Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 March 1883 — FARM NOTES. [ARTICLE]

FARM NOTES.

The fleeces of any sheep are badly injured around stacks. Long-wooled fleeces are more damaged than the downs of fine wools, since they are longer and more open, and catch more beards, chaff and straw. An Eastern paper says lambs can be made to shear from two to four pounds more wool by a little extra care and feed during the winter. The extra wool will more than pay for the extra feeding, and*the result will be a much larger and stronger sheep. For this purpose feed good clover hay, with bran, oats and corn mixed equally. Henry Stewart, in the Hural New Yorker, says that no dairyman or farmer can afford to give more than S2OO for a heifer promising 20 pounds of butter a week when mature, as all that might be paid in excess of that sum is what might be called a “fancy” price, and the “bric-a-brac” value of the animal, paid merely for the pleasure of . owning it. No limit can be placed on this value, as it depends wholly on the fancy and pocket of the ultimate owner and the speculative recklessness of the intermediate dealer. Worth of Incubators. Fanny Field finds that many farmers and poultry raisers are afraid to purchase incubators for fear that they will not work satisfactorily, or that inexperienced hands cannot run them. Ido not blame them for this feeling. I lost a good bit of money on incubators before I found one that filled the bill, but at the same time I can assure them that there are incubators that will do all the makers claim for them, and that any one who can follow printed directions can run them. G. H. MoKinney, of Stanford, Ky., gives to the Louisville Courier-Jour-nal the following recipe for destroying lice on cattle and horses: “Boil Irish potatoes in such quantities as required, a peck if need be, until they are thoroughly cooked. Then take out the potatoes and boil the water a short to increase its strength. Then wash the animals, whether cattle or horses, with this ooze or tea. It will effectually destroy the lice. If one application fails, keep on trying, as the remedy is cheap and perfectly harmless otherwise. ” At times horses are habitually overfed, and their systems become so disordered by it that their health suffers, and, the power of digestion failing, they lose flesh instead of gaining it, and will recover condition only by diminishing from one-fourth to one-half the quantity of their allowance. Frequently old horses become thin on account of their teeth wearing unevenly, so that if is not in their power to masticate their food. In such cases a farrier should be employed to file them; or the owner, if he possesses the particular kind of file used, can file them himself. In this case much less food will soon restore the horse to a proper condition. Rock salt should, of course, be ever present in the manger, as a horse was never known to take too much of it.—Germantown Telegraph. Eli Elliott gives this advice to stock-raisers in the Diary and Farm Journal: “First, get good stock of some of the best beef breeds; then send them along in calfhood, and be sure you never let them lose their calf-fat, but push them on good feed, as well as good grass, at the same time; never let them know what hunger is, but make them weigh from 1,300 to 1,600 at 2 years old. In such case you may have fed them on good ground feed, such as oats, corn, bran, shorts and oil meal, every day of their lives, and still you will have a fine profit, as the time has never yet been that it did not pay to feed a good animal all it would eat of the best and most nutritous feed to be had, regardless of the cost of it—provided it had always been so kept, and was put in market at not more than 2| years old. ” •

Joseph Harris, author of “Walks and Talks on the Farm,” etc., asks and answers some important questions in farming in the American Agriculturist. We now have far better tools for cultivating lands than formerly. In fact, our tools are better than our agriculture. And we may rest assured that so soon as we adopt improved-methods of farming and gardening, our inventors and manufacturers will furnish all the tools, implements and machines necessary to do the work. But will it pay to adopt high farming ? That depends on what we mean by high farming. High farming, if we confine ourselves to the production of hay, Indian corn, wheat, oats, and ordinary farm crops, will not pav in this country. And Sir John Bennett Lawes once wrote a paper, or gave a lecture before a farmers’ club in Scotland,in which he demonstrated that' high farming was no remedy for the low prices of agricultural products of Great Britain and Ireland. I think, however, he would admit that thorough cultivation and heavy manuring could be profitably used for the production of what we usually term garden products. The advocates of high farming make a mistake. Neither Old England nor New England will ever raise all the wheat required by its population. Even the great State of New York, I hope, will not long continue to raise on its soil all the wheat it annually consumes. Commerce is the feature of the ag?, and wheat is carried ten thousand miles to market. Cheap bread is what the world wants, and what the world wants the world will get. Cheap wheat can never be furnished by high farming. It must and will be grown largely on land manured only by nature. There may be places in which wheat can be profitably grown, where many of the constituents of the’ plant must be applied to the soil, just as there are places where we can profitably use chemical processes for the production of ice. As a rule, however, nature and commerce will furnish ice cheaper than even modern science can manufacture it. We shall have two kinds of farming. One will consist largely in the production of wheat, corn, oats, barley, cotton, sugar and rice. The other, while it will not entirely neglect these great products, will aim to produce crops which cannot be kept from year to year, or ordinarily be transported long distance o .