POOR PRACTICES FOR FARMERS.

Southland Times, Issue 656, 12 April 1867, Page 3

POOR PRACTICES FOR FARMERS.

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 £400, and then in the third year surrender about, a fifth of it to briers, brambles, and o.x-eye 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 good, one, and consume more food than three. To purchase in town fire 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 affairs as arrant humbugs, and spend three days every month saving the country at political meetings. To depend on borrowing your neighbors' rakes, 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-tenth has gone to feed rats and mice, and the remainder smells like the essence of rat, and the price is down forty per cent. To plant out a big orchard of choice fruit-trees with a first thought of moneyjnaking, and leave them to do or die. To keep two fancy hundred-guinea carriage - horses, and pay twenty - five shillings a day for a teanrto plough. It is positively poor practice to call " book laming," all bosh, to ignore news and agricultural papers, and attempt to keep up an even yoke with your progressive neighbors by main strength and. stupidness. — " Saturday Evening Post of America."