What I know of farming:: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon scienceGreeley, Horace
Science
What I know of farming:: a series of brief and plain expositions of practical agriculture as an art based upon science
Greeley, Horace
Agriculture -- United States
Highways we must have, and people must traverse them; but this gives
them no right to trample down or otherwise injure the crops growing on
either side. In France, and other parts of Europe, you see grass and
grain growing luxuriantly up to the very edge of the beaten tracks, with
nothing like a fence between them. Yet those crops are nowise injured or
disturbed by wayfarers. Whoever chooses to impel animals along these
roads must take care to have them completely under subjection, and must
see that they do no harm to whatever grows by the wayside.
In this country, cattle-driving, except on a small scale, and for short
distances, has nearly been superceded by railroads. The great droves
formerly reaching the Atlantic seaboard on foot, from Ohio or further
West, are now huddled into cars and hurried through in far less time,
and with less waste of flesh; but they reach us fevered, bruised, and
every way unwholesome. Every animal should be turned out to grass, after
a railroad journey of more than twelve hours, and left there a full
month before he is taken to the slaughter-pen. We must have many more
deaths per annum in this city than if the animals on which we subsist
were killed in a condition which rendered them fit for human food.
Ultimately, our fresh Beef, Mutton and Pork, will come to us from the
Prairies in refrigerating cars: each animal having been killed while in
perfect health, unfevered and untortured by days of cramped, galled, and
thirsty suffering, on the cars. This will leave their offal, including a
large portion of their bones, to enrich the fields whence their
sustenance was drawn and from which they should never be taken. The cost
of transporting the meat, hides, and tallow, in such cars, would be less
than that of bringing through the animals on their legs; while the
danger of putrefaction might be utterly precluded.
But to return to Fencing:
Our growing plants must be preserved from animal ravage; but it is most
unjust to impose the cost of this protection on the growers. Whoever
chooses to rear or buy animals must take care that they do not infest
and despoil his neighbors. Whoever sees fit to turn animals into the
street, should send some one with them who will be sure to keep them out
of mischief, which browsing young trees in a forest clearly is.
If the inhabitants of a settlement or village surrounded by open
prairie, see fit to pasture their cattle thereon, they should send them
out each morning in the charge of a well-mounted herdsmen, whose duty
should be summed up in keeping them from evildoing by day and bringing
them safely back to their yard or yards at nightfall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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