334r 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[Septembek, 
neatli the shade of the gray alders, sittiug mo¬ 
tionless as a statue upon a branch that projects 
over the stream, or catch his rattling note as he 
scuds along the surface of the water to some 
distant point. 
I have not pointed out any practical utility in 
his character. Yet what need of it, if he min¬ 
isters to our pleasure and teaches us to more 
closely observe and better love all the birds ? 
--- . 
Walks and Talks on the Farm.—No. 105. 
We finished haying this morning, July 18th, 
an 1 shall commence cutting wheat to-morrow. 
There is a good deal of grass yet uncut, and it 
will have to stand until after wheat harvest. 
We have had “catching” weather in this sec¬ 
tion, and haying has been slow and tedious. I 
was determined to get my hay out of the way 
before we commenced cutting wheat. I started 
two mowing-machines, and kept them going 
without regard to the weather. I cut all one 
uay in the rain, and the next morning it rained 
again, and I still kept on cutting. I tried to 
keep up my courage, but must confess that my 
faith commenced to waver. By ten o’clock the 
rain ceased, the sun came out, and there was a 
good drying wind, and we got all that was cut 
the previous day into cock, and the next day we 
drew in twenty-two acres of hay. It was not 
injured in the least. 
Clover can not well be cut while wet, but 
timothy can be cut in the rain just as well as 
when dry. The Deacon came up to congratu¬ 
late me. lie is one of the cautious kind, and 
only cuts down a few acres at a time, and then 
stops the machine until he has got it all in. The 
result is he is not yet through haying, and what 
he has got in is in no better condition than 
mine. “ But you have a large force,” he says; 
while in point of fact I have no more men in 
proportion to the amount of hay than the Dea¬ 
con has. In fact not so many. The only reason 
why I am ahead of the Deacon is because I re¬ 
garded not the clouds. My theory is that so 
long as the grass is green rain does not hurt it. 
But whenever it is partially cured, then rain or 
dew is very injurious. If because it rains to-day 
it is less likely to rain to-morrow, it is better to 
cut in the rain, and get everything ready to put 
all hands to curing and getting in the hay to¬ 
morrow—or at any rate to get it into cock. 
A teddiug-machirie is a grand implement for 
meadow or timothy hay, and may also be used 
to great advantage in a field of early-cut clover 
that is full of sap. We have the best climate 
in the world for curing hay, and our imple¬ 
ments are about as nearly perfect as we can 
hope to get them. It is difficult to see how our 
mowers can be improved, unless it is in harden¬ 
ing and strengthening the parts most liable to 
wear out and break. My land is pretty rough 
and stony, but we did not break or injure a sin¬ 
gle thing about the machines this season. 
When I think of how much trouble we had 
with our old machine eight or ten years ago, I 
have a gratifying realization of the great im¬ 
provements that have been gradually effected. 
What we want to do now is to grow larger and 
better crops of hay. 
I have just read with much interest a paper 
in the last Journal of the Royal Agricultural 
Society of England on the Management of 
Grass Land, by H. S. Thompson, of Kirby Hall, 
Yorkshire. I do not know that it presents any¬ 
thing especially new, but as I grow older new 
things have less attraction for me. I like to see 
old truths presented in a new light, and illus¬ 
trated and enforced by practical experience. I 
never,get tired of reading about a wet farm that 
has been drained, or a foul farm that has been 
cleaned, or a run-down farm that has been 
brought to a high state of fertility. Such ac¬ 
counts are always interesting and always useful. 
They encourage us to go ahead with our own 
farm improvements. We need line upon line 
and example after example. We need to have 
our faith in good farming strengthened. It does 
one a great deal of good to get a splendid crop, 
or even to hear of others getting it by the same 
processes that we are adopting. When I put a 
five-incli-pipe drain through the old swale in 
the corner adjoining the Deacon’s west line, 
where we used to have a foot of water in June, 
I felt sure that it would “knock the bottom 
out ” of the pond and give me good land, but it 
was none the less pleasant to see the water soak 
rapidly away, and the dry land appear early in 
the spring. Arid now when I stand by the 
fence that divides the two fields, and see forty 
bushels of Diehl w’heat per acre on the old 
swale on the one side the fence, and a crop that 
will not yield eight bushels per acre on the 
other, I know there is nothing “new” in all 
this, but it is none the less encouraging and gra¬ 
tifying for all that. It is a result which all ex¬ 
perience and observation would lead one to ex¬ 
pect, but it is very pleasant and profitable to see 
it with one’s own eyes. 
There is one phrase in Mr. Thompson’s essay 
that is new to me. When speaking of top¬ 
dressing grass laud with barn-yard or artificial 
manures, he calls them “tillage” or “tillages.” 
“All tillage,” he says, “should be applied to 
strong land pastures early in winter.” . . . “ If 
the application of tillage be delayed until March 
or April, and a droughty spring follows, the 
application loses a great part of its effect for 
that season.” I like this use of the word. It is 
very significant. It is a recognition of the fact 
that tillage is manure and manure is tillage. 
In other words, that plowing and working the 
land is, in a certain sense, equivalent to manur¬ 
ing it, and on the other hand that manuring the 
land is equivalent to working it. 
In England, summer-fallowing as a means of 
enriching land has been pretty well abandoned. 
Land is high, and meat in great demand, and it 
pays better to keep a large amount of stock, 
and buy American oil-cake, cotton-seed cake, 
and corn to feed out, and make a great quan¬ 
tity of rich manure, than to adopt the slow 
method of enriching the land by fallowing. 
They have also another advantage over us. 
They can buy artificial manures at something 
like what they are worth. The time will come 
when we can do so here, and then we shall use 
them in enormous quantities. Mr. Thompson’s 
favorite “tillage” for grass land is 1 cwt. of 
nitrate of soda, 2 cwt. mineral superphosphate, 
and 3 cwt. of kainit per acre. These manures 
cost about $10 per acre. For mowing land, he 
would increase the quantity of nitrate to H cwt. 
per acre. 
Almost ail English writers who have visited 
this country seem to be struck with the poor, 
brown, weedy, burnt-up look of our pastures. 
I have always believed that we can raise just 
as good grass here as in England. Who can 
doubt that we could if we should top-dress a 
field of good pasture land with ten or fifteen 
tons of well-rotted barn-yard manure per acre, 
and then feed off the grass to sheep which are 
allowed one pound'of oil-cake each per day? 
Then late in the fall sow $10 worth of artificial 
manures per acre. The next fall top-dress 
again with barn-yard manure, and the next year 
repeat the artificial manures, and in the mean 
time feed off the grass with sheep eating cake 
or grain. If we took pains to mow down the 
weeds and coarse tufty grass, and hammed and 
sowed a little grass seed occasionally, can any 
one doubt that we should have just as good a 
pasture as they have in England ? I believe we 
should have letter. Whether it would pay or 
not is a question I have not now time to answer. 
But I believe there are thousands of farms on 
which some such a system would prove very 
profitable. 
The great defect with our permanent pastures 
now is that at the season of the year when we 
need the most grass we have the least. The 
pastures dry up and fail us at the critical point. 
We can afford to pay liberally for means to 
avoid this difficulty, and it is certain that top¬ 
dressing with manure will go far to prevent 
pastures from drying up during even our 
severest drouths. 
A miller who resides in one of the dairy dis¬ 
tricts tells me that the farmers are buying more 
and more corn-meal and bran every year to feed 
their cows. They feed it not only in winter 
and spring, but during the summer and autumn 
while the cows are at grass. I was exceedingly 
glad to hear it. It is a very encouraging sign 
of agricultural improvement. I have thought 
for some time that the dairymen were improving 
faster than the grain-growing farmers. The 
cheese-factory system, contrary to my expecta¬ 
tions, proves a great stimulus to liberal feeding. 
I thought that rich food would give rich milk, 
and that if the factory paid a uniform price per 
quart there would be far less encouragement to 
produce rich milk by liberal feeding than if the 
milk was made into cheese and butter at home. 
I aril' glad to learn that such is not the case. 
The milk is weighed every day, and a farmer 
soon finds out whether his cows are giving less 
of more milk than those of his neighbors. If I 
were a dairyman, I should not only feed all the 
grain and bran I could afford to buy, but I 
should keep a sharp lookout to see if a few 
tons of artificial manure could not sometimes 
be obtained at reasonable rates. Kainit (sul¬ 
phate of potash) and nitrate of soda ought to 
be sold here for about the same price as in Eng¬ 
land, and I do not see why mineral superphos¬ 
phate (from the Charleston phosphates) can not 
be manufactured at such a price that we can 
afford to use it. 
The Blood Manure I put on my wheat last 
fall I have no doubt paid me well. But I have 
not yet thrashed. The wheat generally is mis¬ 
erable. Much of it was thin on the ground, 
full of weeds, late, rusty, and badly damaged 
by the midge. 
But I must say no more about our failures. I 
have thought many times of the remark made 
by one of my correspondents, that, “judging 
from ‘Walks and Talks,’ you must live in a 
poor neighborhood” ! It is not so. I live in the 
“Garden of the Empire State.” There are no 
better farmers in the country than can be found 
within a few miles of me. But still it is never¬ 
theless true that our system of agriculture, 
taken as a whole; is very far inferior to what it 
should be. And is it not so all over the coun¬ 
try? The really good farmers are the exception 
rather than the rule. Ho one feels more keenly 
than I do the difficulties under which we labor 
in all our efforts to improve our farms. But 
