The patron of husbandry. (Columbus, Miss.) 1875-1883, 1882-03-18


corn or grain with regard to a
Southern sun and warm soil, and
generally to neglect or despise the
methods which local experience has
taught their neighbors, and which
If they came with a frank acknowl
edgement of entire ignorance they
could soon learn, and which the
real farmer with some variety of
experience and grasp of mind for
his business would expect to have
to learn on changing his location
f ON Northern to Southern
State, where the seasons are so diff
ferent. Some of the new corners,
who are heard to say that Texas is
no farming country, have had a
fancy that they could take the man.
agement of farm and get good
salary for it, though they never
farmed before, and they are digust-
ed that they arc not taken at their
word and allowed to direct the OPP
erations of a number of hands be-
fore they have been in the State
long enough to raise hill of pota-
toes. They remind the Texas farm
er-who knows them by their fair
skins and clothing-of the fellow
who came along to farm house
one day and asked for work, saying
he could doevery sort of farm work
except blowing; he had never
plowed. They would be equally
confident that they could manage a
hotel, or bank, or a newspaper.
1t is not such persons who will ever
be competent to decide what con-
stitutes an agricultural country.
They would be capable of going
out upon piece of barren hill, suit
able only for a sheep ranch, and
trying to raise figs and oranges
knowing in fact no more of the
conditions of successful cultivation
than little Johnnie, who raised a
fiat stone in the tagged yard of his
city home and deposited an orange
pippin beneath its center, then re
placed the stone and confidently
watched for the growth Of an or
ange tree. They may chance to
take up their abode in some swampy
bottom and get the chills, and forth
with write their views of Texas as
notwithstanding fever and ague-
breeding nest, forgetting that the
wide Empire State of the South
west contains great variety of eli
matte conditions, and that they
would as surely be wrong in some
respect in any one place as in any
other, unless it should please Provi
dence to transplant them to some
favored isle where men did not
need to observe and think and
work. Yet Texas has its distinct
lively agricultural as if has its stock
country, and there are good reasons
why produce is sometimes high
even near productive lands. The
country is settling up in some sec
tons, and new corners buy the corn
that is raised, even in good crop
years, at very fair price. In other
places the stock interest predonli-
mates, not that there is any lack of
fertile land, but settlements are few
and far between, and the stockmen
buy the corn at figures that make
the Northern critic exclaim: snow,
if that were farming country corn
would not be so hight" Such ex-
carnations are founded in igno-
rance. A few years ago both corn
and oats were generally higher than
they average since more land is in
cultivation. The land was not less
good than it is now. There was
less grain raised. Predominant
among the causes CT high-priced
corn and grain in Texas is the ex-
tensive cultivation of cotton. Fthe
farmers of Illinois and Kansas
could raise cotton and Cuban sugar
cane, perhaps they 7Vould not raise
quite so much corn nor haze to sell
1t quite SO cheap. A writer adj
dresses the Chicago Times from
Dallas, and asserts broadly that the
prices of grain in Texas are high
because the crops are small. He
instances, also, the importation CT
cheese, vegetables and fruit. He
gives no proof as to the crops, but
appears to take his own assertion
as something that is in the nature
of truism. 1t is so far from being
so that it is easily reduced to an
absurdity. If high prices were an
index of small yield per acre, then
the most favored European coun-
tries would be proved to have only
small yield of wheat. English
land is Put IN grass; Texas land is
put in cotton. English cities de-
mand more wheat than the country
produces. Texas teamsters, stock
men, railroad builders, cotton-grow
ers, sugar growers and others de-
mand more corn and wheat and
oats than Texas now produces, yet
the average corn crop of Texas is
such as to reward the husbandman,
and the oat crop is frequently from
sixty to ninety bushels per acre in
| places, and at times even more in
Central Texas. An intelligent far
mer, whose boyhood was spent in
Illinois, told the Ne7Vs that he had
tried wheat as crop in a situation
only moderately favorable, in Travis
county, for nine years. and that his
average yield was about thirteen