Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1889-01-01
R0UND-UPS.
Containing Valuable Hints on Hog Rails
ing for the Agriculturist.
The Necessity for Diversity of Crops in Texas
Expatiated Upon by One Who Knows.
Stock Matters.

Alb. sanborn, one of the heaviest
Worth yesterday.
Texas fever is reported as prevailing
among the cattle of Davis county, Kan
sas The disease is said TO have been
taken there by Texas cattle imported for
feeders.
Active work is being done in the di
rection of getting the live stockyards on
their feet, and it will not be long before
it can be announced that they are ready
for occupation.
Trading on the Fort Worth cattle mar
ket now is confined to Struggling sales of
thoroughbred stock to North Texas
breeders. The dealers here do not ex-
pect much business at this time of year,
in fact in no part of the state now is there
much activity in live stock.
-
While the Texas cattleman is engaged
in studying the underlying causes of the
depression in value of beef and the Texas
horseman is figuring out the effect of yell
low fever upon trade in his products, the
ordinary, every day rancher is striding
right along toward wealth on the strength
of his hog crop. One of Tarrant county 5
most progressive farmers, one Of those
whose pride is in the good quality of his
stock and the painstaking cultivation of
his broad acres, enlarged upon the sub
iect of hog raising in Texas to a
GAZETTE reporter the other day, and as
his are the ideas of the intelligent, en-
lightened, broad-guaged rancher, they
are here set forth:
''You do not have to go back more
than twelve months to the time when
hog raising first obtained any attention
from the farmers of this state, said
this gentleman q It is business which,
though peculiarly adapted to this
country, has never been patronized
much by our people; perhaps because
they were unwilling to stoop to swine
herding when the
MORE CONGENIAL PURSUITS
of agriculture or cattle raising were at
hand; but most probably because they
were too lovingly welded to the tyrant
cotton TO be amenable to the dictates of
common sense and business judg-
ment, for hogs can be bred and
fattened by any man endowed with an
ordinary mental development, it not be-
ing a skilled labor requiring time and
practice for its requirements, and there
fore is open to everyone who has the
small means necessary to make the start.
1t is always a profitable business where
the smallest amount Of judgment and
foresight are used, requiring no great
investment, and consequently involving
no great risk; so that many of these
Texans, had they devoted their energies
to bunch of hogs instead of to cotton or
cattle during the past two years
no no m OF
the bank instead of being hard pushed to
meet their last years bills for articles of
household consumption. There are
many other articles of country produce
of which the same might be said as Of
hogs. We import butter, cheese, lard,
bacon, pork, rice, sugar, dried and
canned fruits of all kinds, walnuts,
jute and faXseed and many other arti-
cles of daily use in every family, all of
which we can produce with the same ease
and certainty that we can cotton and with
a much better prospect Of continued and
satisfactory profits. If the individual
farmers would take this subject Of a
greater
DIVERSITY OF CROPS
home to themselves, and study it in the
light of the benefits it would bring to
their own households, and act in accord
should hear much less complaint of hard
times and the appropriateness of farming
in our state. Our farmers, as a class
and as individuals, trust too much to the
failure or success of single operations-of
single crops. The cotton grower turns
all his attention to cotton, and buys his
grain, butter, cheese, potatoes,
cabbage, beets, cornmeal, lard,
bacon, pork, beef and mutton, and many
times his eggs, and chickens and turkeys
for Christmas, his green and dried fruit,
and many other little necessaries and
Injuries which he might JUST as well
produce on his own farm. Is there any
wonder, then, that at the end of the
year he finds the proceeds of his single
crop all exhausted, even in a season Of
good crops and good prices? And if such
be the case under favorable circum-
stances, what must be his condition
when this cotton crop fails or when the
crop, being abundant, he can find
neither foreign nor home demand for it,
as has been shown may happen almost any
year? To render Texas farmers independ-
ent and insure their permanent prosperity
the entire system of farming must be
changed. Each farm must produce the
necessary vegetables and fruit of all
kinds for the family, must support few
sheep, few hogs, chickens, turkeys and
all the other necessaries that go to make
LIFE ON THE FARM
comfortable and the occupation of the
farmer independent and remunerative.
''But this cotton problem is a hack
neyed subject. Its solution mas been at
tempted by able men, and could not be
evolved by me in an off-hand manner
like this. A great many of the farmers of
this state particularly of the cotton grow
ing sections, are renters. a man
with one team is allowed thirty-five or
forty acres, of which he must put twenty
five or thirty in cotton, leaving ten or
fifteen acres for corn, or if he lessons his
corn crop he is allowed to put two or
three acres in oats. He will raise just
enough feed TO keep one team, and has to
depend entirely on mis- cotton to pay his
debts at the end of the year. If that one
dependence fails him (Which it has done
this year, he mortgages his team and is
carried over TO another year, which is a
repetition of his last years experience,