134 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



he says — he put it in a water-trough and poured some water over 

 it and let it stand about one-fourth of a da}', and then squeezed it, 

 and it would not granulate. Yet, he writes to know why he did not 

 succeed. On the other hand, here is a young man, who, a j'ear 

 ago, had never seen a 3'oung stock of sorghum. He is about twenty- 

 one, in Central New York, and he did follow directions. He did 

 not know enough about it to know what was material and what was 

 immaterial, and consequentlj- he followed directions implicitly, and 

 the result is he has sent half a dozen bottles down to Washington 

 for examiuation, and the}' are as good syrups, and crystallize as 

 readily as though they had been made from sugar cane. The spec- 

 imens he sent showed that, of the total sugar in these samples, in 

 one case 88.6 was cr3'stallizable sugar, and in another case 85.3 ; 

 in another case 85.9, in another case 82.8, and so on. 



There was a point I was going to speak of out in Minnesota. A 

 young gentleman had eleven acres and five rods of wheat from which 

 he obtained one hundred twent3'-two bushels, which at $1, the price 

 at which he sold, and a good price at that time, he received $122. 

 One acre of sorghum taken out of the same field, allowing twenty 

 cents per gallon for its manufacture, which was a large price, gave 

 him in syrup a profit of $45.50. The wheat gave him a profit of 

 $42. He kept an' accurate account of his expenses of sorghum and 

 of his wheat. That is, a little over eleven acres of wheat gave him 

 $42 profit, and one acre of sorghum, with a liberal allowance for 

 manufacture, gave him $45,50 profit. 



Mr. Gihnan — Is this machinery expensive? 



Prof. Collier — It is not. 



Here is a report of the Commissioner of Agriculture to the Presi- 

 dent, just issued. In the back part of the report are some, perhaps, 

 five thousand letters from those who have tried this sorghum during 

 the last 3'ear, and their success is here recorded, and the}' got from 

 forty to four hundred and forty gallons of syrup to the acre. It is 

 just the difference between knowing how and not knowing ; but I 

 should say, on good land with these varieties which you can grow 

 here, you ought not to be satisfied with less than two hundred gal- 

 lons of syrup to the acre, and whether that shall be worth twenty 

 cents a gallon or seventy-five, depends on the care with which it is 

 made. In Massachusetts a man wrote to me that he had sold all his 

 crop at seventy-five cents a gallon ; another man met me in Hartford 

 and said he would be glad if he could sell his at thirty cents ; and 



