’ 
he said, ‘ if you choose to set it so deep.’ His 
theory was that if the heat was allowed to re¬ 
main long, it favored a lactic fermentation, or 
other chemical change, which prevented the 
free separation of the cream from the milk. 
Still, I did not profit by the hint. But recently 
I read an account of some Holland dairies in 
which deep crocks were used. So I got to 
thinking, and it occurred to me that people, in 
setting in shallow pans, were merely, in ignor¬ 
ance, accomplishing the early cooling, though 
they imagined the necessity was shallowness. 
So I went to the Ironclad Can Co., and said I 
wanted a slender, tall can. 
‘“You want an Orange County Creamery 
cooler,’they said. ‘They use in the factories 
8 x 10 inches.’, 
“‘Make me one—and a conical skimmer.’ 
“ We set it with 15 or 16 inches of milk in a 
deep spring reservoir, where it floated upright , 
the heavy ironclad bottom ballasting it. At the 
end of 36 hours skimmed it, and set the skimmed 
milk. We got no more cream from it. We next 
set it 48 hours, and the milk still continued per¬ 
fectly sweet. I then ordered a full set, 8 x 25, 
and we are skimming at 24 hours. I intend to 
try 12 hours, and if satisfied that we get all the 
cream, that little pool (holding 5 cans) will be 
more than ample. 
“Near the stone house I have another reser¬ 
voir, 4:'2" x 4 / 6 // , which will hold 30 cans, and 
a live spring boiling up in the bottom. 
“Just as I got my set going, I saw the last 
Journal of the R A. Society, containing a lec¬ 
ture by X. A. Willard, delivered in Maine, and 
found it all described, and the cooler and skim¬ 
mer figured; and I now find in Ogden Farm 
Papers in August that you have been at it too. 
I believe it will be generally adopted.” 
So it seems again that there is “ nothing new 
under the sun,” and I shall not be surprised to 
hear that one of the sorest sorrows of old Job 
himself—that patient herdsman—was the dis¬ 
covery that Jacob had used deep milk-cans 
before him. 
However, although I was so late to discover 
the merits of this deep setting of milk, I am none 
the less anxious to spread the knowledge of its 
advantages. Every day brings evidence that, 
in avoiding some almost insuperable difficulties 
in summer butter-making, it is even more ef¬ 
fective than I had at first conceived it to be. 
In general farm matters there is nothing of 
especial interest to report. We jog along very 
much as usual, well satisfied of the benefits of 
soiling, and not especially dissatisfied with our 
results in any respect, save that, in spite of 
thorough cultivation and heavy manuring, we 
still feel the ill effect of the deejp plowing of 
about ten acres of the farm in the autumn of 
1868. For ordinary crops it does very well,, 
probably much better, because of the deep 
