1894 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
439 
CALIFORNIA THROUGH EASTERN SPECTACLES 
WHEAT AND SHEEP. 
Port Costa, an hour’s ride from the metropolis of the 
West, is provided with numerous large iron ware¬ 
houses for the storage of wool and grain. Here ocean 
steamers may be found loading their precious freights 
of grain and wool; food and clothing for the hungry 
and naked for some far away country. At every little 
station, no matter how insignificant, an iron-covered 
storehouse looms up, until the far away mountains are 
reached. May wheat sells at $1.17 ; barley at 82 cents 
per 100 pounds. Ten bushels per acre is the estimated 
yield of wheat for this year. This means that some 
fields are not worth harvesting, as 20 bushels will be 
secured on the low rich lands Many fields already 
give evidence that they have stored up much of their 
fertility in these great iron railroad coffins. The be- 
gincing of the end is at hand. The lack of the usual 
amount of spring rain in part accounts for the small¬ 
ness of the yield. Two thousand acres of golden 
wheat billowing in the sunshine is a most beautiful 
sight, and makes one’s mouth water for a taste of 
those white, p’ump berries, but the beauty and diges¬ 
tion are all taken out of them for the hard-worked 
owner, when he says, “ Stranger, thar’s no clean gold 
in it ” 
A machine 30 feet broad, over all, cuts a swath 16 
feet wide, thrashes it and delivers the grain in sacks, 
six in a pile, ready for the European market. The 
machine costs nearly $2,000, and requires four men 
and from 26 to 32 horses, according to their size, to 
run it. Forty days of continuous reaping is the mini¬ 
mum, 70 the maximum season’s work. Thirty acres 
is an average day’s work ; the charge being $1,75 per 
acre and food for men and beasts, which is rated at 25 
cents an acre more. Almost no insect enemies or 
. rusts have yet appeared, and so long as fertility holds 
out, if the rains are propitious, this mining of plant 
food can go on. The meagerness of the houses and 
other betterments on these great wheat ranches leads 
one to think that in the long run little money besides 
that invested in xhe land has been made ; but all this 
unhomelike look may be due to the mild climate and 
the careless habits of farmers which prevail in all 
new countries. 
Riding through these great wheat fields and think¬ 
ing of the boys and girls who would possess these 
acres in the next century, I discovered here and there 
a few changes which made the outlook appear brighter. 
The master having been transported to some far away 
country, like his wheat bags, his widow had divided 
the ranch into small holdings and sold them on long 
time and at low interest. It rested one’s weary eyes 
to see here and there a neat little cottage, bright with 
its last coat of paint, surrounded with its flowers and 
young fruit trees, peeping out from that monotonous 
sea of grain. Another little home of happiness and 
plenty had been planted where no pigtails would ever 
be found unless fastened to the winter’s supply of 
meat. Here no foreign tongue will “ bray harsh, dis¬ 
cordant sounds upon the evening air,” Here shall 
be implanted in the quiet of the field, a love for that 
home life and healthy, clean thought which we in our 
haste have come so near to losing. May not then the 
calamity which threatens us from these great seas of 
wheat be averted by planting the fields with English- 
speaking, flaxen-haired children ? 
The sheep industry is not so difficult to deal with, 
for, if it do not pay, we can get clear of the sheep by 
giving them the rot or by turning the dogs loose, or 
sending first, a free trader and then a high tariff man, 
to Congress. A flock of 9,000 sheep had iust landed 
on the low tulu lands of the Sacramento, after a 14 
days’ journey from their mountain home, when I ar¬ 
rived at the pastures. The lambs are yeaned in Feb¬ 
ruary in some protected cove in the mountains. Ten 
per cent are often lost from the depredations of 
coyotes and wild cats. Shearing begins early in May. 
The average unwashed spring fleece weighs five 
pounds, and sells for eight cents per pound ; the fall 
fleece sells for four cents, averages 23^ pounds, and no 
more than pays for the shearing ; but it is unsafe to 
leave it as it is so full of dust and burrs that it will 
hold the cold winter rains and destroy the life ol the 
sheep. The flock was composed of grade Merinos, 
quite as good as the same class of sheep in the Eist. 
The owner offered them for $1.50 apiece, reserving a 
thousand of the best ewes to go on with, or hold on 
with until he could change to cattle or times improved. 
The old prices for wool were 15 to 17 cents, “all 
’round,” and “there was lots of money in it,” said he. 
The pasture consists largely in many places of 
rented railroad lands, costing from $40 to $50 per sec¬ 
tion for the best, and nothing for the poorest. All flock 
masters are now crossing with some variety of the 
mutton breeds ; Shropshires and South Downs are 
preferred. Pastures are good from May to November 
if the range be ample and late summer rains do not 
come. Already the grass is brown and dry in the 
foot hills, but the dried grass is full of seeds and won¬ 
derfully nutritious. When the cold, rainy weather 
comes in the winter, the sheep often suffer and die 
from exposure and hunger, as no shelter or extra food 
is provided. Before sheep husbandry can become a 
satisfactory industry here, the great flocks must be 
broken up into “bands” of 100 or 200, or less, and win¬ 
tered at the little homesteads, by their owners, on hay 
which may be so easily raised and cured in this 
climate. Wheat, oats and barley mixed or separate 
make most excellent hay; if cut just before the grains 
are in the milk, it will keep the animals in flne condi¬ 
tion without other grain than that which is in the 
shrunken berries of the hay. By massing the “bands” 
into large flocks in the summer, they may be pastured 
on the mountains at a nominal cost. The old idea of 
boundless flelds and countless flocks is still strong, 
but loss of fertility, low prices and the old scythe 
wielded by Time, will destroy the old and make place 
for the new and better way—the small holding, the 
schoolhouse, the English tongue, the church and 
neighborly love and helpfulness. 
[PUOF.] I. P. KOBERTS. 
A TALK ABOUT CHURNING. 
USE A FRUIT-CAN TESTER. 
Nature puts up her choicest products, such as the 
Seckel pear and Lady apple, in small packages. Emu¬ 
lating her example. The R. N.-Y. presents us with a 
delicious dessert of “Brevities” after a bounteous 
feast of substantials. But in a recent issue was one 
that I didn’t quite relish. I had enough of spoiling 
cream to learn the fine art of buttermaking years ago. 
But I did not “spoil a few batches to learn what con¬ 
ditions are beat” either. Only one, and the little 
pinch of knowledge I got out of that lesson in the 
school of experience, cost me 10 hard-earned dollars. 
Too much, to be sure, but in those days fools could 
learn in no other way. But now when scientific knowl¬ 
edge is literally crying in the streets, and the results 
Henry Ward Beecher. Plow City. Fig. 118. 
FiQ. 117. Often this shape. (See first paRe.) 
of carefully conducted experiments are sent to our 
very doors, as free as autumn leaves for the asking, 
there is small excuse for taking the old stage-coach 
line in the pursuit of knowledge. And besides, there 
is a better way with perverse churnings, as indicated 
on the same page of Brevities; “ Never experiment 
with the whole thing at once.” A good way to carry 
out this injunction is to take some cream from the 
churn in a fruit can, say about one-third full, and 
after raising the temperature one or two degrees, 
shake till it comes. Another can may be churned at 
a lower temperature, noting the time required for 
each. If either refuse to yield the butter, raise or 
lower the temperature again, and churn as before. 
The proper degree of heat may soon be found in this 
way, usually. 
At the t’me of my failure with that churning of 
about 40 pounds of butter, my dairy thermometer was 
marked “ churning ” at 62 degrees, and that had been 
generally accepted as the right temperature. I had 
learned, however, that cream from “cold setting” 
must be a little higher, and again that it must be a 
little higher in winter, and so I had felt my way along, 
like a blind man learning to read with his fingers, till 
I had got that churning up to 66 degrees. We churned 
with reenforcements a day and half a night, and then 
surrendered to the witches. I now know that by a 
vigorous treatment of hot fire slice, as prescribed in 
such cases in the olden time, those witches might have 
been exorcised with far less exercise for me. The 
next churning behaved in the same way ; but instead 
of “ experimenting with the whole thing,” 1 devised 
the fruit can experiment, which showed that 68 de¬ 
grees was the imperative condition, and the job was 
soon done. I have not lost a churning since. When 
asked what the right temperature for churning is, I 
answer, from 45 to 72 degrees according to conditions 
and circumstances. 
Where the Cream is Lost. 
But there are conditions that should be understood 
by every buttermaker, which make it extremely diffi¬ 
cult or, perhaps, impossible at times to get the butter 
out of cream. As butter dairies are usually managed, 
cows coming in fiesh in February and March, are 
liable to give milk that makes trouble with churnings 
in December and January. We must churn at a high 
temperature, the butter is long in coming, and diffi¬ 
cult to gather into granules large enough to float on 
the buttermilk. The trouble may all come from 
the milk of one or two cows, which should be 
kept out. Look out for the cow that is most advanced 
in pregnancy. My neighbor has just lost two batches 
of cream, caused by the milk of one that “ sprung 
bag ” unobserved. Since that is left out, he gets the 
butter all right by churning at 70 degrees. What we 
want is a machine something like the “ milk shake” 
that will churn with several of these fruit cans at one 
operation. The source of the trouble could then soon 
be detected by churning the cream of each suspected 
cow by itself, and undesirable peculiarities discovered 
and eliminated from the herd. The first cow I ever 
owned gave a large mess, but her butter was as white 
as lard, even when she had the run of June pasture. 
It had not been known till I took her from the herd 
to the village. 
One cow at the New York State Experiment Station, 
absolutely refused to yield half the butter by any of 
the gravity modes of creaming. Similar cases of idio¬ 
syncrasy among cows occur more frequently, as I be¬ 
lieve, than we suspect. The Babcock tester will not 
reveal them unless it be applied to the skim-milk of 
the guilty individual. It is true the separator will get 
all the cream without the ^east partiality, but it may 
cheat you after all if you do not test the buttermilk; 
and then how are you to know which cow contributes 
her cream to the swill barrel unless you solve the 
question with these individual churnings ?” The cause 
of all this trouble is to be found in the small size of 
the cream globules of certain cows, and, certain 
breeds also, for it is well-known that the .lerseys and 
Guernseys are free from this defect, while the Devons 
and Holsteins, as butter cows, have this serious draw¬ 
back in a very marked degree. 
In the experiments at the New York Station, it was 
found that the Guernseys lost in the skim-milk for 
every 100 pounds of milk 0.32 pounds of fat, while the 
Holsteins lost from the same 0.68 pounds, which is 
more than twice as much as was lost by the Guernseys. 
The report says: “ If the milk of the Holsteins did 
not lose so much fat in creaming, they would easily 
make the largest amount of butter. The question 
arises as to the best method of getting the fat of the 
Holsteins from the milk to the butter without such 
serious loss. This can be accomplished satisfactorily 
by using a centrifugal machine for creaming the milk.” 
But this statement is evidently misleading, since the 
same series of experiments (seereport for 1891) showed 
that it took much longer to churn the cream of the 
Holsteins than it did the cream from any other breed 
in the experiment, and then about three times as much 
butter fat was left in the buttermilk as was found in 
the buttermilk from Channel Island cows 
LE ROY WHITFORD. 
What Say? 
A Poultry Partnership. —An acquaintance wishes 
me to go into the poultry business as follows : I to 
buy the farm and put up the necessary buildings 
which will cost, I judge, complete, about $800. In fact, 
I am to furnish feed, fowls and everything, and divide 
prefits equally with him. He is to furnish all the 
labor. It seems to me that he has everything to gain 
and nothing to lose. I expect to keep grade Guern¬ 
seys, sell the cream and feed skim-milk to the chicks. 
We would expect to go into the broiler and capon busi¬ 
ness. What would be a fair division ? I am a good 
farmer, and he is a good poultryman. I think of buy¬ 
ing a farm in Virginia. Is Washington, D. C., a good 
market for broilers, capons and eggs ? A. s. 
Lenox, Mass. 
R. N.-Y.—We call that a jug-handled arrangement. 
The other man has nothing to lose and all to gain. It 
is not a fair division. 
Crimson Clover and Timothy. —I have a piece of 
ground that is now planted in corn, and I would like 
to get it in grass as soon as possible I have been 
thinking of sowing it to Crimson clover and Timothy, 
when I cultivate the corn the last time, say, about 
July 10. Will the Timothy be likely to do well sowed 
then, and will there be any danger of the clover 
smothering it out next season ? I have never tried 
the Crimson clover, but from what I read and hear of 
it, I believe it would make a paying crop of hay in the 
summer of 1895. But I would not wish to plow the field 
again to get it in Timothy. Have any of the readers 
of The R. N. Y. had any experience in sowing Crimson 
clover and Timothy together, and with what results ? 
Castle Shannon, Pa. w. f. 
What About This Soil ? —I have on my farm about 
30 acres of low land. The soil is a rich, sandy loam, 
from 4 to 10 inches deep. The sub-soil is a gravelly 
clay, of a runny nature, and is so compact that the 
