1872.] 
175 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
as fully as its importance demands, and I have 
no -wish to get into a controversy with the ad¬ 
vocates of steaming. My sympathies are all 
with them, and with every farmer who is trying 
to improve our processes of agriculture. I 
have sometimes thought, however, that it is a 
pity so many of our ablest agricultural writers 
spend so much of their energy in advocating 
deep plowing, soiling, and steaming, when there 
are so many other subjects of far greater im¬ 
portance on which we need line upon line and 
precept upon precept. 
A man at Reading, Pa., whose name I sup¬ 
press, wrote me as follows: “ I can increase 
your net profit on sales of live-stock twenty 
thousand dollars per annum. What arrange¬ 
ment can I make with j'ou in reference to pay¬ 
ment for such services ? I am willing to do this 
either on commission or salary. It will require 
no addition to the capital you already have 
invested in that branch of your business. There 
is no risk; all operations being cash. I sin¬ 
cerely hope you will not consider the above 
assertion an exaggeration, or the product of an 
excited imagination of an unfledged novice, as I 
can assure you I am no child in operations of 
this character, and am accustomed to dealing in 
facts only.” I wrote to ask him to tell me how 
I could raise and keep such an amount of stock 
on my farm as would afford a profit of $20,000 
a year. I told him I had no trouble in selling 
stock. But if he could tell me how to keep it 
more economically, and to raise it in such 
numbers and of such high quality as to afford 
such splendid results, I should be glad to hear 
from him. To this I have received no reply. 
We have had capital luck with our lambs this 
spring. The weather has been very dry, and 
the sheep were strong, healthy, and in good 
condition, and this is the great secret of having 
“luck” with lambs. It is a curious fact that 
the lambs from Merino ewes sired by a thor¬ 
ough-bred Cotswold are generally as large and 
sometimes larger than the lambs from Cotswold 
ewes. And yet many of my Cotswold ewes 
weigh three times as much, and all of them 
twice as much, as the Merino ewes. One of the 
Cotswold-Merino lambs weighed at birth 14 lbs. 
I notice a statement of a well-known Merino 
breeder in the West to the effect that he tried a 
cross with fifty good-sized “roomy” Merino 
ewes and a full-blood Cotswold. No difficulty 
was experienced at yeaning time, and the lambs 
looked vigorous and healthy for several days, 
but after that seemed to want more milk than 
their mothers were able to furnish them, and 
though on good tame pasture, before the end of 
summer a few lank, living specimens and more 
dried pelts were all he had to show as the result 
of the experiment. “It may be,” he says, 
“ that the fault was not in the cross, but in the 
treatment before and subsequent to lambing. 
We treated the flock precisely as we treated our 
other stock.” That tells the whole story. 
Though a sensible man and an experienced 
breeder, he thought he could bring into exist¬ 
ence a lot of large lambs, and have them grow 
rapidly on the same amount of food required 
by the small, slow-growing Merino lambs. He 
“ treated them precisely the same; ” and conse¬ 
quently it is certain that either the small Merino 
lambs got more milk than they needed, or the 
grade Cotswolds got less. 
Since writing the above, we have weighed 
(March 22d) a grade Cotswold ewe, that is about 
a year old. I can not tell her exact age. I had 
74 lambs last spring from GO Merino ewes. I 
sold 70 to the butcher, and this ewe is one of 
the four he left me, and he certainly did not 
leave me the best. I killed two for the table 
when from eight to nine months old, and never 
ate tenderer or more juicy mutton. But I 
thought it rather deficient in flavor. This ewe 
we have just weighed is covered with a heavy 
fleece of long wool that will answer for combing 
purposes. In fact it is nearly as long as that 
of the full-blooded Cotswolds. The ewe weighs 
to-day 121 lbs. Her mother at four years old 
did not weigh over 80 lbs. This is what these 
cross-bred lambs are capable of doing. This 
quality of rapid growth on the part of the Cots¬ 
wolds is the result of years of careful breeding 
and liberal feeding. Now take such a flock of 
lambs and starve them, and what does any sen¬ 
sible man think would be the result? Is it not 
reasonable to expect “ lank, living specimens 
and dried pelts ” ? 
The grade lamb I have spoken of as weigh¬ 
ing 14 lbs. was born March 3d. On March 1st 
we had one that weighed when born 12£• lbs. 
We have just weighed them again (March 22d). 
Both of them weigh exactly 25 lbs. each. I 
allow all my lambs a few oats, fine middlings, 
bran, sliced mangels, or anything that they will 
eat, placed in small troughs separate from the 
ewes; but it is not probable that these two 
young lambs, only three weeks old, have eaten 
very much. They have derived their nourish¬ 
ment from the Merino ewe. The milk seems 
to be very rich, and the secret of it is simply 
this : The ewes had good pasture last summer 
and autumn, and have been liberally fed all 
winter, and before and after lambing have 
abundance of milk-forming food—such as good 
clover hay, bran, and a few mangels. 
My own opinion is that a farmer who has 
been accustomed to Merino sheep, and who 
does not expect to raise more than 75 lambs 
from 100 ewes, had better have nothing to do 
with Cotswold, Leicester, or South Down sheep. 
The poorest Merino sheep he can find, provided 
they are healthy, will be best adapted to his 
mode of treatment. When he is prepared to 
give better feed and more care he should get 
some improved Merinos; and if he keeps on 
improving in his general system of manage¬ 
ment he will in time be prepared to keep a still 
more artificial breed of sheep, and will at length 
succeed with Cotswolds or Leicesters. Whether 
it will pay to keep sheep that require so much 
more care and better feed will depend entirely 
on the demand for mutton, lambs, etc. 
Some of the Cotswold breeders are disposed 
to expel me from the party for entertaining 
such notions—or rather for publishing them. 
I am not afraid of the truth hurting this splen¬ 
did breed of sheep. To me it is encouraging 
rather than otherwise that these high-bred 
sheep are not adapted to “ roughing it ” on the 
cheap lands and vast prairies and plains and 
mountain-sides of the far West. If such was 
the case, the best thing we could do woulddhe 
to pull up stakes and take our flocks out there. 
But depend upon it that Merino sheep will do 
better in such sections. Our Merino wool will 
be raised on these cheap lands, and the long- 
combing wool, good mutton, and early lambs 
will be raised in the better farmed and more 
highly cultivated parts of the country. In fact, 
I do not see how those of us who live in the 
older settled wheat-growing sections of the 
country can keep up the fertility of our farms 
without keeping more stock. And we have to 
decide between dairying, or beef, pork, or sheep 
growing. I think we shall feel the competition 
from the West in the production of pork, beef, 
and fine wool, for some years, more than in 
early lambs, good mutton, and combing-wool. 
To raise the latter to the best advantage, we 
need clean, dry, highly cultivated land—or pre¬ 
cisely what is needed to produce remunerative 
crops of winter wheat. The more mutton we 
produce the more wheat shall we grow per acre. 
So far, my mangel-wurzel have kept perfectly. 
I raised about 3,000 bushels on three acres, and 
as I had no cellar room to spare, we pitted them 
on a dry, sandy slope near the barn, and found 
it far less trouble every way than I expected. 
It would of course be far more convenient to 
have a good cellar, but the want of it need deter 
no one from growing roots. 
I have never been a strenuous advocate for 
raising roots extensively in this country. They 
probably act as a tonic, and stimulate the appe¬ 
tite, and improve digestion, and regulate the 
bowels. They arc very useful to the farmer 
who keeps improved stock and feeds liberally. 
But for ordinary farm stock, fed as most far¬ 
mers feed, I doubt whether roots can compete 
with Indian : corn. In England it is customary, 
especially on sandy farms, to sow one fourth 
of all the arable laud every year with turnips— 
the rotation being clover, wheat, turnips, barley. 
The latter crop is seeded with clover. This is 
pastured with sheep until the next fall, or some¬ 
times for two years, and is then plowed rather 
shallow and serwn with wheat. The land is not 
plowed until it is time to sow the wheat. 
It has been said, and with much truth, that 
turnip culture is the sheet-anchor of British 
agriculture. Turnips must have very rich and 
very clean, mellow land. It is a crop that is 
all consumed on the farm, and on light sandy 
soils it is generally eaten on the field where it 
grew by sheep. The crop needed a heavy dress¬ 
ing of manure, the land was kept very clean, 
and where the crop was eaten off, and the drop¬ 
pings of the sheep left on the land, and espe¬ 
cially with the sheep allowed oil-cake, it is easy 
to understand that the land would be in high 
condition for barley and clover, and when the 
latter crop is also eaten on the land the pros¬ 
pects would be good for a great crop of wheat. 
It is easy to see, therefore, why the turnip crop 
has proved so exceedingly profitable to the 
English light-land farmer. 
It is a great mistake, however, to suppose 
that it is the turnip crop that makes the laud 
rich. This would be mistaking cause for effect. 
The turnip requires rich land, and its growth 
and consumption on the farm husband the 
manurial elements already in the soil, and render 
them available for grain crops. 
Mr. Lawes, in a recent address, after giving 
an account of his experiments, remarked: “ We 
may learn from these results that the growth of 
the root crop did not of itself contribute anything 
to the fertility of the land." 
He further said, speaking of his own farm: 
“I am disposed to give up the growth of turnips 
altogether , growing no other roots but mangolds, 
and these probably to the extent of not more 
than one fifteenth or one twentieth of the ara¬ 
ble land of the farm.” 
Coming from the highest living authority on 
scientific farming, these remarks are certainly 
worthy of consideration. They are quite in ac¬ 
cordance with some statements I have repeat¬ 
edly made in the Agriculturist. But I have not 
time to say more on the subject at present. 
