144 [Senate 



lay of hand labor — the subsoiler being substituted for the pick, and 

 the team performing the work of at least a half dozen men. 



Wherever ditches are required, on land sufficiently firm to carry a 

 team, the subsoiler is employed to great advantage. The team needed 

 is a yoke of oxen — the yoke, a piece of scantling long enough to 

 allow each ox sufficient room to travel outside of the ditch — and 

 lengthening the chain, enables you to plow without inconvenience 

 in a ditch two feet deep. 



My experiments have not been sufficiently accurate or extensive to 

 enable me to state the actual saving, but I am fully satisfied not only 

 that the amount of hard labor is materially abridged, but that the 

 necessity for spading, the hardest part of that labor, is obviated en- 

 tirely. 



The plow used in making the following experiments, is of the 

 manufacture of Ruggles, Nourse & Mason, of Worcester, Mass., pro- 

 cured from Pruyn, Wilson & Vosburg, of Albany. It is a substan- 

 tial, neat and highly finished implement, as are all the articles of their 

 make that I have happened to see. 



Experiment J\''o. 1. 

 May 16th. Plowed two acres — in potatoes last season, planted 

 on the sod — soil, a sandy loam, six or eight inches deep — subsoU 

 somewhat clayey. One half of this piece was subsoiled to the depth 

 of eight inches below the bottom of the soil plow furrow, making the 

 whole depth of the culture about fourteen inches. After a dressing 

 of ten loads of rotten dung to the acre, one-half was sown to wheat, 

 and the other to oats, and finished with grass seeds and the roller. 



Experiment JVo. 2. 

 May 17th. Subsoiled a strip four rods wide, through a field plant- 

 ed with corn the 19th. Soil, deep sandy loam, with occasional 

 gravel knolls. 



Experiment JVo. 3. 



Green-sward last year, and planted with potatoes. Soil, similar to 

 No. 1. Plowed 24th May, and half of it subsoiled — sown with oats 

 same day, and treated in all respects like No. 1. 



The corn crop on No. 2 was good, but had no advantage either in 

 growth or yield over adjacent parts of the field. The experiment 

 was made with the expectation that it would be labor lost, and so it 

 was. But with respect to Nos. 1 and 3, better hopes were at first 



