1868 .] 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
217 
ami doing well, he had belter stay where he is ; 
and if he is not doing well, let him “consider 
liis Avaj’-s,” i. e., let him sit down and look the 
matter honestly in the face and ascertain where 
the fault lies. A little self-examination takes 
the conceit out of a man, and real humility is the 
parent of good resolutions, and leads to success. 
One of the most prosperous farmers in this 
section was a city man—I think a painter— 
who saved a little money, and bought, twenty or 
more years ago, a piece of so-thouglit poor, sandy 
land, that the timber had all been cut from. He 
paid about $500 for one hundred acres. It is 
now 'worth $20,000. When he went on to the 
farm, his health was poor, and he has never been 
what is called a “hard-working man,” but he 
attended closely to his business. He has a tool- 
house, and a place for everything, and keeps 
everything in its place. Everything in and 
around the house and barns is as neat as a pin, 
and order and system pervade all his opera¬ 
tions. It was thought when he bought the land 
that it was “barren.” He found, however, that 
it would grow clover, and in this case, as in so 
many others, plowing under clover made the 
land rich enough to produce anything he liked 
to sow or plant. I need hardly say*he had a 
good wife,—one that interested herself in farm¬ 
ing operations, and was not continually longing 
to get back to the city. 
I never understood, till the other day, why 
farmers on hilly laud do not irrigate their mead¬ 
ows. I was walking over a farm on the borders 
of Cayuga Lake. There was a little stream 
running through it. “For fifty dollars,” I said, 
“ that stream might he made to irrigate ten 
acres of land.” “ That is true,” replied the 
owner of the farm, “but when you want to ir¬ 
rigate, the water is not there; it dries up in the 
summer.’ 1 “ That is of no consequence,” I re¬ 
plied, “it is here now, and the early spring and 
late fall is the time to irrigate in this country.” 
On further conversation it appeared that he 
thought the object of irrigation was to furnish 
water to the plants during dry weather. And 
he believed this was the common opinion. If 
so, it accounts for the fact that so few farmers 
adopt the practice, even when the land might 
be flooded at a mere nominal expense. Of 
course, streams which dry up will only make 
“ catch meadows,” but even in cases where you 
can only flood the land for a week or ten days 
in spring, the benefit is very great. It will gi ve 
you a good bite of grass three weeks or a month 
earlier than where it is not irrigated; and in a 
spring like this, when if a man had had good 
grass butter in April, he could have got 75 cents 
a pound for it, early feed is a great object. Those 
who raise early lambs for the butcher can also ap¬ 
preciate the importance of such food for the ewes. 
It is a great mistake to keep a poor horse. I 
have one that has been on this farm, or some 
other, for about twenty-five years. He lias been 
a good horse in his day, and I can hardly make 
up my mind to give him half a pound of laud¬ 
anum, and let him rest from his labors. And 
yet I am sure I could not invest a dollar to bet¬ 
ter advantage. He cats just as much as one that 
does more than double the work. It costs at least 
one hundred dollars a year to keep a horse, and 
it is far better to pay four or five hundred dol¬ 
lars for a good team than take a poor one for 
nothing. Man and team, counting shoeing, 
harness, etc., cost about $000 a year. And 
who does not know that a good team will do 
from one-third to one-half more than a poor one? 
Farmers, as a general rule, keep too many 
horses. In old times, when hay was worth only 
$5.00 a ton, and oats 25 cents a bushel, it might 
pay better to keep an extra team than to hire 
an extra man. But who can now afford to let 
a team lie idle, while the teamster is hoeing 
corn or planting potatoes? With proper man¬ 
agement the requisite number of horses can be 
profitably employed on the farm throughout the 
season. Of course, it is sometimes well to let 
a horse run to pasture a few weeks, but that is 
another question. To let him lie idle merely 
because you want the teamster to do work that 
another man could be hired to do for $1.50 a 
day, is poor economy. Ellwanger & Barry, 
who study these matters closely, say each team 
and man costs them $4 a day. 
There are few things which annoy me more 
than being obliged in cultivating corn or potatoes 
to go twice in a row. A strong horse and a good 
steel-tooth cultivator will do almost all the work 
as Avell going through the row the first time, as 
by coming back in the same row. All that one 
gains is in being able, when the rows are not ab¬ 
solutely straight, to get nearer the hills of corn. 
The same object, however, might be attained 
by going only once in a row, and keeping the 
cultivator the first time through, close to the 
right hand hills, and the second time through, 
a few days later, to the left hand. Or, what 
would be better still, keep always to the right 
hand, but commence the second time through 
at the top of the field, instead of the bottom. 
In this way the cultivator would run the second 
time, in tile opposite direction from the first. 
In this way the hills can be “ dressed out”*just 
as well as by going twice in a row, and the land 
gets an extra cultivating, or what is equivalent 
to it. I do not know that I make myself un¬ 
derstood. The object of cultivating is to kill 
weeds, and enrich the land by exposing the 
particles of the soil to the atmosphere. Now 
no one will contend, that if we should run a 
cultivator up and down the row eight times in 
one day, it would kill as many weeds or ex¬ 
pose as many different particles of the soil to 
the atmosphere, as if we cultivated the land 
eight times, once a week for two months. We 
should cultivate just as much in the one case as 
the other, but the effect would be very different. 
If only a day apart, or even half a day, so far 
as enriching the land is*-concerned, two culti- 
vatings are better than one, twice in a row. 
Do I think it would pay to cultivate corn once 
a Aveek for two months? I am sure it does on 
my land, especially if in making up the estimate 
the folloAving crop is taken into consideration. 
--- 4 ■■■ iM u ss S-ffi-B sa™ -- »-•* ..■■i .™ 
More About Beaus. 
After the article on Bean Culture which ap¬ 
peared in the last number, Avas in type, Ave re¬ 
ceived a communication from a farmer in avIiosc 
judgment Ave place great confidence, from 
Avhicli avc extract the folloAving: 
“ With a good yield the price may be very Ioav 
next Avinter. We have knoAvn beans sold for 
75 cents a bushel, that Avould uoav bring $5.00. 
At $2.00 a bushel, beans are a profitable crop to 
raise. They are planted after all other spring 
Avork is done, and gathered in time to permit 
the land to be sown to winter Avlieat. If the 
land is in-good condition and the crop is kept 
scrupulously clean, twenty bushels per acre 
may be expected in an ordinary season, and 
thirty bushels if the season is favorable. 
The impression that beans do best on poor 
land is a mistake. When the country Avas neAg 
and the land rich, there may have been some 
truth in this idea, but that time is past. On 
dry upland (and beans should be planted on no 
other) it is rare, indeed, to find soil that is too 
rich. The crop has such a short season to groAV 
in that it is essential to have an abundance of 
plant-food immediately available and Avitliin 
easy reach of the roots. Another mistake, 
equally common, is in not keeping the land 
clean. We Iuioav a farmer avIio planted five 
acres of beans. He hoed half an acre, and 
then, other Avork pressing, gave up the job. 
The weeds soon smothered the crop, and he 
had more beans from the half acre that Avas 
hoed than from all the rest of the field. We 
have seen a twenty-acre field of beans so full of 
AVeeds that in the latter partof July not a single 
bean could be seen from the road. They Avere 
there, hoAvever, and Avere finally harvested, and 
bringing a high price, paid a fair profit. Had 
they been properly cultivated and hoed, they 
would have almost paid for the land. As it 
Avas, the farmer said he should raise no more 
beans because ‘ it Avas such an awful job to pull 
them.’ To pull beans from among thistles is, 
indeed, unpleasant Avork, but that is not the 
fault of the beans. On clean land, beans can 
be pulled for $1.50 to $2.00 per acre. 
Beans are generally planted on sod ground. 
But if the land is clean they do equally Avell on 
corn stubble or other ploAved land. Some of 
the best crops avc have ever seen were grown 
by nurserymen on land that had been cultivated 
for several years Avitli young trees. A good ro¬ 
tation is to plow up an old sod, plant corn, and 
the next year plant beans, and then wheat. If 
the corn is heavily manured and thoroughly 
cultivated, the land a vi 11 he in good order for 
beans. If it can be plowed early in the spring 
and again just before planting, say the first Aveek 
in June, and the beans are cultivated once a 
week for a month, and once ortAvice afterwards, 
the land Avill be as clean and the Avlieat nearly 
as good as if summer-falloAved. When beans 
arc raised on an extensive scale, they are sown 
Avith a drill. There are several excellent bean 
planters that do the Avork expeditiously and 
Avell. The drills are about thirty inches apart, 
and the seed is dropped in hills a foot apart in 
the rows, Avitli four or five beans in a hill. It 
takes a bushel or a bushel and a half to the 
acre, according to the size of the beans.” 
Cotton Seed Meal for Feeding. 
Cotton seed cake meal, now to be found in our 
'markets, is the residue left after pressing the oil 
from the cotton seed, ground for feed. The cotton 
seed as it comes from the gins, is covered Avitli a 
hull or shell, Avhich in the upland variety is 
clothed with a short down of cotton fiber. The 
seed makes more and better oil, and better feed, 
if it is deprived of this hull; nevertheless, there 
is, or has been, considerable seed pressed which 
has not been thus decorticated. There are sev- 
eral patented processes for this hulling or de¬ 
cortication. After pressing, the cake is ground 
Tor feed as Ave find it, and sold at considerably 
loAver prices than those of linseed cake and 
meal. Its actual value for feeding purposes is 
considerably higher. Prof. S. W. Johnson, in 
a report made to the Connecticut State Agri¬ 
cultural Society in 1857, says: “Cotton seed 
cake is much richer in oil and albuminous mat¬ 
ters than the linseed cake. Three pounds of the 
cotton seed cake are equivalent to four of lin¬ 
seed cake of average quality. The value of the 
