s86 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



Ans. A coarse stubble was plowed in. I do not care what 

 you turn in, you will find the scab will be there doing business 

 years and years afterwards. That is why I say that the future 

 of the potato industry demands that you pass a law forcing 

 every man to treat seed tubers as he puts them into the ground. 



Ques. Do you know about the lime of the Edsom Cement 

 company ? 



Ans. I think they are selling a straight ground limestone. 

 Whether they sell other products I do not know. 



Ques. In regard to plowing clover in, some of the dairymen 

 here think it is better to cut the second crop and feed it to the 

 cows. They think it is worth too much for feed for cows to 

 turn under. What do you think about this? 



Ans. I quite agree that wherever it is possible, here in New 

 England where the roughage is so valuable, we should feed the 

 clover to the cows. 



On some old soil in Rhode Island which, after growing four 

 or five crops of Indian corn, would only produce a crop six 

 inches high and in using an ordinary amount of commercial 

 fertilizers you could get only 60 bushels of potatoes and 15 

 bushels of corn, after liming it and practicing a three years 

 rotation we are now able to get 380 bushels of marketable pota- 

 toes and as high as 60 to 91 bushels of shelled Rhode Island Cap 

 corn. That means a wonderful improvement and I believe one of 

 the great troubles with all the middle West where they cry for 

 more humus is that they have been practicing a short rotation. 

 If they had kept on one year more and had put clover with the 

 timothy they would have had an enormous amount of humus. 

 You can build up a soil without any stable manure at all if you 

 run about three years in six that kind of a mixture of clover 

 and grass. I will admit there is a difference between the dairy- 

 man and the potato farmer. The dairyman who is making 

 enough profit on his milk is doing all in feeding the clover. 

 The potato farmer is probably doing all right in plowing it in. 



