28o , AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



The wheat crop is not adapted to the southern part of our 

 country, and the flour made of wheat that is produced south 

 of Mason and Dixon's hne cannot be shipped to Cuba ; the flour 

 will not keep. I was a miller when I was younger than I am 

 now, and I know when we were selling flour we could not ship 

 to Cuba any flour made of southern wheat. 



Some years ago the Department of Agriculture at Harris-^ 

 burg made investigations among the farmers in southeastern 

 Pennsylvania ; we had farmers there who would invariably raise 

 from thirty to forty bushels of clean wheat to the acre, while 

 there were others who produced only fifteen to twenty bushels 

 from the same kind of soil and under the same climatic condi- 

 tions. Our Department wanted to know just why such condi- 

 tions as these should exist. I was the man they sent to investi- 

 gate ; I do not know whether I was fit or not, but they sent me. 



The Professor from Cornell has outlined in a splendid way 

 how to do these things. Our Pennsylvania Dutch followed that 

 plan a good while ago ; they did not know why they did certain 

 things, but they did them. A Dutchman does lots of things he 

 cannot explain, when you ask him about them. Now, what does 

 he do in preparation to raise a wheat crop? In the first place, 

 he is a good farmer ; he plows his land early and does exten- 

 sive cultivating. 



In order to find out whether early plowing has anything to 

 do with the yield of wheat, I asked a friend of mine in York 

 county to make experiments. I asked one man, who had been 

 raising thirty-five or forty bushels of wheat to an acre and who 

 plowed early, if he would not let one-half acre lie until about 

 two weeks before seeding time, and another until a day or two 

 before sowing the seed and then plow these half acres. The 

 land he plowed early he cultivated six or eight times. He had 

 a pair of old mules and an old fellow around his place ; they 

 were not worth much, but they could harrow and when there 

 was nothing else to do the old fellow would hitch up the mules 

 and harrow. The half acre I asked him to plow about two 

 weeks before seeding he cultivated four or five times and the 

 half acre I asked him to let lie until a day or two before plant- 

 ing, he did the best he could with, under the circumstances. We 

 sowed the wheat the latter part of September — we watched it. 

 It was not an experiment, conducted along simply scientific 



