Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 November 1878 — Waste of Farm Machinery. [ARTICLE]

Waste of Farm Machinery.

How many of our readers or their immediate neighbors have a plow, harrow, valuable wheat or corn-drill, wheeled-rake, mowing or reaping-ma-chine, or other valuable farm implements and machinery lying out of doors unprotected from the weather? Hundreds we will venture to say. Have any of those careless farmers ever endeavored to cipher out the actual loss such inexcusable negligence entails upon them? A mowing-machine or drills, thrashing-machine or any other piece of complicated machinery, suffers more by exposure to weather in one season than the wear and tear of putting in or harvesting half a dozen crops. The implements and machines on many farms in the western country owe 50 to 75 per cent, of their decay and breakage to the effects of weather, While 25 to 50 per cent, of their usefulness Only go to benefit the owner, who has paid high price, and probably bought them on- credit bearing a heavy rate of interest. Is it all strange that such unthrift should keep those “ happy-go-lucky” farmers always in straitened circumstances? They need a guardian to save them from inevitable ruin.

It is not a reasonable excuse to allege that they have no proper place to house machinery And farm implements. Every farmer should provide a storehouseiarge enough to hold all of his farming tools, carts and wagous, before he expends money for them. He had far better hire the use of a drill, mowing and reaping-machines, and a thrashing-machine than to buy such costly articles without a proper building to keep them in during the ten or eleven months they are not in use. • At this season of the year every farm implement should be cleaned, oiled and carefully laid away in a dry building, where it should remain until the season arrives to use it again. Hundreds of dollars are wantonly wasted by the too prevalent practice of having exposed to the weather, plows, harrows, cultivators and other more oostly machines. A shed covered with straw or cornfodder, for storing! tools under, is better thart to have them lying round the fields and inlfence-corners, but all such buildings leak more or less in wet weather, affording btit poor protection to the tools.stowed away unde? them. An observant writenon this subject attributes two-thirds of the mortgages on Western farms, to the loss on farm Implements and maphiiHm which were bought when they could l»e very well done without, and, no care being bestowed upon them, they soon become utterly worthless, frequently before they are paid for. To Sum the matter up, too much money is paid, or too

much debt contracted in purchasing farm machinery that oould be vety well dispensed with, and too little care is taken bf k. A system of wise economy is as profitable to the farmer as good crops, while carelessness keeps multitudes poor and their farms and buildings in anjmkempt and unsightly condition.—Kansas Farmer. Cattle are seldom exposed to the open air in the Eastern or Middle States through the winter; shelter of some kind is provided, although it is frequently very defective. But in the great cattle-raising region of the West, shelter is the exception. If these Western cattle feeders would study the cost of keeping the temperature of the animal body at 100 deg. through a severe winter, when exposed to the intense cold, with- storms of wind, rain and snow, they would never again subject their cattle to such exposure.—Live Stock Journal. The seven cotton and woollen mills of Lawrence, Mass., have a capital of •7,850,000, employ over 10,000 bands and run 388,000 spindles and 9,057 looms, which produce every week 2,801,654 yards of cloth. Forty-seven persons own twothirds of the land of Nueces County, Tex. William Kennedy owns 186,286 acres, valued for taxation at •84,948, and Richard King owns 188,435, assessed at •130,127.