POOR PRACTICES.

Hawke's Bay Weekly Times, Volume 1, Issue 17, 13 May 1867, Page 109

POOR PRACTICES.

: (Fromthe Saturday Evening Post of America.) It is a pretty poor practice for a farmer to dig and delve, tug and grub, and clear, up fifty acres of land at a cost of j;400, and then in the third year surrender about a fifth of it to briars, brambles and oxeye daisies. Poor practice to half-manure, halfplough, half-seed, and half-cultivate a field, and then harvest from it less than half a crop.

To keep two inferior, scrawny scrub cows for dairy purposes, that give less milk than one, aud consume more food than three.

To purchase in town five hundred loads of livery-stable manure and suffer six hundred of better home-made material to run to waste.

To attempt to fatten three hogs into twelve hundred pounds of pork on just so much feed as would keep two nicely growing. To estimate agricultural fairs as arrant humbugs, and spend three days every month- saving the country at political meetings.

To depend upon borrowing your neighbours’ Takes, reapers, mowers, and all sorts of implements in haying and harvest time.

To house up a thousand bushels of grain waiting for a rise, till one fenth has gone to feed rats and mice, and the remainder smells like the essence of rat, and the price is down 40 per cent.

To plant out a big orchard of choice fruit trees with a first thought o t money-making, and leaving them to do or die.

To keep two fancy hundred-guinea carriage horses, and pay 255. a day for a team to plough. It is positively poor practice to call “ book lamin’ ” all bosh, to ignore news and agricultural papers, and attempt to keep up an even yoke with your progressive neighbours by main strength find stupidness.