It is an easy matter to keep horses or mules fat, with a full and open corn-crib and abundance of fodder.  But that overseer shows his good management who can keep his teams fat at the least expense of corn and fodder.  The waste of those articles in the South, through shameful carelessness and neglect, is immense; as food for stock, they are most expensive articles.  Oats, millet, peas (vine and all), broadcast corn, Bermuda and crab-grass hay, are all much cheaper and equally good.  Any one of these crops, fed whilst green—­the oats and millet as they begin to shoot, the peas to blossom, and the corn when tasseling—­with a feed of dry oats, corn, or corn-chop at noon, will keep a plow-team in fine order all the season.  In England, where they have the finest teams in the world, this course is invariably pursued, for its economy.  From eight to nine hours per day is as long as the team should be at actual work.  They will perform more upon less feed, and keep in better order for a push when needful, worked briskly in that way, than when kept dragging a plow all day long at a slow pace.  And the hands have leisure to rest, to cut up feed, clean and repair gears, and so on.

Oxen.  No more work oxen should be retained than can be kept at all times in good order.  An abundant supply of green feed during spring and summer, cut and fed as recommended above, and in winter well-boiled cotton-seed, with a couple of quarts of meal in it per head; turnips, raw or cooked; corn-cobs soaked twenty-four hours in salt and water; shucks, pea-vines, etc., passed through a cutting-box—­any thing of the kind, in short, is cheaper food for them in winter, and will keep them in better order than dry corn and shucks or fodder.

Indeed, the fewer cattle are kept on any place the better, unless the range is remarkably good.  When young stock of any kind are stinted of their proper food, and their growth receives a check, they never can wholly recover it.  Let the calves have a fair share of milk, and also as much of the cooked food prepared for the cows and oxen as they will eat; with at times a little dry meal to lick.  When cows or oxen show symptoms of failing, from age or otherwise, fatten them off at once; and if killed for the use of the place, save the hide carefully—­rubbing at least two quarts of salt upon it; then roll up for a day or two, when it may be stretched and dried.

Hogs are generally sadly mismanaged.  Too many are kept, and kept badly.  One good brood sow for every five hands on a place, is amply sufficient—­indeed, more pork will be cured from these than from a greater number.  Provide at least two good grazing lots for them, with Bermuda, crab-grass, or clover, which does as well at Washington, Miss., as anywhere in the world, with two bushels of ground plaster to the acre, sowed over it.  Give a steady, trusty hand no other work to do but to feed and care for them.  With a large set kettle or two, an old mule and cart