Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 April 1875 — Mixed Husbandry. [ARTICLE]

Mixed Husbandry.

No matter how much money may have been made certain years by certain parties in certain localities by the cultivation of special crops, or the following of certain special branches of husbandry, the conviction is gaining a stronger and stronger hold each yetfr in the minds of agriculturists that a - mixed husbandry is the safest and most profitable, all things considered. Those who live near large markets, and who have their regular and reliable customers for whatever special product they may produce, and who have established a reputation therefor which ednimands the best customers and the best prices, may safely and profitably adhere to specialties. But those who are remote from markets, and w r ho have no such established reputation, and whose profits on their products are not uniformly large in consequence, are not safe in risking all the work of a year and the capital necessarily invested in a single crop or product. Besides, it is a well-established fact that, unless the farmer is near to manurial resources, constant cropping with a single product depreciates the value of his form, and the prodding capacity of his soil deteriorates. The cotton-growers of the Southern States are fast learning tlfot half the usual area deyoted to cotton may be cultivated in crops that will yield food for men and animals, that more stock may be grown, more domestic manure made, and the profits of plantations thus increased with far less risk, for fewer failures, and a for greater certainty that they will not have to hypothecate their crops a year in advance in order to live comfortably. This is also the prevailing conviction in the North. Judging by the expressions oi Northern farmers, made in convention';. Farmers’ Clubs, etc., specialties are “ going out” and mixed husbandry is being “ taken up.” It is, however, wise for a former to have a specialty, even with mixed forming. He should multiply his resources; but he can do this and yet make one crop or product the leading feature of his husbandly. If a man’s soil is expressly adapted to the production of a certain crop of superexcellence, or to keeping sheep, cattle, ox to production of butter or cheese, it is not unwise to make such, whatever- it is, the leading feature in his farm economy; but it is not wise to rely wholly upon it, unlcs.-, he is in a position relative to markets such as we have described above. Prudence should teach formers that the more varied the products that the}* can pu; on the market the more certain they will be to have something to rely upon for an income; that the fewer the products they have for market, as to variety, the greater risk they run as to profit from any ot them. This is* the fact, entirely independent ol the consideration that the cultivation of a variety of crops involving rotation insures a better condition of soil and the sustaining of its fertility. These are all important suggestions, to be considered now that the seeding time is at hand, and because they are timely as well as important the\ are given.— New York World.