28 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



result. I selected, within half a mile of the College, two 

 l^ieces of land that were thrown away, because they were not 

 fit for any farming purpose. We took them simply as com- 

 mon lands, because nobody claimed them as farm-lands. One 

 piece contained one hundred and fifty-four rods, and the other 

 one hundred and ninety-two rods. The materials Avere applied 

 on each of them according to the quantity of land to make 

 fifty bushels of corn to the acre, in precisely the ordinary way 

 of farming ; no plot was selected to test what the land would 

 naturally bear. The plot which had one hundred and fifty- 

 four rods of land yielded sixty-four bushels of shelled corn, 

 or ninety-eight bushels to the acre. The plot which had one 

 hundred and ninety-two rods in it yielded ninety bushels of 

 shelled corn, or within a fraction of seventy-five bushels of 

 corn to the acre. The land was worked, as I say, in the way 

 in which farmers ordinarily farm it, — simply taking the land 

 and taking the material to make a certain amount of corn, and 

 throwing it on, without any regard to what the land would do, 

 — and that was the yield. 



Now, gentlemen, indulge me in saying this one thing: the 

 plot which produced seventy-five bushels of corn to the acre, 

 and the plot which last year (1874) produced sixty-two bush- 

 els of corn to the acre, with no barn-yard manure, — it has not 

 had any since the memory of man runneth, — this same plot — 

 poor, cold, sandy as it could be — produced last year sixty-two 

 bushels, and this year it produced seventy-tive bushels to the 

 acre. That land has not been hurt any by the process. 



Now, some gentlemen will say, "All this was done under 

 your own eye, and you had Dr. Goessmann, the professor of 

 chemistry, right by those fields, and he could analyze the 

 materials you used, and you knew just what you were doing; 

 but we could not do it on our farms." Very likely. But 

 indulge me, gentlemen, in savinoj this : that what has been 

 done on the College Farm has been done on more than two 

 hundred farms this year, scattered all the way from Vermont 

 to North Carolina. 



After the publication of those experiments at Westfield, a 

 year ago, numerous applications were made to me for the 

 formulas of the materials. I do not know who has bought 

 the materials, and used them, but the formulas were sent to a 



