American citizen. [volume] (Canton, Miss.) 1864-1890, 1881-09-10
Some Of the Blessings Of Drought.

| AmlO the LOUD ana constant COM
plants of our present protracted
drought, no one has yet found time or
heart to speak word of contentment
| or of gratitude. Let me ask my broth
| err farmers to look on both sides OF this
alb orbing question and see if they can
| not find some cause of congratulate on
| in what they, with the rest of man.
kind" regard rs an unmitigated calam-
| ity.
The first cause of graduation is the
general health that the drought pro-
duces. We are freed, almost entirely,
| from the frightful curse of the ague,
| and other ma arial diseases that follow
upon a wet season and that owe their
birth and life to the decomposition of an
| immense vegetable growth.
2. A protractcd spell of dry weather
will add greatly to the destruction of
the seeds of many noXious weeds, and
thus leave the places that they occupy
fer the future growth of food plants.
3. Our lands, like our bodies, require
rest, and drought is rest to our soils.
If seasons of perpetual fertility should
occur, one of two things would happen:
Either our fields would grow up in weeds
that would require, in each successive
year, additional labor to eradicate, or
our farms would be rendered totally I'M
fit in short time for the cultivation of
our three great cer ca's corn, wheat
and oats-which crops cultivated sue
essively on the same soil with total
disregard of chemical affinitieS) would
ne ESTATE the introduction of new food
plants, or the constant application of
costly artificial manures.
4. There is imprisoned beneath our
soils an eXhaastleSs fund of manures in
,t, IS hat k<,
reached by heat. These natural rescr-
voirs of fertility are kept down bv the
pressure OF moisture and by shade.
They exist in beds of humus vegetable
mold) or in a virgin soil too deep to be
reached by the pillow. Thai they exist
i known to every observant farmer,
from the simple fact that soils taken
from a considerable depth below the
surface. as from the excavation of n
well. will produce for the first y ear or
two very luxuriapt growth. This
evolution OF latent force, reached only
and generally diffused by heat, makes
itself beneficially apparent in the next
years crop; for old farmers will remem-
Der, with me, the drought of 1851 and
the great product of 1855, and also other
successive seasons of drought and
abundance.
5. A drought forces us to agricultural
economies. AS class our farmers are
proverbally wasteful. To stranger it
would seem that feeding corn to hogs
and hay and fodder to cattle on the
muddy ground is regarded by so many
of us as the perfection OF husbandrv,
and that the burning of our straw piles
is imperatively demanded by the neces-
sary use for the next year of the ground
thus occupied. 1t seems almost useless
to denounce a practice that is so con-
tinuously and so dangerously foil wed
bv men who aspire to the reputation
among their neighbors of good farmers.
If this drought shall teach us to make
shelter for our cattle and subsequent
manure from the straw if any remains
unburnedD, OF to lay planks or rails or
poles on the ground where our hogs are
fed on corn if any of us shall have any
corn), then this much eliminated sea-
son will not have been in vain. During
the last severe winter j fed and keptfa
all nv horses and cattle on wheat and
rye straw, saved in my barn and cut up
by a straw cutter. mixed with bran and
occasionally sprinkled with salt water.
have found good, clean, wheat straw.
thus saved and used as f God for cattle.
as good as over-ripe hay
| will not bore your readers any
further. but will say to my brethren of
the pillow that, if they will look at this
thing right. they will come to regard
this drought as blessing in Disguise
an Old Farmer, IN S. Louis Repubs
itcais,