H\)C j^crt)smiin. 
STOCK RAISING IN THE GULF STATES 
The South—and I speak more positively in 
reference to the Gulf States—is making con¬ 
siderable progress in the breeding of stock 
and in the improvement of methods of farm¬ 
ing. A few years ago there were very few 
breeders of thoroughbred stock in the Gulf 
States, and those few confined their efforts 
chiefly to the breeding of hogs. How is it to¬ 
day ? Perhaps there are in this State alone 
not less than 100 breeders of thoroughbred 
cattle, including Jerseys, Short-horns, Devons, 
Ayrsbires and Galloways. Some of them 
have herds reaching nearly to a hundred 
(one has a herd of Jerseys numbering not less 
than 150 head), but the majority have less 
than a dozen head each. In Alabama. 
Louisiana, Texas, Georgia and South Caro¬ 
lina, there is a very large number of breed¬ 
ers and prospective breeders of pure bred 
cattle. The Jerseys predominate in nil these 
States, as this valuable breed has proven to 
be splendidly adapted to our climate and 
pasturage. Such is the demand for thorough 
bred cattle of all the breeds among our own 
people, that few Southern breeders have any¬ 
thing to offer at this time. When 1 say breed¬ 
ers, I mean it, and do not refer to specula¬ 
tive dealers in the weeds and culls of Eastern 
and Western herds, 
I am glad to say that the growing tendency 
among nearly all who are preparing to 
establish thoroughbred herds is to secure the 
best stock their means will admit. In the 
matter of Jerseys it is a well-known fact, 
even among the breeders of the Eastern 
States, that the South can boast some of the 
very best animals, which are being added to 
from time to time by the importation of some 
of the most select beasts in the North that 
money can buy. The famous bull, “ Cham¬ 
pion of America,” which $10,000 could not 
have purchased from its owner, was the prop¬ 
erty of W. B. Montgomery of this county. 
Last Winter Hon. H. L. Muldrow of this 
county, member of Congress, and the author 
of the bill to make the Commissioner of Ag¬ 
riculture a Cabinet Officer, purchased a Jer¬ 
sey bull at the Simpson sale in New York, at 
a cost of $1,600. He has recently purchased 
a bull at a cost of $1,000, A syndicate at 
Jackson, Miss., composed of bankers, lawyers, 
judges and merchants, all breeders of Jersey 
cattle, have recently received from Illinois a 
Jersey bull for which they paid $1,000. It 
has not been very long since Capt. Stiles of 
this county, sold a Jersey cow 11 years old, 
for $1,000 to T. G. Bush, an enterprising 
breeder of Jersey cattle near Mobile, Ala. 
I could mention many other instances 
which would go to show the character of our 
Southern Jerseys, and the enterprise and 
foresight of the intelligent, and wide-awake 
breeders, but do not deem it neres°ary. 
In speaking of thoroughbred catile, it might 
prove interesting to some Southern readers 
of the Rural to fenowthit the Mississippi 
Agricul uraland Mechanical College, located 
at this place, ha? decided to purchase the 
foundation stock for several thoroughbred 
herds, including Jerseys, Ayrshire®, Short¬ 
horns, Hereford*, D wons and Galloways. 
The money is on hand to make the purchases, 
and the Professor of Agriculture is now in 
correspondence with parties iu various States, 
with a view to consummating these purchases. 
Already a small herd of Galloways has been 
purchased. 
For many years to come there will be a 
steady and increasing demand in the Cotton 
States for thoroughbred cattle of all the sev¬ 
eral breeds; such stock as are fully acclimated 
are always preferred, and will sell for a much 
greater price than unacclimated stock. Bring¬ 
ing cattle from a northern lalitude to our sec¬ 
tion of the country, is attended with con¬ 
siderable risks. I know of parties who have 
lost nearly their entire herds by acclimation 
fever. Whatever writers may say, there is 
no positive and reliable antidote against this 
fever; and even after the stock have been 
here one year, they ore liable to it. I believe 
about the only thing that can be done, or is 
attempted to be accomplished, by the most 
intelligent and experienced breeders, is to 
keep the stock in a cool place and in the shade 
during hot weather, feeding upon such diet as 
is most likely to keep the bowels open. 
While the breeding of thoroughbred cattle 
is becoming such an important interest with 
us, there is a widespread disposition among 
farmers to grade up their native cattle by 
breeding to pure-bred bulls. This is especially 
the case as far as the Jersey is concerned. It 
has been fully demonstrated by actual and 
innumerable experiments in nearly every 
Southern State, that grade Jerseys, for the 
dairy, are almost equal to the thoroughbreds 
so far as all practical purposes are concerned. 
I believe I would be correct in saying that 
there are more grade Jersey cattle in this 
county, Oktibbeeha, than in any other in the 
Gulf States; yet, strange to say, these cows 
and heifers are so highly valued by their own¬ 
ers that it is extremely difficult to purchase a 
good animal at all; and, if one does buy one, 
he will have to pay all the way from $50 to 
$100 for it. 
I have a neighbor who has been breeding 
grade Jerseys but a comparatively short time, 
aud upon a very moderate scale, yet he tells 
me that he has sold $1,500 worth of grade 
heifers the present year—the most easily- 
earned money he ever made in his life. His 
cattle are rarely ever fed oven in the severest 
weather during the Winter, end when they 
are fed, it is only a small allowance of cot¬ 
ton-seed. I am pretty safe in sayit g that his 
cattle do not cost him 25 cents per head to 
winter them. 
If I had 100 grade Jersey heifers, I could 
dispose of every one at satisfactory prices 
within three weeks; or, in other words, as soon 
as I could get my advertisement circulated 
among the readers of a good agricultural pa¬ 
per circulating in thi3 State, Alabama, Lou¬ 
isiana and Texas. A great many grades have 
been sold to Texas at high figures. I have 
known car-load lotsshipped to that State. 
There is always a steady demand in all our 
cities for every well-bred grade heifer, from 
parties who are able and willing to pay high 
prices. There is no danger of the business of 
breeding grade Jerseys being overdone for a 
long period of years, at least. In our Gulf 
States we also have a very large and increas¬ 
ing number of breeders of the several breeds 
of hogs, sheep and fowls, of the best strains. 
The outlook in the stock and poultry line is 
very encouraging, indeed, for the future. 
Starkville, Miss. E. m. 
-*-*-♦- 
NOTES BY A STOCKMAN. 
There must'soon be some legislation to pro¬ 
vide for the vast cattle interests of the West 
aud put them upon a solid basis of legal posses¬ 
sion of the land. It is not fair to stigmatize 
stockmen as land-grabbers and monopolists. 
The laud they occupy is useless for any other 
purpose. Farming is absolutely impossible 
upon it. The land is worth but little, for the 
grass is so thin that 30 acres of the best of it 
will keep but one steer. A stockman haB at least 
equal rights with a farmer. A farmer can 
have 160 acres for the cost of surveying it. 
Now, why should not the cattle men have 
equal privileges without being called land 
grabbers and thieves. The Australian system 
would suit our purpose. This is to lease the 
land for a moderate sum, say $5 a square 
mile, on condition that it was stocked and 
occupied. This would give the stockmen a 
legal right to their ranges, prevent quarrels 
and disputes, and greatly encourage the in¬ 
crease of the business for which there is 
abundant room. 
The futility of expecting to make the great 
plains arable by means of artesian wells has 
been clearly shown by competent hydraulic 
engineers, who know precisely what a cubic 
foot of water will do and what a vast quan¬ 
tity of water an acre of land will evaporate 
in 24 hours in an arid climate But a well of 
this kind, three ineheB in diameter, constantly 
flowing, would provide 10 000 head with seven 
gallons each per day and need not cost more 
than a thousand dollars. Bo that the true use 
of the subterranean streams and lakes is to 
facilitate the herding of cattle on the plains, 
and not to encourage agriculture. This last 
hope is futile. The Western Plains will be 
grazing grounds for centuries to come, and 
the stockman who is forced to neglect oppor¬ 
tunities for want of water may supply his 
necessities by means of one of these wells. A 
six-inch well would be of four times the 
capacity of a three inch well, but would not 
cost twice as much. 
When Mr. J. W, Clarke says (page 833) 
that “ all necessity for close breeding of Jer¬ 
seys has now passed away,” because of their 
number, he makes a great mistake. He does 
this anyhow, because he says, if I understand 
his opening sentence (which in its length and 
involution would do credit to our first of law¬ 
yers, the long-winded Wm. M. Everts), it is 
their surrounding conditions that have made 
them what they are, aud that these conditions 
have been operating for ages. If this is true, 
then the Jersey should be the richest-railbing 
animal in existence, for every possible device 
of the breeders of Jerseys has been used to 
make them produce pure cream, or pure but¬ 
ter. If conditions can produce one thing 
that is, 25 per cent, of cream, why can they 
not produce another, that is, 50 per cent.; or, 
“ to go the whole hog,” let us say 100 per 
cent, of cream. 
There is great variation in Jersey cows, as 
in others, and it is by breeding that the best 
qualities are concentrated. The Devons will 
yield, as a rule, as much cream as a Jersey, 
for a short time; but Devon breeders have 
given their attention to beef rather than but¬ 
ter, and so they do not hold on as a Jersey 
does. 8mall animals, as a rule, give richer 
milk than the large ones, and “the little Jer¬ 
sey rats,” with the Kerry and the small Breton 
cows all give rich milk. But the Jersey's have 
been fortunate. Their graceful, deer-like 
form gave them popularity, and being petted 
and made much of, they have been more 
highly fed (and this only of late years, and 
not for ages), and have gradually become 
larger and heavier, and yet have retained 
their rich-milking quality, at the same time 
gaining in quantity. Forty years ago, a Jer¬ 
sey cow that gave eight quarts of milk a day, 
or made one pound of butter for it. whs a very, 
very great rarity. Then, it has not been con¬ 
ditions and environments, but a process of 
breeding that has resulted in making the mod¬ 
ern fancy Jersey cow. 
What are we coming to ? At the Crystal 
Palace (London) poultry show, a pair of Ban¬ 
tams sold for more than their weight in gold. 
A pound of gold is worth about $300, and a 
pound of Bantam is a very small one. Six 
hundred dollars for a pair of fowls is a price 
that recalls the extravagance and luxury of 
Rome in its decline and fall. 
Accidents are all preventible; perhaps but 
one may be excepted and that is when light¬ 
ning strikes. Some persons are always suf¬ 
fering loss from accidents. Taking up a coun¬ 
try paper a short time ago, I find the follow¬ 
ing: A horse poisoned by Paris green left in a 
stable and upset among some bay; a cow died 
from eating frost-bitten tomatoes and vines; 
and a horse broke his neck by running in his 
frolic against a low limb of a tree in an orch¬ 
ard where he was turned loose. How many 
similar accidents occur from the most cul¬ 
pable thoughtlessness ? 
This is the season of dairy shows, and per¬ 
haps that at Dublin, Ireland, may have given 
as useful a hint as any other to those persons 
who keep a cow for family use, if not to dai¬ 
rymen. The little Irish, Kerry cow weighs 
400 to 500 pounds and gives as much milk as 
an average Short-horn weighing 1,200 to 1,500 
pounds. One Kerry cow exhibited at Dublin 
gave 15 pints of milk a day. This is equal to 
the average yield of many a dairy herd which 
will rarely exceed seven quarts daily, one day 
with another, for the whole herd. And what 
a saving of food with these little Kerries! 
It has been said, and a great many persons 
think, that oxen as farm draft animals are 
played out. At one fair (Westbrook) in Con¬ 
necticut this year there were 150 yoke of oxen 
exhibited. If one should make the round of 
the New England fairs he would never think 
oxen had become played out. Good oxen will 
do as much plowing in a day as a pair of av¬ 
erage horses, and some will easily keep up 
with horses on a road with a load behind 
them. 1 f beef is going to advauce in value, or 
even keep to its present value, it might be a 
good thing to keep oxen—of the right sort—on 
farms for their work as well as their beef. 
I like to he understood and therefore say 
that the unmitigated falsehoods often pub 
fished in agricultural papers are very sicken¬ 
ing. Here is one that is going the rounds of 
hose papers whose conductors call them agri¬ 
cultural. It is credited to a “ Thoroughbred” 
paper, and is as follows: “Mr.-says when 
his wheat is an inch high he turns in his sheep 
and keeps them there utl Winter. They come 
off in the Spring quite fat. He has 875 head 
on 55 acres and they cannot feed it down,” 
etc. etc. Now the person who wrote this never 
saw wheat growing, and never saw 375 sheep 
pastured on 55 acres of wheat one inch high 
and come off fat. First, when wheat is an 
inch high not even the notorious Connecticut 
sheep, whose noses are whittled down and 
filed to let them get in between the rocks, 
could bite it; and seven sheep to an acre of 
wheat, all the Winter long, would keep the 
ground bare, and starve in a month. This is 
a very moderate specimen compared with 
some of the stuff one reads. 
This has hitherto been a warm, mild Win¬ 
ter in this section. The rains set in early and 
warm, giving the grass a good start, end 
there will be plenty of feed fcr stock this 
Winter. It is a good thing too, for in no 
country does stock suffer more during cold 
Winters, as no shelter or feed is provided for 
animals in this whole region. Thousands of 
cattle and sheep died last Winter in Hurnbolt 
County from hunger and cold. But little 
improvement has been made here in stock, 
the introduction of Durham bulls being the 
only attempt that way, although during the 
last three years the Jerseys have been intro¬ 
duced to some extent. The owners of Dur¬ 
ham stock are opposing them, "tooth and 
nail;” still the Jersey “boom” is gainiug, 
although prices are not as high as they are in 
the East. A handsome Jersey bull calf, of a 
good butter family, whose ancestors have 
been five generations in the Herd Book, was 
lately sold for $35. I think cattle grow 
larger on the Pacific Coast than they do in 
the East; at least one sees more large cows 
and oxen here than there. Cows will 
make more butter, too. I have a scrub cow 
which calved on Oct. 16, that is making a 
pound-and-a-half of butter per day. Her pas¬ 
ture is steep, stumpy land seeded to mesquit, 
and in addition she gets four pounds of wheat 
bran daily. There are plenty of native cows 
that make from a pound toa pound-and a-half 
of butter per day on fair pasture, and dairy¬ 
men tell me there are herds of cows in this 
county that average two pounds per cow 
daily during two or three months of the best 
feed in the Spring, for grass is the only feed 
they get. I know of no butter dairymen who 
feed more than perhaps a little dry hay, if it 
should be an unusually hard Winter. Cows 
are milked for five months of the best feed on 
the range; then go dry and “pick their liv¬ 
ing” till the next Spring. m’c g. 
Eureka, Humbolt Co., Cal. 
florintliitrtiL 
RAYS. 
If you want midwinter flowers from pan¬ 
sies, violets and Christmas Roses now in 
cold-frames, frost must be excluded and light 
and sunshine freely admitted. This is done 
by means of a thick bank of dry fitter or 
leaves around the frame, and a substantial 
covering of straw mats or other material over 
the sashes, the covering to lie rolled aside in 
mild weather and even in hard frosty weather 
if the 6un is shining on the frame. But re¬ 
place the coverings at night, or early in the 
afternoon, in the event of frosty weather. 
Cold-frames filled with centranthuR, phloxes, 
pentstemons, wall flowers, biennial stocks, 
and other somewhat tender or young plants 
for next Summer’s garden, need not be cov¬ 
ered so thickly as in the above case, nor need 
they be uncovered at all in the event of 
steady frosty weather. As damp is rather 
hurtful to the plants, ventilate freely in fav¬ 
orable weather, and when a mild spell comes 
remove the sashes altogether. Sometimes 
young plants in cold-frames suffer for want 
of water in Winter: if the earth is dry give 
it a good watering. But, on the other haud, 
if your frames are already too moist and the 
plants in them are damping off, ventilate 
more freely, remove every particle of decay¬ 
ing matter, Btir the surface of the soil, and if 
the plants begin to crowd one another, either 
pluck off a lot of the roughest leaves or re¬ 
move somtf of the plants. 
* * 
If you have a conservatory or greenhouse, 
ventilate a little as often as you can; even 
in frosty weather while the sun is shining on 
it you can open the ventilators a quarter of 
an inch or more. In severe weather rather 
let the regular temperature fall a few de¬ 
grees under the average than drive your 
heating apparatus too bard. A dry, harsh 
heat is bad for plants. Maintain a moist at¬ 
mosphere by sprinkling water about on the 
floor and benches, but do not spill it on the 
warm pipes, else it will rise in steam which is 
hurtful to the planes. 
* ♦ 
The Rural has a kind word for the Tea 
Plant for ornamental hedges in the Southern 
States. My knowledge of it there coincides 
with this favorable opinion of it. It is one 
of the greenest and thriftiest of evergreen 
bushes, stands the Summer sunshine with 
apparent impunity, growB well on upland. 
