Wessington Springs herald. (Wessington Springs, Aurora County, Dakota [S.D.]) 1883-1891, 1883-03-24
Specialties in Agriculture.

What are special crops? We think
every product of the farm may be
called q special crop if special care and
culture is given to it. 1t is not some
new and unheard-of crop; not hops, or
%teasels, or peppermint-oil onions, or
melons, or fruit alone; but these when
there is an opportunity for them, and
when there are not special crops OF
wheat or oats or barley or corn or fod-
der, and special kinds of butter or
cheese or milk, specially prepared for
sale, or specially fed beeves or mutton
or lambs or poultry, for all of which
there is a market and q profitable sale
if the product can be made as much
larger or better or heavier than that
from other and cheaper localities. The
Eastern farmer has his market at his
door, and if he a by special methods
Or culture produce as much larger or
more valuable crops as will exting uish
the. advantages gained by cheaper land
and culture elsewhere he will have all
the benefits of the greater nearness of
the markets. The Nebraska farmer is
now considering if it would not pay him
to borrow money at one per cent. a
month to hold back his corn from
twenty-si1 for thirty cents bushel by
and by. The Ohio farmer gets thirty
cents a bushel more than that and the
New York farmer forty to fifty cents
more. If either of these can produce
seventy-five or eighty bushels per acre
by special culture against the forty
bushels of the Nebraska farmer he may
well consider this a special crop and a
profitable one to grow. So with all other
products of the farm.
But there are special crops, in tho
significance of the term-fruits, vegeta-
bles, fancy cheese, early lambs, and
poultry and various other products
which have a high local reputation on
account of their high quality, which has
been gained by long and skillful cult.
walton and which gives them a high
value in the markets. The market re-
ports sometimes contain notices of
these. There are Long Island potatoes,
New-Jersey melons and sweet corn,
Pennsylvania poultry, of which capons
are especially highly valued; New
Jersey and Pennsylvania lands, many
kinds of fancy cheeses, Delaware
peaches, Kelley's Island grapes, South
ern Illinois fruits and vegetables, the
white Burleigh tobacco of Kentucky, the
Berea (Ohio) onions, and others OF
which a long list might be given. Every
locality offers some opportunities for
enterprise in this direction ;every city and
town has its market, every village its
select customers, and everything that is
more than usually good or early or
novel, its unusually large price. A mar
ket gardener undertook to grow straw
berries under glass in the winter near a
large northern city, and at once found
customers for all he could raise at one
dollar to five dollars a quart. Every
year he built a new glass house, until
he had a dozen of them and twenty
five acres of ground outside for later
crops. A young farmer makes a special
business of feeding light pork for family
use and of making s~ausages, for which
he gets a double price. And so it is all
through; the ma of one thing becomes
known and succeeds because he devotes
his attention to that one and excels in it.
The secret is to find what the one thing
needful is, and when this is found the
genius which has enabled the man OF
the woman to find that will always ena.
BILE him or her to make a success Of it.
N. Y. Times.