94 THIRTY-FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



what he thought was the best fertilizer for clover, he said, "Clover 

 seed." In other words, the more clover you raise, the more you get the 

 soil inoculated with that bacteria, the better it will grow. We have had 

 on our farms some soil a little too acid for clover, and we have cor- 

 rected that by the use of ashes. Another thing, I think I will mention 

 a little experience we have had this past season that we never had be- 

 fore, and I hope we never shall again. 



I have been in the habit of sowing some barley and last season I 

 sowed several acres, sowed it early and then we seeded it. That barley 

 got up about five inches, when we had this freeze the 8th of June; it 

 froze it so that the barley lopped over and turned white. It sprouted up 

 very well, but being so dry, the hayseed that came up, and a good deal 

 of the clover, was killed by the frost and a great deal dried up, so we 

 could not do what we calculated on, cut off that hay as soon as it 

 headed out and then get a good crop of clover hay afterwards. But 

 last season instead of its being like that after it commenced to grow, 

 the ground was partially bare. About a quarter of the barley sprouted 

 and a very little of the hayseed, but the pig-weed and smart-weed and 

 every other kind of a weed grew, and they grew like weeds, so we had 

 a proposition on our hands that we did not know what to do with. 

 There we were along the last of June and first of July with several acres 

 of that. It had got to be coarse and rank, more weeds than anything 

 else, with smart-weed and pig-weed predominating, and we finally con- 

 ceived the idea of taking one of the old silos that we had abandoned 

 when we built our round silo ten years ago, and filling it with the stuff. 

 We raked it with a side rake and had a Keystone hay loader; it was 

 heavy stuff, but this silo was where we had a horse pitchfork, and we 

 filled that silo with several acres of that stuff; whether or not anything 

 would ever eat it I did not know, but I had got to get it off the ground. 

 I knew if I left it until it came on haying weather the seeds would 

 scatter everywhere. I thought we would make a fertilizer if we did not 

 make anything else. We had all we could draw in at seventy-rrve loads 

 of it. After it began to heat it grew rank and, to tell the whole story, 

 in order to get the full meaning of it, after we had got that partly 

 in the silo I came home from church one day and there was a breeze 

 blowing and I noticed a terrible odor as I drove into the yard. 

 My hired man had been shooting some half-grown cats a few 

 days previous and I thought one of them had got in some building 

 somewhere, but I could not find it, and a few days after that I came 

 to the conclusion the odor came from that silo. 



The 26th day of October we opened that silo and began to feed 

 about 70 head, and when we came away from home yesterday morning 

 there was enough to feed once or twice more. The odor from the silo 

 as we fed it was pretty rank, although but little changed from what it 

 was when we first began to notice it when I came home from church; 

 but one of our neighbors who lives a mile away said they could detect 

 the smell. 



I was afraid it would affect the milk and butter. We have got a 



