White Bluffs spokesman. [volume] (White Bluffs, Wash.) 1907-1938, 1935-07-04

building. These hauling jobs help in
times like this when the wheat is
threshed and the grapes are not yet
ripe, he says.
The cows are of the province. They
look like Jerseys grown as big as Hol-
stems, and work right up to the day
they freshen Except for what the
calves take, they give no milk. They
are better than oxen, Pierre says, be-
cause they breed and multiply.
And they are much better than
horses to work with, he adds. One does
not have all these straps of harness
"a yoke, simply, and there you are!
And no reins; one talks with them
and they obey.
They are slow? Perhaps, but what
would you? With them one may in a
day plow an acre, and there are plen-
ty of days on which to pillow. One may
do with two horses as much work as
with four cows? Yet the two horses
cost more than twice as much to feed
as four cows. And at the end of the
year one has only the manure from
two horses instead of the manure
from four cows.
One can never, he says, have too
many cows. He has nine head, gener-
ally more, on his 60 acres, only about
tWo-thirds of which are under Guilt
walton. He wishes he had work enough,
feed enough, for three times as many.
A mans riches are not to be mea-
sured in acres as much as in cows. He
keeps his in the stable; he will not
turn them out. He Tugs green feed and
pumpkins in to them, and feeds them
clover hay, even though there is pas
turage enough on the sleeper hillsides
for the greater part of the year. There
are no fences on his farm, but that is
not the reason for his not pasturing;
there are plenty of small boys round
about who could mind COWS. No, it is
because, with commercial fertilizer all
but out of the question for farmers
with such a small cash turnover; with
legumes a more or less irregular fac
tor in a rotation that stresses wheat;
and with old, old land, a farmer must
be fixed so as to save every ounce of
animal excrement, liquid and solid,
and to get it out to just what spot in
his land where it is worst needed.
"Voila!" says Pierre Lafargue, point
ing. The straw under his COWS is more
than foot and half deep. 1t is
hauled out almost every day and put
on the land. If at the end of the year
there is any straw left in the stack that
is hauled out too.
ask him how his wheat yields have
held out all these years. About the
same as far back as he remembers or
knows. Some years good, say seven
teen sacs to the hectare. Years, like
this bad one, only about ten sacs to
the hectare. A hectare is two and a
fifth acres. The French sac runs about
two and a fifth bushels You can read
these figures, pretty accurately, there
fore, in terms of bushels to the acre.
(Our states average about fifteen
bushels to the acre)
AS we leave the barn Pierre shows
me Louetta, his horse. Few peasants
have horses, and he is as proud of
this one as California ranchman
would be, say, of an airplane. Louetta
can go the seventeen miles to Mon
tauban, he says, in two hours, or even
better if one is fool enough to let her
trot downhill The last part he can
not make me understand in words, so
he acts it out.
We walk over his place. There is
not, he says, much to be seen at this
time of year. That is true. What I get
of his farming plan, piece together
out of what can see, what UNDER
stand Of his explanations, and what
I know of the other French wheat
farms on which worked for day
or so at various times.
His vines enter little into his labors.
They are mainly along the edges of
fields as sort of cropped fence row.
With little attention, they give enough
grapes for the family to tread with
Dd4C ACSG AltO cIlOuS1l WlIl6 1Or Cue
house.
Patches of cultivated crops such as
potatoes, cabbage, flint corn, pump
kins, and perhaps sorghum are placed
more or less without plan, year after
year, according to the needs of the
house and barn and the needs of a
titled crop to clean up place where
weeds have become bad. Crimson clo-
yer is sown in different parts of the
wheat from year to year, with the ten
dency to patch with legume, as it
were, a part of the field that is wear
ing out. A legume is plant with the
power to take nitrogen as gas from
the air and store it as plant food in
the soil.
But the main thing here is wheat,
wheat, wheat, as much as the land
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