14r 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[January, 
ajdelicate head, with the large, deer-like eye, and 
mealy muzzle of the Jersey. The legs are very 
delicate though long, and almost any one after 
seeing the black Jerseys would take this for 
another of them. 
Walks and Talks on the Farm.—No. 49. 
“ You farmers,” said a city friend, “ought to 
be making money, with butter at 40 cents a 
pound. But you grumble just the same.” 
“ American farmers seldom grumble. Those 
who think so get the idea from books or from 
tradition. It is an English habit—not an Amer¬ 
ican. There is a»reason for the difference. The 
English farmer rents his land, and grumbles in 
order that the landlord may not think he is 
making too much money, and increase his rent. 
The American farmer owns his land, and if any¬ 
thing, is inclined to exaggerate its quality and 
productiveness.” 
“ I thought they were always grumbling.” 
“I know you did, but it is a mistake. The 
city people are the grumblers.” 
“Have we no cause to complain of high prices?” 
“ Wheat is perhaps 25 cents a bushel too high, 
and barley 25 cents too low. Butter should be 
a few cents lower, and pork and mutton a few 
cents higher. At such prices, a farmer, if equal¬ 
ly intelligent, might make almost as good a liv¬ 
ing as a grocer or a dry goods merchant.” 
“ Farmers used to be glad to sell at half what 
they get now.” 
“True, but this only proves that ‘ times have 
changed.’ Perhaps they got too little. They 
have worked hard, and done their full share in 
making the country what it is. They are going 
to do still greater tilings. They have now hold 
of the long end of the lever. They are bound 
to make this country the grandest and noblest 
that the sun ever shone upon. You are all very 
well in your way. We could not get along 
without you. But we propose to have some of 
you take a back seat, and make room for a few 
of our bright, active, young farmers. City peo¬ 
ple shall no longer sneer at country folks.” 
As I was leaving, he said something to the 
effect that city people did not sneer at the farm¬ 
ers. And in this he is right, so far as the well- 
bred, intelligent citizens are concerned, but the 
snobs speak of us with a superciliousness that 
k trying to the flesh. 
But enough of this. Good farmers are now 
making money, and are well able to educate 
their children. They are doing so; and it is 
no disrespect to the fathers to say that their 
sons who stick to farming, will occupy a higher 
social position than has been accorded to us. 
It does me gd'od to talk to an educated young 
farmer. But deliver me from your ignorant, 
prejudiced, conceited, self-satisfied, swaggering 
biped—half farmer, half peddler, who thinks 
about nothing but his own shrewdness and his 
neighbor’s follies. Such men ought not to annoy 
me, but they do. Unfortunately these meddling 
farmers have a notion that I came into the coun¬ 
try to “ show them how to farm,” and though 
this is in no sense true, I encounter their bitter¬ 
est opposition. This is no new thing. I was 
reading, the other day, in the Museum Rusti- 
cum et Cornrnerciale, published in London in 
171*3, a letter from a farmer who had been trying 
Jethro Tull’s system of enriching the laud by 
hoeing. He says: “ By introducing the drill 
plow and the horse-hoe, I could save a great 
deal of labor; and I may probably some time 
or other attempt it; but at the same time, I am 
sensible I shall find great difficulty in getting 
men that will even try to do the work with 
those instruments. * * * If by dint of author¬ 
ity you oblige them to go out of their Avay, they 
will rather contribute to the loss of your crop, 
than not to endeavor to convince you that they 
are in the right.” On this, the editor remarks 
in a foot note: ‘ Our correspondent’s reason¬ 
ings on this head are very just. He seems to 
speak feelingly, and we are sorry to say that 
others lie under the difficulties he mentions. 
What chiefly prevents a reformation among our 
laborers in husbandry is, the masters in general 
being but little more enlightened .” Not every 
agrciultural editor would have pluck enough to 
utter such a truth in the first number of his paper. 
I am offered $12 a ton for all my wheat straw, 
to make paper. I do not like to sell straw, but 
1 am satisfied that there is no way in which I 
can turn it into so much money. If we reckon 
the manure from a ton of straw worth $3, I 
should still have to get $9 a ton of nutriment 
out of the straw to make it pay. I do not think 
it is in the straw, and consequently it cannot be 
got out of it. If a farmer could sell his straw, 
and buy clover hay at something near the same 
price, he had better let the paper men have it. 
I am more and more convinced that our chief 
aim should be to raise large crops of clover. The 
Agriculturist , last month, in “Hints about 
Work,” says that the manure of “fattening hogs 
is very rich.” This is true. It is far richer than 
sheep or cow manure from animals having noth¬ 
ing but straw or corn stalks. But if a cow, or a 
sheep, or a horse, is fed on clover hay, the ma¬ 
nure from a ton of it is worth as much, if not 
more, than the hog manure made from a ton of 
corn, fed either whole or ground, raw or cooked. 
The idea that pig manure is so rich arises from 
the fact that our cow and sheep manure is usual¬ 
ly so miserably poor. The question as to which 
is the richer manure, that from working ani¬ 
mals or fattening animals, may be interesting to 
the physiologist, but has no sort of practical value 
to the farmer. If I have 30 tons of straw, 50 
tons of corn stalks, 40 tons of ha} r , 2 tons of 
bean straw, 1000 bushels of corn, and 10 tons of 
oil-cake to feed out on the farm during the next 
six months, it will make no appreciable differ¬ 
ence in the value of the manure to what kind 
or class of animals I feed it. 
The only question I have to determine is in 
what way I can get the most money from the 
nutriment there is in the food. If we can get the 
most money by fattening sheep, or by keeping 
store sheep, or by fattening steers or farrow 
cows, or by feeding young stock, or from 
milch cows, or from wintering horses, we 
need not take into account the value of the 
manure. It will be approximately the same 
in either case. It will probably be the 
least valuable from the milch cows, and the 
most valuable from the store stock. But the dif¬ 
ference is hardly worth considering, and it is a 
pity that scientific agricultural writers should 
so frequently allude to it. It only helps to keep 
alive the old notion that “horse manure,” or 
“pig manure,” or “sheep manure,” or “cow 
manure,” gets its value from the animal, and 
not from the food. 
“ How about hen manure ?” The same prin¬ 
ciple holds. Its value is determined by the 
food. A bushel of corn fed to a turkey will 
give manure •worth no more than a bushel of 
corn fed to a pig—provided the liquid and solids 
of the latter are all saved. As ordinarily man¬ 
aged, however, the liquid either runs away or 
soaks through the crevices of the planks into 
the ground, and is lost. In the case of poultry, 
there is no liquid excrement to run away, and 
this is the reason why the droppings are con¬ 
sidered so valuable. Poultry also eat a good 
deal of animal food in some form or another, 
and this, of course, adds to the value of the ma¬ 
nure. It is a fact—and I wish every farmer fully 
comprehended it—that the value of manure 
from an 3 r animal depends entirely on the food. 
There is one aspect of the manure question 
which encourages me very much—the won¬ 
derful effect that good manure has on our crops. 
I do not know whether to attribute this to the 
climate or to the soil. But I am much mistaken 
if the same amount, of manure will do as much 
good in England as it will here. 
We fed our hogs corn meal, and more or less 
oil-cake meal, (cooked,) all summer, and the 
neighbors evidently thought I was slightly de¬ 
mented, if not more. Some said the pigs were 
so fat they would not grow; others, that the 
pork would cost me 25 cents a pound. Of 
course, none of us have made anything on pigs 
this season. The price of grain is out of all 
proportion to the price of pork. But I have 
done as well as my neighbors. In fact, I have 
done better, for I have lost less than they have. 
One of my neighbors has a dozen or fifteen pigs 
over a year old, and about the first of Novem¬ 
ber he got out of pork, and bought one of the 
smallest of my late spring pigs. It weighed 145 
pounds, after eating its breakfast, and dressed 
121 pounds. He said he had not a hog that 
was fit to kill, even for fresh pork, and none, .if 
killed, that would dress much more than half 
what this little chuck of a pig weighed. He 
was half Essex, and my neighbor said, when he 
came to pay me for him, that he “ never saw or 
tasted fatter pork.” I had another pig, half Suf¬ 
folk and quarter Yorkshire, not fourteen months 
old, that dressed 423 pounds. He was the poor¬ 
est pig in the litter, and did not do well for four 
or five months, or I should have sold him earlier. 
The Deacon says there are a great many pigs, 
over a year old, that, at the present price of 
corn, will cost more to make them fat than they 
will bring ■when killed. In other words, their 
keep for over a year is wholly lost. Perhaps 
this is an exaggeration, but it is very certain 
that it has been an expensive business feeding 
their hogs the past autumn. I believe the sys¬ 
tem is all wrong. 
Mr. J. II. Foster, Jr., of New Jersey, writes: 
“Inone of your 1 Walks and Talks,’ in theA^n- 
culturist , you say: 1 A farmer can afford to pay 
one cent per pound for flesh as a manure.’ 
“We can buy dried meat at 2 cents to 
2 1 (i cents per pound. I believe, it contains no 
more water than old wheat, if as much; no 
grease ; sometimes as much, perhaps, as 5 per 
cent of bones—generally but little. It is consid¬ 
erable trouble to prepare it for feeding. I boil 
at one time, after it is chopped, (which is con¬ 
siderable work,) about GO pounds. The chop¬ 
ping and boiling costs 40 cents. These 60 
pounds furnish enough for five hogs for two 
days—all they will eat. They -weigh about 250 
pounds each. The cost of food, chopping and 
boiling, is 17’| 2 cents per hog each day. 
“ How much ought the pigs to gain, and how 
much is the manure worth from 100 pounds of 
such food? Also, how much from 100 pounds 
of boiled corn meal? It costs me 20 per cent 
more to feed all they want of boiled corn meal 
or pudding.” 
I do not know, but I think one pound of this 
dried meat contains the substance of 4 lbs. of 
