Agriculture.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1193, 4 November 1882, Page 4 (Supplement)

Agriculture.

THE CAUSES OF AGRICULTURAL FAILURES. The Hural New Yorker has frequently and earnestly presented to its readers the advantages of economy and the unwisdom of injudicious expenditure; but, more than all, the dangers and misfortunes resulting from debt. Time and experience exemplify more fully the cautions that have been repeatedly given. But a good thing bears repetition, and we it is a good thing to continue to harp upon this subject; for there are questions of the greatest import to the well-being of mankind, that may be reiterated and discussed over and over again. Very briefly, we would request attention to a fact of much interest in this regard. We hear of failures and distress very often, and these misfortunes have become so common as to fall under the careful notice and calculations of the statisticians, who can tell us precisely how many men out of a thousand fail in business; but there they stop. We ought to know why they fail. To a great extent it is no secret that most of these misfortunes come from reckless expenditure and misuse of credit. Men are much the same everywhere, and the farmers of Bavaria are no worse on the average, than American farmers, and what happens in that country may be a lesson for us. The Government of Bavaria has been investigating the causes of the failures and distress among farmers in that country, and has only rehearsed “ the old, old story.” Forty per cent, of these failures have been found to be due to injudicious purchases or reckless mortgaging ; 34 per cent, are found to be due to personal causes, as inefficiency, vice, and other faults, and but 13 per cent, to purely business causes, as mistake, mismanagement, or accidents which may carry no blame with them. Don’t let it be forgotten that a debt is a mortgage, as truly as a mortgage is a debt, and the owner of a farm can no more escape the payment of the one than he can * that of the other. And yet, how many farmers will contract a debt without the least hesitation, when they would suffer the greatest inconvenience rather than sign a mortgage on their farms I The fact is, that the farmer who pays as he goes, will never become a subject of the probe or the dissection of the statistician, who turns his attention to business failures and misfortunes. He will be safe all the time and whatever may happen.— Rural New Yorker.

PREVENTION OF ANTHRAX DISEASES. The most fatal and destructive diseases which affect domestic animals, are those known under the general term of anthrax or anthracoid fevers. Splenic or Texan fever, and carbuncular erysipelas known by the too common name of bloody murrain, black leg, and charbon in cattle; braxyor enteric fever in sheep, and cholera or intestinal fever in swine; a similar type of disease in horses, and the cholera of poultry, are all of this kind, and it needs no saying to inform "our readers that these diseases are the cause of nine-tenths of the enormous loss which farmers and stockmen suffer. It has been very conclusively shown, that these diseases are produced by infection of the blood by a vegetable organism, which is sown in the blood by means of germs taken into the system, just as small-pox, cho-lera-morbus and yellow fever in man, are produced, and spread from victim to victim, either by direct infection, or by the entrance into the blood of the infecting germs from the products of the diseased subjects, which are carried in the air, in water, or in food. The researches of M. Pasteur and other investigators have proved all this. But M. Pasteur has turned his attention, in a great measure, to the study of methods of prevention. This he effects by means of inoculation, by virus of a milder type of the same form of disease, just as the virulent small-pox of man is averted or greatly lessened in its force, by inoculation by the virus of the milder form, which prevails in cattle, and is known as cow-pox or vaccine ; hence the term vaccination.

European sheep are much troubled by, a form of anthrax, known by the name of charbon, in France, and braxy or blood-striking, in England. This is a true intestinal fever, as hog cholera, and black leg in calves, or the splenic fever in cattle are, and although it is not so destructive in our fresher fields and newer pastures, yet it yearly carries off thousands from our flocks, and, of course, as these increase, the disease will probably become tenfold more destructive than it was. The subject is therefore one of great interest to us.

Prevention by inoculation has been found easy and effective. The virus used in the operation is produced by means of cultivating the germs taken from the blood of an originally diseased animal in solutions of animal matter, through several gradations, until an attenuated virus, so to speak, is made, which, by inoculation, produces a mild form of the disease, which is not fatal. The subject is then re-inoculated after the lapse of 15 days, with a stronger virus, which would destroy an uninoculated animal, but, in the already prepared subject, causes merely a slight fever. The peculiar germs which are thus conveyed into the blood have the effect of fortifying it against the malignant germs, and so the animals either escape altogether from them, or are rendered proof against any serious effects. The mode of inoculating a sheep is as follows :—The animal is held by an attendant, while the operator, with a graduated hypodermic syringe injects a certain quantity of the infected fluid into the tissues of the thigh, this being found to be the most convenient locality for the operation. Sheep have long been inoculated for the sheep-pox in Europe, as this disease is exceedingly destructive among the large flocks of the Eastern countries, and now a new remedy is offered to the shepherds, which will add further to their immunity from the prevalent scourges which more than decimate their flocks. —(Abridged from Rural New Yorker.)