From mid-winter, and especially _just before_ spring opens, beets,
carrots, parsnips, potatoes, ruta baga, and mangel wurtzel are of the
highest utility. After months of dry fodder, and of slops thickened
with corn-meal, cattle need—their stomach, their blood need—a change
of diet; and none can be better than roots. At the East it is no
longer a debatable question—root crops are as regularly laid in as
grain or grass crops. The chief difficulty at the East, in introducing
“new-fangled notions,” arises from the regular routine habits of
farmers and their settled aversion to change from old ways. Very
little of this spirit exists at the West. There the very essence of
life is _change_. The population have broken up from old homesteads,
moved off from old States, abandoned the comforts and settled life of
long tilled agricultural districts—to come into a new country, where
they _have_ to practise new ways, live differently, and labor by new
methods; and, by consequence, the farming community of the West are
remarkably free to meet and adopt agricultural improvements. But the
difficulty lies in a different direction. The farmers have large
farms—are ambitious of large crops, large herds of cattle, large
droves of hogs, and of a style of husbandry which brings in a large
pile, and all at once; so that the idea of _good_ farming is _large_
farming. Many a sturdy Kentuckian will very patiently plow, two or
three times, his fifty or hundred acres of corn, and think nothing of
it; but to put in half an acre of carrots, or beets, to weed and work,
to harvest and store the vexatious little crop, this seems a piddling
business. Our big prairie farmers, our heavy bottom-land farmers, our
stock farmers who “hog” one or two hundred acres of corn, of their own
planting or of their neighbor’s, they do not love _little_ work. We
know a man who lives on thirty acres of land of about a middling
quality. He winters seven cows, two horses, and two pigs. He raises
corn and grass enough for his own use, and sells none. Every year he
puts in about a quarter of an acre of parsnips, or ruta baga, for
winter and spring fodder. His garden in summer, and his dairy all the
year round, are represented in market. He probably does not receive
five dollars at _once_, on any one sale, through the year. We never
looked into that old chest under his bed; but we will venture much,
that if the shrewd housewife would keep her eagle eyes off long enough
to give us a chance, it would be found that this man has made, and
laid up, more money in the last five years from his thirty acres, than
any farmer about here from six times the amount. Our farmers _have not
grown rich on large and careless farming; but many are growing rich on
small farms and careful husbandry_.
When the dairy shall be more thought of—when wintering stock, and
fattening it, shall be more carefully studied—we predict that our
farmers will annually raise thousands of bushels of roots, and have
capacious cellars under their barns to store them in.