3. In the award of premiums, more or less of dissatisfaction will always be felt. A man who has worked a whole year for a premium cannot be expected to lose it without some pain. Premiums should be awarded with great care, with scrupulous impartiality, and every effort made by the leading, substantial farmers to soothe and keep down everything like bitterness and faction, in consequence of disappointment.
4. It is _indispensable_ that agricultural papers should go hand in hand with agricultural societies. We will venture to say, that no society will long exist prosperously, which does not have a reading membership; and that a society can hardly fail to prosper if its members are regular readers of agricultural papers.
To let the cattle fodder themselves at the stack; they pull out and trample more than they eat. They eat till the edge of appetite is gone, and then daintily pick the choice parts; the residue, being coarse and refuse, they will not afterwards touch.
To sell half a stack of hay and leave the lower half open to rain and snow. In feeding out, a hay knife should be used on the stack; in selling, either dispose of the whole, or remove that which is left to a shed or barn.
It is a shiftless trick to lie about stores and groceries, arguing with men that you have _no time_, in a new country, for nice farming—for making good fences; for smooth meadows without a stump; for draining wet patches which disfigure fine fields.
To raise your own frogs in your own yard; to permit, year after year, a dirty, stinking, mantled puddle to stand before your fence in the street.
To plant orchards, and allow your cattle to eat the trees up. When gnawed down, to save your money, by trying to nurse the stubs into good trees, instead of getting fresh ones from the nursery.
To allow an orchard to have blank spaces, where trees have died, and when the living trees begin to bear, to wake up and put young whips in the vacant spots.
It is very shiftless to build your barnyard so that every rain shall _drain_ it; to build your privy and dig your well close together; to build a privy of more than seven feet square—some shiftless folks have it of the size of the whole yard; to set it in the most exposed spot on the premises; to set it at the very far end of the garden, for the pleasure of traversing mud-puddles and labyrinths of wet weeds in rainy days.