1873 .] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
4&7 
some recognized agricultural association, coun¬ 
ty, or district, or State, as may be (or any local 
Grange would be a proper vehicle), whose offi¬ 
cers will be responsible that the application is 
bona fide and that the contracts made will be 
carried out on the part of the employers. They 
will also be prepared to advance the funds suffi¬ 
cient to defray the expenses of the laborers 
from their present to their future homes, which 
amount will be repaid out of their wages. Ne¬ 
gotiations and contracts will be made by the 
Laborers’ Union or its recognized officers, and 
through them with the laborers personally. As 
this movement contemplates the removal to 
America of many thousands of persons it is 
necessary that a perfect organization be effected, 
and that Mr. Arch as its representative shall 
satisfy himself of the desirability of his friends’ 
removal hither. ' To this end he will make a 
lengthened visit to this country next spring, 
arriving here in May, and spend four or five 
months examining the various fields for emi¬ 
gration which present themselves. At that 
time he will be prepared to visit any locality 
and confer with any association that may desire 
to enter into arrangements with the Union for 
the transfer of any number of laborers and their 
families. In the meantime we shall convey 
such information of the progress of this move¬ 
ment in England as may reach us. At the 
present time the Union consists of over a liun-. 
dred thousand English laborers, and is rapidly 
extending. A number of letters have been 
sent to Mr. Arch in our care. The writers of 
these must not feel disappointed if they receive 
no reply, as his work is of such magnitude that 
he can not treat with individuals. 
A Good Jersey Cow. 
The Jerseys are working their way into fa¬ 
vor as family pets and butter cows. They are 
accustomed to kind treatment and plenty of 
food in their native island, and their true place 
seems to be in the village and its suburbs, or 
places where but one or two cows are kept, 
rather than upon the farm in large'herds. A 
small fifteen-sixteenths grade heifer, sold two 
years ago from Poquonnoc Farm, has made a 
remarkable record. She is one of the smoky- 
fawn animals,with dark points, nowin fashion, 
whose comeliness is thought by some to damage 
the milking qualities of the breed. Since she 
came into the hands of her present proprietor, 
she has had the run of a good pasture in sum¬ 
mer and some extra feed in the stable. The pres¬ 
ent season, at four years old, she is making over 
two pounds of butter a day, of the finest qual¬ 
ity, such as is very properly called gilt-edged, 
and would sell at $1 a pound in the city markets. 
She would be called a handsome cow of any 
breed, and yet her beauty does not seem to be 
incompatible with rich milk and plenty of it. 
Oats and Peas. • • 
A correspondent in Clarke Co., Va., wishes 
to know all about the crop of oats and peas 
alluded to in Walks , and Talks on the Farm, 
No. 118—the kind of pea, where purchased, 
quality per acre, and whether we think the 
crop will succeed in Virginia, and last, but not 
least, how the land was prepared for that crop 
of 84 bushels per acre.—The land was in corn 
in 1872, clover in 1871 and 1870, wheat in 1869, 
barley in 1868, and corn in 1867. The field 
was manured for cora in 1867. A part of the 
field was also manured for corn in 1872. There 
was nothing peculiar in the preparation of the 
land for the crop of oats and peas. In the fall 
of 1871 the clover sod (the field having been 
pastured that year and mown for hay and for 
seed in 1870) was plowed with a three-horse 
plow and left rough for the winter. It was 
harrowed and cultivated in the spring, and af¬ 
terwards plowed, harrowed, etc., and sown to 
corn in drills ft. apart. The corn was re¬ 
peatedly harrowed with a Thomas harrow, 
and when too large to harrow was cultivated 
at short intervals until about the first of August. 
The land was very clean. The next spring 
(1873) it was plowed, thoroughly harrowed, and 
was then (May 6th) sown with oats and peas 
drilled in together, at the rate of four bushels 
per acre—2| bushels peas and 1| bushel of oats. 
This is all there was to it. The crop was cut 
with a reaper July 30th. The land was after¬ 
wards plowed and sown to winter wheat. If 
the crop of oats and peas is considered a large 
one, it is due to a little good manure and to 
very thorough cultivation while the land was 
in corn. The peas were bought in Buffalo, and 
cost $1.40 per bushel. They were the “ Canada 
Creeper” pea. The farmers in Western New 
York seldom use their own peas for seed, owing 
to the fact that they are more or less “ buggy.” 
They think it better to get their seed from 
Canada or from the northern counties of the 
State of New York, where the pea-bug does 
little or no damage. In regard to whether this 
crop would do well on our correspondent’s 
farm in Virginia, we can only say that we see 
no reason why such should not be the case, 
provided the land is in good condition. The 
Southern “Cow Peas,” for which the seasons 
in New York are too short, succeed admirably 
in Virginia, and have received less attention as 
a source of fodder than Virginian cultivators 
have given them. 
Faith in Specialties. 
It is one of the weak points of American 
farming, at least in the Eastern States, that we 
have no system founded upon an intelligent 
apprehension of the capacities of the soil and 
the wants of the market. When wool is high 
we rush into sheep, and are soon overstocked; 
wool falls off, and the sheep are sold for a song. 
When pigs are ten dollars at four weeks old 
w» invest in breeding sows, and after a success¬ 
ful season cr two pigs are so plenty that we 
lose money on every pig that we raise. It is 
cheering in these days of change to come occa¬ 
sionally upon a man who has faith in special¬ 
ties, and is content to produce a uniformly 
good article, whether the price is high or low. 
In a recent visit to the farm of J. N. Blakesley, 
in Watertown, Ct.,we found a remarkable in¬ 
stance of perseverance in well-doing. Mr. 
Blakesley is a gentleman of the old school, now 
eighty-five years of age, still hale and hearty, 
and attending to his stock every day. He 
has been the owner of his large grazing 
farm for over sixty years, and has had one 
line of policy from the beginning. 
Watertown is well known as one of the best 
grazing districts in Litchfield county, and from 
a very early day has been famous for a breed 
of cattle known as the Watertown Reds. 
They are probably from the same stock as 
the Devons brought over in the first settlement 
of the country, and bred by the farmers in 
this vicinity with a good deal of care. Taking 
a hint from the success of this stock, Mr. Blake's- 
ley bought Devons in 1812, and has bred them 
with success ever since. He has a herd of 
twenty-six head, oxen, steers, cows, and calves. 
A single yoke of thorough-bred Devons do all 
the work upon the farm. They are so per¬ 
fectly trained that they can be driven as well 
without the yoke as with it. Through all 
these years he has found nothing that suited 
him so well for working cattle, beef, and milk. 
Whether the Devons were up or down he has 
always had them to sell. Another of his 
specialties is the merino sheep, of which he has 
a fine flock numbering 162. They are the de¬ 
scendants of an importation made in 1810 by 
Peck & Atwater, of New Haven, and he has had 
them under his care since 1815, breeding for 
special points and keeping the flock in the 
most thrifty condition. . 
The flock is now very' uniform in size, and 
yields from four to five pounds of washed 
wool per head. One breeding ram yields ten 
pounds. They are known as the Infantado 
Merino Sheep. He sells the sheep for stock so 
far as there is demand, and claims that he has 
a good mutton as well as fine wool breed of 
sheep. They were certainly large, well-bred 
animals. Whatever the change in the popular 
fancy is in the market price of wool, he has 
kept right on breeding from the old stock, and 
has no doubt that he has the best breed for a 
Connecticut farm. One of his specialties is old 
sod for pasture and meadow. He showed us a 
large field where there had been no plowing for 
thirty-four years. It was cleared of stones and 
planted for two years then, and has yielded 
good crops of hay ever since, with an occa¬ 
sional top-dressing of stable manure. In late 
years he plows but little, relying mainly upon 
his sheep and cattle to keep up the fertility of 
the farm by grazing. He succeeds admirably. 
Artificial Butter. —During the scarcity 
occasioned by the investment of Paris by the 
German troops a substitute for butter was im¬ 
provised by an ingenious Frenchman. Neces¬ 
sity was thus the mother of the invention by 
which the occupation of the cow is now 
threatened in the United States. Butter in 
which milk or cream has no part is now made 
by a patented process in New York and Con¬ 
necticut. At least the stuff is called butter. 
It is made from the oleine or the liquid part of 
the suet of cows and oxen slaughtered for beef. 
After the suet has been chopped up and melted 
it is pressed, and the oleine is separated from the 
stearine. The stearine is made into candles, 
but the ultimate use of the oleine is no such light 
matter. It is churned, colored with annotto, 
and the product is called butter and is sold as 
such. It is not at all to the credit of the gen- 
eral^run of butter makers, that we are forced 
to say after tasting this artificial butter that 
there is a vast quantity of real butter comes to 
market that tastes much worse than this colored 
extract of suet; and that a large portion of the 
population may have cause to bless the inven¬ 
tive Frenchman who first initiated the manu¬ 
facture. But so it is. Fortunately or unfor¬ 
tunately as it may be, this business can never 
grow to excessive proportions for the reason 
that it takes a whole cow or ox to make about 
30 pounds of this butter, and it can only be 
made once and then after the death of the crea¬ 
ture. The cows’ occupation is therefore not 
gone as yet, and this new butter is only a com¬ 
panion product to the sugar which is made 
from sawdust, or the whiskey which is pro¬ 
duced from old rags, 
