104 AGRICUI.TURE OF MAINE. 



becomes necessary to cut the amount down, but I think a Hght 

 coat appUed frequently to the land is giving better results than 

 a heavy coat applied less frequently. I think the more often 

 we get over the land the better, even if we cut the amount in 

 halves or thirds. Here is where our mechanical devices, such 

 as the manure spreader, are aiding us. That is, of course, allied 

 very closely to the question of farm labor, the scarcity of which 

 we hear so much about. We can only meet that objection by 

 adopting these labor saving appliances. 



Now making the land produce more per acre means the keep- 

 ing of more cows on the same number of acres. There might 

 be several classes of land which we could find in this section. 

 The first would be land which is adaptable to hoed crops ; which 

 is free enough from stones or surplus moisture so that it can 

 be used in a regular rotation of three or four years, land suit- 

 able for growing potatoes or corn. Then there is a lot of land 

 that is too damp and has too many stones just below the surface 

 to allow it to be plowed conveniently. That land we must 

 handle in a somewhat different way. Probably as good a 

 method of handhng this land as any is one that I have seen 

 followed in New York, topdressing with a light coat of barnyard 

 manure, about eight or ten spreader loads per acre, every year, 

 and at the same time using a small quantity of clover seed and 

 working it in with a light harrowing of some kind, either with 

 a special brush harrow or the ordinary smoothing harrow. I 

 have seen this done in several instances with marked success. 

 There is another kind of land which is too rough to be handled 

 in either of these ways, or perhaps too steep, but land which is 

 admirably suited to the growing of apples. All of you here in 

 this part of Maine know what good apples are, and why don't 

 you raise more of them? If you should go to certain parts of 

 New York you would find that the farmers are handling their 

 orchards in an intensive manner, bringing up the old orchards 

 and putting out new ones. In Rochester, N. H., there is a 

 farmer who has 12 four-year-old Baldwin apple trees which 

 this year produced four barrels to a tree. He tilled the land 

 just as he would for any other crop. 



I am looking all the time for the best farmers I can find, and 

 studying their methods. I have not time to make more than 

 passing mention of a few of them. One farmer in Central Ver- 



