GRASS CULTURE FOR THE SALE OF HAY. 331 



sell from the farm, at least two-thirds of the stock ; and I have an- 

 nually sold since, two-thirds of the hay grown on the farm. That 

 course might not do so well here, because you may not be so 

 favorably situated to sell hay as I was then; but the raising of 

 grass will do as well for you here, and if the; grass does not.sell 

 you can feed it to your stock. In adopting this course I had any 

 quantity of advice from the citizens of the vicinity in which I 

 lived, and I had, most decided warning from my father, that such 

 a course would result in running the farm out. At that time we 

 had one field of fifty acres; another of seventeen acres, and 

 another of eight acres. The small fields my father kept to cut for 

 his horse and cow. The seventeen acres were sold, and there 

 was left to me the field of fifty acres. After continuing my course 

 of selling most of my hay for six years, and never buying a cord of 

 barnyard manure, and never but one car load of ashes, I am proud 

 to say that I succeeded in raising more hay from that single field 

 than my father ever raised iu one year from all his fields together. 

 The last year I owned it our county society offered a premium of 

 fifty dollars for the best cultivated farm in the county, I am proud 

 to say further, that after continuing the system of farming which 

 I have related to you, I received that premium. In arriving at 

 this condition of things I say also that I had made the farm profit- 

 able, because I avoided paying out much for labor. I had been 

 over the country considerably, and 1 had come to the conclusion 

 that our brothers in the West could raise corn and wheat there 

 much easier than we could here ; and that our position as the 

 manufacturing section of the republic indicated the raising of grass 

 as the most profitable style of farming for us, and I turned my 

 attention to that. 



My practice is to do most of my farming in the fall. I have 

 raised hardly a bushel of corn in my fieid, and have never raised 

 anything in mj' pastures. Immediately after cutting the grass, 

 and it is cut very early, in July if possible, I commence plowing, 

 beginning on my low land first and turn it over, and if it is very 

 low (as I have never underdrained) I plow it up in beds, harrow 

 and seed it down with an application of bone, Peruvian guano or 

 superphosphate. On my first farm, the one to which I more par- 

 ticularly alluded, I have never brought any manure and never but 

 one car load of ashes and nothing else but ground bone, Peruvian 

 guano and superphosphate. My endeavor has been to practice 

 economy and to make money in this way. In cultivating the first 



