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THE CULTIVATOR. 
one, and perhaps that fault will not long last. The public advertisements 
of shoe makers, grocers, lawyers, cap merchants, sign painters, and such 
local matters, should give place to something more agricultural and gene¬ 
ral in their nature. I hope the subscription list will soon enable the 
Farmer to exclude every thing but what appertains to agricultural, manu¬ 
facturing and commercial interests. The paper, I think, will be liberally 
encouraged. 
I was pleased, too, at the high state of cultivation to which they have 
improved and now conduct their lands in Kentucky. They have not, as 
we in Tennessee have, been always struggling to make their country 
what nature never designed it to be. They have practised the adapta¬ 
tion of their soil to the production of those things which nature intended 
it to produce. Kentucky, in point of scientific and practical husbandry, 
as regards thinking about how to make the most profit out of the least 
labor and the least soil, and then doing what they think about, is far, very 
far, in advance of Tennessee. 
Here, the great object of our land holders is to put in as much as they 
can possibly save from beihg destroyed by weeds and grass. There, the 
object seems to be, to improve the land, by judicious management, so as 
to make each acre yield annually a more abundant harvest than it did the 
preceding year. 
What will be the necessary results of the different courses of tilling 
and producing you know full well. Our soil will soon be at least station¬ 
ary in its value, and the owners cease to grow richer. The other state 
will continue to become richer in soil, richer in science, richer in mind, 
richer in dollars, richer in every thing: Our state, as a state, is admira¬ 
bly adapted to grass and stock raising, and whilst many, very many ad¬ 
roit, and see the Kentuckians annually growing wealthy by raising such 
stock as we might raise, and driving, too, some hundred of miles further 
than we should drive, yet such an apathy prevails—so cotton loving are- 
we—that but few will agree to abandon the latter, and try the other.— 
Some, however, are manfully arousing from their lethargy, and turning 
their labors to their truainterests. I hope the number will-grow. 
The hospitality of the farmers of Kentucky is unsurpassed by that of 
any people I have seen, and I have travelled much in the United States. 
There is an open frankness of manner, a noble, independent sort of fa¬ 
miliarity at once evinced towards a stranger, as foreign from the bluster¬ 
ing, swearing, dram-drinking, reckless adventuring of the south, as it is 
from the cool, calculating, cent per cent policy of the north. I was 
struck, however, with one trait in all the stock raisers I saw, one only ex¬ 
cepted. In asking them the price they set on an animal, I never received 
a direct answer from any but one man. A second, and still oftener, a 
third inquiry, was always necessary to procure an answer.. This custom 
I dislike very much. It is no difficult thing to tell the price, or decline 
the sale; I cannot account for this habit. 
I was, however, better pleased at the stock fair in Lexington, than at 
anything. The form, the perfect symmetry, the splendid, brilliant co 
lors, the size, the milking qualities of some, and the fattening qualities of 
other cattle, struck me as so far transcending any thing I had conceived 
of, that I was completely enraptured. Such an exhibition I should like 
to see in Nashville, but I doubt whether one so superior in every thing, 
can be presented in America, or Europe even. 
By way of showing you the profitableness of the business there, to the 
country generally, in the stock counties, I will give you, on the authority 
of Dr. S. D. Martin, of Clarke county, the following statement:—“ Jn 
ten miles square of that county, in the year 1834, the cattle exported and 
sold returned to the raisers one hundred and sixty-eight thousand three 
hundred dollars, besides^ixty-eight thousand dollars more for hogs, and 
the hemp, mule and horse sales, too.” One-half of this ten miles square 
is thickly set with blue grass, and gives a great profit from its luxuri¬ 
ance. Whilst the race horse spirit is high in Kentucky, I was glad to 
see, that more than a corresponding number of breeders were deeply en 
gaged in rearing, in improving and exporting the slow, but useful mule. 
Such utilitarians should and do receive good encouragement Whilst the 
race horse is comparable to the speculator, the idler, and the worthless, 
and all are mere leeches, the patient and insulted mule, like the farmer, 
the mechanic, the laborer, is a producer of such things as others but con¬ 
sume. May the producers increase. 
Pardon, my dear sir, this long, tedious letter. When I commenced, T 
only intended to tell you how to dispose of this five dollar bill, and I find 
I have written out, at a rapid pace, the entire sheet, and have barely room 
left to assure you that the Cultivator is popular in Rutherford county, is 
becoming so elsewhere, that I intend some day to contribute to its co¬ 
lumns, and that I am respectfully, your obedient servant, 
FRED. E. BECTON. 
UTILITY OF APPLES FOR FARM STOCK. 
Putnam, Ohio, Oct. 7, 1837. 
As I have for many years been an advocate for total abstinence from all 
intoxicating drinks, I feel much solicitude that our farmers should adopt 
that principle, have therefore concluded to give you some of my experi¬ 
ence in feeding apples. I am a mechanic, and live in this village, but 
have a small fruit yard. In the winter of 1834 and 5 I purchased a pig of 
a very good farmer, wt. 75 pounds, say three months old, which I kept the 
next summer in my fruit yard, and led on the slop of the kitchen, and 
the milk of one small farrow cow, until the summer sweeting apples be¬ 
came fit to eat, when I shut it out, except once a day we let it in to pick 
up what we did not want, which practise w.e continued until fall, when I 
shut him in a close pen, and commenced giving him corn, but soon found 
he did not do so well. I then quit giving corn, and gave him what apples 
he would eat, with common slop, until about two weeks before I killed 
him, when I gave him corn, under the belief that it would make the pork 
harder. I killed him the first week in December, being a little over a 
year old, when he weighed 343 pounas. The gentleman of whom I got 
him, fed his well on corn through the summer, letting them run out, and 
in the fall shut them up and fed corn. He had the six best of the same 
litter, and'killed them one week after I did, when his best weighed 200 
pounds. He says he gave me the poorest but one, out of nine the sow 
had, and killed the six best. So you see that I had 143 pounds of pork 
more than he had from any one of his, and better pork I never saw. I 
kept some of it a year and a half, as good as at first. I rung my hog in 
the spring, a practice I have always found advantageous, as I believe it 
takes one-third less feed than when not rung. I find, if you let your hogs 
run where there are too many apples, they chew them for the juice, and 
do not do so well as when fed regularly what they will eat clean. 
The same winter I fed a small farrow cow on apples, nearly all win¬ 
ter; she had not had a calf for a year; and still we made all the butter we 
ate in the family, say seven persons, two of them children. If you turn a 
cow in where she can get too many at first, it will dry her off, as will bran 
j or any other feed; but if you begin moderately, and increase until you 
give what she will eat regularly, there is, I believe, no better food for 
COW'S. 
If our farmers can be persuaded that feeding apples to their stock is 
I more profitable than making them into cider, one great obstacle to the 
[adoption of the teetotal pledge will be removed, and the wealth of the 
country increased by the value of the apples so fed. 
HORACE NYE. 
BOTTS IN HORSES. 
Spottsylvania, Va. Sept. 30, 1837. 
Mr. Buel,— Dear Sir,—As I know nothing which I can communicate 
that would more interest the community than a preventive of botts in the 
horse, I will give a receipt for the same, and the facts upon which it is 
founded, that you may satisfy youiself of its virtue. It is only necessary to 
grease a horse when the bott fly is depositing its eggs to prevent that de- 
posite. 
My plan has been to use pot-liquor, or in other words, the liquor in 
which bacon or pork has been boiled, by dipping a piece of woollen cloth 
into it, and after wringing it slightly, rub the horse well with it, and par¬ 
ticularly the parts of the horse upon which the fly usually deposites its 
eggs, being always careful to have oil enough on your cloth to give a slight 
coat of it to the hair of the horse, and no bott-fly will touch him. And to 
j prevent the hatching of the eggs after they are deposited, a greater quan¬ 
tity of oil is necessary, though it may be applied in the same way, for 
grease an egg and it will not hatch, though it must be well greased w'ith 
some oil that can be easily rubbed off, to prevent the sticking of the hair 
together, which might otherwise cause it to come off in batts, and leave 
the horse naked in spots. A bott was taken from the stomach of a horse, 
! and was kept in a snuff-box,, which was filled each day with fresh horse 
dung, until the bott had changed to the crysalis state, when it was left in 
the dung, and in a short time it came out the.perfect bott-fly. Thus proving 
that the fly-is produced by the bott. And now to prove that the greasing 
the egg will prevent its hatching. Spit in your hand and put two or three 
eggs from the horse in it, then press your hands together, so as to ex¬ 
clude the light, and you will find that they will hatch in less than two 
hours. Then grease the same number of eggs, and if you can hatch them, 
I know nothing.about it. Now these are experiments that can be easily 
tried, by you or any of your neighbors, and I hope you will try some, and 
give to the woild the result. 
Yours truly, JAMES HART. 
CHURNING. 
There is sometimes considerable difficulty in makingbutter from cream, 
owing perhaps to causes not exactly understood; and every dairy woman 
knows that cases occur in which the manufacture of a good article is im¬ 
practicable. A friend assures us that in ordinary cases the difficulty is at 
once removed, and butter of a good quality procured, by the addition of a 
little sal aratus to the cream. We have since tried it when cream proved 
refractory, and found it to succeed admirably. A spoonful of sal aratus, 
.pulverised, is a sufficient dose for two gallons of cream. After the cream 
has been churned a proper time, if no signs of butter appear, sprinkle the 
powered sal aratus over the surface, half at a time, as it is possible no more 
than half may be required. After churning a few minutes longer, if ne¬ 
cessary, add the remainder. The philosophy of the matter, we take to be 
this;—the alkali of the sal aratus neutralizes the superabundant acid of the 
cream, and thus produces butter.— Genesee Farmer. 
