OCR Text |
Show FOR THE FARMER. Sugar-beet raising.-W. F. Emory of Alvarado, Cal., is a farmer who owns a farm containing eight (whole) acres. On these he has an orchard, besides which he raises mostly beans, potatoes and carrots. This he calls his homestead, and although he, a carpenter by trade, has no house on his homestead, as he hires land as best he can this year having hired from different parties fifty two acres in all, including a small dwelling on it for which he pays a cash rent of $750 per annum, and of which land he has fifty acres in sugar beets, he owns three good working-horses, and has hired most the time, till the crop was all in, three more, for which he paid each fifty cents per day in cash, he finding the harness, tools, and driver. He plowed first very shallow, then fourteen inches deep with three horses, then, shortly before planting shallow again, doing all the planting by team and at fifteen inches apart. The ?? and cultivating he contracted for at $1.25 per ton, which includes digging; and he thinks the beet fields will leave enough profit after rent of land and money to pay for thinning and ?? has been taken out, to enable him to build a house on his homestead farm, and this at the rate of $1 per ten for beets delivered at the factory.-Methodist. MILK ITEMS.-I quote from Dr. Henry A. Mott, Jr., "Adulteration of Milk." The amount of water added by milkmen ranges between 10 and 56 per cent. Dr. Chandler, from numerous and valuable investigations of the milk supply of New York, concluded that the average milk sold consisted of three-quarters milk and one quarter water. The 120,000,000 quarts of milk sent annually to New York receive an addition of 40,000,000 quarts of water, which sold at 10 cents per quart brings $4,000,000 per annum, or $12,000 per day. And I regret to add that many of the cows yielding this bulk has forced to drink foul water. That watered milk robs children of a proper proportion of their accustomed nutrition it is a fact not controvertible, but ?? ?? the whole truth. Children fed by ?? on such milk may and doubtless are half starved. And a child in this condition is infinitely more liable to contract disease, and far less able to resist that disease in an enfeebled state than children in robust health and with a sound constitution. Milk from a diseased cow, or from bad food and bad water will cause, and does cause, sickness in thousands of children in this city. And added to this privation, the poor tenement house children, deprived of light and air, and suffocated with sewer gases must succumb under a depressing temperature of from 85 to 98 deg. F., and suffer and die by scores and hundreds. Milk from newly calved cows and those sick and feeble from lack of pure air and good food, rapidly decompose and irritates the delicate digestive organs of feeble children, causing sickness and premature death. Read before the Farmer's Club of the ?? inst., June 10, 1879, by A. S. Heath, M. D. First year Lbs. But. 282 Sold for $104.34. Second year Lbs. But. 876 Sold for $140.61. Third year Lbs. But. 282 Sold for $104.34. Fourth year Lbs. But. 482 Sold for $149.88. Fifth year Lbs. But. 442 Sold for $??. One half sixth year to Dec. 12, 1878 Lbs. But. 199. Sold for $49.78. Total Lbs. But. 2,135. Sold for $719.65. 1 calf [unreadable] Sold for $11.50 Amount $118.84. 1 calf [unreadable] Sold for $8.00 Amount $154.84. 1 calf [unreadable] Sold for $6.00 Amount $147.89. 1 calf [unreadable] Sold for $8.00 Amount $164.86. 1 calf [unreadable] Sold for $8.00 Amount $??. Total $43.50. $764.20. Cost of raising cow 5½ years, at $50 a year 275.00. Profit $498.20. Number of pounds of butter in excess of days in the 5 ½ years 128. "The butter has been by good judges compared with the best known in the market as gilt-edged, and pronounced equal to it, being very yellow and firm. In May and June sixteen pounds a week have been the average weight. Some portions of the year five quarts of milk make a pound of butter. The keeping ?? ?? In the summer, grass in the field and little else, in the fall green corn-fodder; winter and spring, hay, corn-stalks, corn meal, and wheat bran."-Michigan Farmer. BREEDING FROM IMMATURE FEMALES-We should avoid breeding from very young females, whose development and stamina will be impaired by the constant drain upon it for the nourishment of the coming progeny. It is notorious that females who breed too early fail to attain the full size and development of their family. It has been shown by the New York reports on "Abortion in Cows," that this scourge has proved especially disastrous in herds in which this system of premature breeding has been carried on for a series of generations and where the constitution has been correspondingly impaired. While the essential cause of the abortions was probably altogether different from this, yet the ruinous results in these herds seemed to show that the generative functions were largely impaired, so that the animals fell easy victims to the immediate cause itself. The statement of this cause suggests the remedy. Females should not be put to the male until they are at least verging on maturity. Above all, the system of breeding from very immature animals should not be continued in the same line from generation to generation, as that can only tend to accumulate and intensify the evil. In the exceptional case of a very forward animal, where an early conception is especially desirable, and where the young dam is either not allowed to suckle her offspring, or is allowed to skip the following year without breeding, the course may sometimes be profitable, but as a rule, breeding to immature animals should be avoided, for the reasons above mentioned.-National Live Stock Journal, Chicago. |