256 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



but I think the men who go into sorghum will come out of it 

 with the loss of their time an^ money. 



Mr. Yeomans. It would be a very difficult matter indeed, 

 to make any of the sorghum growers in Columbia believe that 

 it is not vastly more profitable for them to grow sorghum and 

 have it manufactured, than to go to any store and purchase 

 the syrup. In regard to the quantity raised to the acre, I 

 regret very much that I have not at hand the figures that 

 were given to me by Mr. Brown. I am very confident that 

 some of them were much higher than any named by your 

 Secretary ; but still, those amounts vary very much with the 

 season. For instance, the season just passed, the juice indi- 

 cated a much lower degree of saccharine matter than is usual. 

 Mr. Brown was unable to account for that. He had the 

 impression, from the great heat in the latter part of the sea- 

 son, that the juice would contain more saccharine matter, but 

 the test of the saccharometer proved it only to be about two- 

 thirds of what it was the year before, and in some cases only 

 one-half. So you see from the same quantity of cane this 

 year there would not be over two-thirds or one-half what was 

 produced last year. 



Mr. Gold. Mr. Bill asks me more particularly for costs 

 and receipts. In the case of my cane, I had a very heavy 

 crop of seed. Now, what with the pressure of business, and 

 our ignorance of the methods of handling it, and so on, we 

 did not take any care of that seed at all, except to draw it 

 home by the cart-body full and strew it in the barnyard, 

 and let the poultry consume it, which they did ; of course, we 

 did not take that into account, but there were thirty bushels 

 of good heavy seed, worth half a dollar a bushel for feed, that 

 we did not take into account. Although we can not give the 

 figures in dollars and cents of the cost of the crop and the 

 returns, yet we are so far satisfied with the result that we 

 propose to continue the experiment still further. Two farmers 

 in Sharon, living twelve miles from me, raised little plots of 

 sorghum this year ; I don't know how many rods ; they 

 couldn't tell me ; they said they only put in a little patch. 



