PRICE FIVE CENTS, 
12.00 PER TEAR. 
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 28, 1^85 
Vol. XLIV. No. 1831 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year lSS.s. by the Rural New-Yorker in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington.] 
and butter induced thousands of dairy farmers 
to devote themselves to the milk trade, until 
at length, particularly in Spring. Summer* 
and Autumn, there has been a glut in the 
market, and prices have shrunk so far that 
many men are going back to cheese-making 
or to butter-making and the raising of stock. 
The reduced exports of cheese from America ' 
have, no doubt, helped to turn the scale, so 
far as it has been turned, and in this way a* 
new balance is being found in the law of sup- * 
ply and demand Even the production of., 
milk in Winter, which was formerly a fairly 
profitable pursuit, notwith3tauding the great 
cost of producing it, has now become 
so much over done that prices have 
sunk to the level of, or below the paying 
point. Autumn calving cows have 
for years past realized high prices, and 
probably will continue to do so, because 
the supply of them is necessarily not 
unlimited: but it is obvious that they 
cannot be provided save at a sacrifice 
of milk in the spring and summer 
months. W hen they are sold, they are 
gone, of course, but it stands to reason 
that the best end of a cow, after she 
has been milked three or four years 
on a stock-raising farm, is to dispose of 
Kk her at a high figure when she is just 
W about to calve in the Autumn. Such 
cows, seven or eight years old, have 
a commonly realized, if in good flesh, 
from $100 to $150; but it is a sine 
qua non that they should be in good 
condition to stand a Winters milking. 
Nothing in dairy farming has paid 
better, in late years, thaD the raising of 
. stock. This and the milk trade to- 
r vjf'Jfe gether have been the fiscal salvation of 
Yjjjjl British dairy farmers daring the past 
eight years. The extent to which stock 
jry V> raising has been carried is seen in the 
fact that, on the 4th of June last, we 
had in the British Islands 324,819 more 
> = w cattle than we had on the same date in 
f 1883, and upwards of a million more 
sheep; so that even stock raising will 
ABsi probably soon begin to pay less well 
l than it has recently been doing. At 
the same time it must be borne in 
mind that as the area of our grain 
crops has diminished to the extent of 
1,036,316 acres in 10 years, we can do, 
or ought to do, with a larger number 
m of live stock than ever before, and 
^ this, at present, we have not got. The 
I present, aud prospective low pnces of 
wool hinder the Increase of sheep, and 
as importations of foreign mutton 
threaten to go on increasmg. particu¬ 
larly from Australia and New Zealand, 
it is probable that our stieep stock will 
not relatively increase as rapidly as 
cattle. Sheep farmers have suffered 
heavily from liver rot in their docks, 
and from the low price of wool; the 
former grievance has fortunately dis¬ 
appeared, but the latter promises to 
become chronic. 
The wheat-growing farmers are 
making loud complaints about the 
price of wheat, which is lower than 
ever before They had good crops 
and a fair harvest last year, aud were 
hoping to make up some of the lost 
ground, but the low prices have dashed 
their hopes to the ground for the present. There 
is not, however, sufficient reason for the ab- 
[ normally low prices which rule at the present 
time, aud it is probable we shall soon see an 
improvement; meanwhile, however, it is an 
■ excellent thing for the working classes, so- 
called, that bread is cheap in the Winter, 
There is now a grovying demand for a tariff 
on foreign wheat, in order to raise the price 
of home-grown; but it is to the last degree 
less foul through sheer inability on the part 
of farmers to clean it; and the herbage on all 
but the soundest soils that were well farmed 
(which, indeed, form but a very small pro¬ 
portion of the country) became more or less 
coarse aud innutritious, many of the best 
grasses dying out and aqueous grasses taking 
their place. The fine weather, as I have said, 
enabled farmers to cu’tivate and clean the 
former, and the latter to clean itself, so to 
speak. On my own land in the district gene¬ 
rally, I have noticed that the herbage is now 
of a much better quality than it was a year 
ago, the better grasses reasserting themselves, 
ter and cheese fell away on some farms. The 
complaints were general that cows gave 
less milk, even when gras3 was plentiful, and 
and that the milk yielded less butter and 
cheese than of yore. Instances are not far to 
THE RUTLAND SEEDLING GRAPE, 
HE LAST of September we re- 
t(. 'l i^'AV, ceived from D S. Marvin, 
Watertown, N. Y, a box of 
new seedling grapes raised by 
'IW? biai, among which wasaclus- 
Y *-’( ter labeled Rutland, a like- 
SC* tiess of which we show at Fig. 
' 77, including cluster and leaf. 
’ As will be seen, the cluster and 
berries are both medium iu size, and 
nearly black in color. The leaf is very 
deeply lobed, and in texture much re¬ 
sembles a Hartford. Mr. Marvin claims 
this grape, which he has named Rut¬ 
land, to be very early and hai dy, and it 
was of very good quality He wi ites as 
to the parentage of his grapes :-*T have 
in every instance used tbeoDly North - 
ern representative of the JEstivalis— 
the Eumelnn. This we have as one 
of the parents, in this case; the Con¬ 
cord was the other. I think horticul¬ 
turists have made a grave mistake 
in breeding continually from the 
Labrusca, or from that crossed upon 
the Riparia, or the more tender Vin- 
ifera. The Dela ware gets its tlue flavor 
from the .E-tivalis side, and tne great 
value of this blood must be recognized 
if we would secure the greatest im¬ 
provement in our native gropes. I j 
recognize the great hardiness of the 
Labrusca, and am using it for all it is U 
worth; but it lacks quality, and this . ■■') 
must come from some other source.” vi* 
THE STATE OF AGRICULTURE 
IN ENGLAND. 
PROFESSOR SHELDON. 
The year which is gone has been, so * 
far as weather is concerned, by far the 
most favorable since 1875. We had a |9 
fine Spring on the whole, a Summer 
with plenty of sun. and not too wet, |P 
an Autumn genial and bright, with a 
Winter, so tar, as line as any one could 
desire After a series of wet seasons, 
marked also by a great lack of sun 
shine, during which a large proportion 
of our land became very much worse 
iu condition and quality, we were 
glad to get a good hot Summer, a 
bright Autumn, and a Winter so far 
bright aud dry as an English Winter 
can lie expected to he at its best, and 
frosty for the most part, with very 
little snow or rain. A finer Christmas, 
surely, no odd remembers than that 
which is just over—u sharp frost with 
no snow to speak of, doing great good 
to the land. The fine Summer and 
Autumn found a quicker response tbau 
anyone dreamed of iu the improved 
condition of herbage on permanent 
grass land (which, iu previous years, 
had deteriorated very seriously), and 
enabled farmers to dean u good pro¬ 
portion of the dirty urattle soils. In cases 
where land has bueu fairly well farmed 
through the wet years, the restoration of fer¬ 
tility and condition during last year has been 
remarkable. There was very little laud In 
the Kingdom, if, indeed, any, which took no 
harm from the plethora of rain and the 
scarcity of sun. and a great deal suffered very 
considerably. All kinds of arable land, and 
especially the heavier soils, became more or 
RUTLAND GRAPE. (From Nature.) Fig. 77. 
chiefly because a rapidly expanding milk 
trade provided a profitable outlet for a great 
deal of surplus milk. But for this, indeed, we 
should have boon in a far worse plight than we 
are. At length, however, the mils trade has 
failed to respond to the scraiu which was put 
upon it, though it has bien immensely useful 
in a time of ueed. It has, in fact, been over¬ 
done, aud has consequently become more or 
less demoralized. The reduced value of cheese 
and the inferior ones dying do wn once more. 
So far, then, we find au Improvement, which 
is none the less welcome because few people 
had ventured to hope for it. 
It is not so much low prices, as inferior and 
diminished yields, that we have suffered from, 
though we have suffered more thau enough 
from each of them. It was remarkable’ in 
the worst of the wet years to notice how 
far, for instance, the yield of milk and but- 
