No. 105.] 187 



FARM OF WILLIAM BUELL. 



The farm I now occupy lies in the town of Gates, Monroe county; 

 about one mile and a half west of the city of Rochester, in front and 

 through which runs the great Buffalo road and the Rochester and 

 Batavia railroad. 



Before I came in possession it had been very loosely farmed for six 

 or seven years, and what improvements had previously been made 

 upon it in the way of fences, outhouses, &c. had gone into almost 

 ruinous decay. The answers to the prescribed interrogatories will 

 show what improvements I have made, and what its present state of 

 production and tillage is. 



1. My farm consists of three hundred and seventy acres, upon 

 which is fifty-three acres of wood land. Timber, generally hardwood 

 and some chesnut, every acre of which is arable and fit for the plow, 

 without one rod covered with brush, briars or swamp holes. Some 

 twenty acres is a black ash bottom, the black muck from three to 

 five feet thick, which I have used with great profit on the upland. 



2. The soil is a gravelly loam, with a good portion of black ori- 

 ginal vegetable matter, intermixed, a loose gravelly subsoil, which 

 at from four to six feet becomes quite coarse. The few stone found 

 in the soil are small boulders of granite and other primitive founda- 

 tions, red sandstone and blue limestone, the latter predominating. 

 The first regular rock formation is what is called the geodiferous 

 limestone, and lies about twenty feet from the surface. There is not 

 as far as yet discovered, over one acre of hard-pan on the farm. 



3. For improving and keeping the land in heart, I principally depend 

 on the three years' rotation system, with those three indispensables 

 clover, plaster and what manure can be made. Three to four 

 regular plowings for summer fallow. For spring crops, if sward, I 

 fall plow with a dressing of coarse manure in the spring. 



4. I always plow from six to eight inches, the soil has such a quan- 

 tity of decomposing marl, that deep plowing does not render it sterile, 

 but a few years creates a soil of that depth and readiness that ordi- 

 nary droughts do not affect it, and it is in my opinion altogether the 

 best system to pursue. On light and sandy soils, where one depends 

 every year on the vegetable matter one plows in, shallower plowing 

 seems to operate best. 



