132 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



anybody undertakes to say that corn fodder is not good for any- 

 thing, he is mistaken. I agree that it is a most valuable 

 article of food ; that you can make as much milk from that, 

 properly prepared, as you can from anything else — more than 

 you can from poor hay. I am sure that our farmers suffer as 

 much from the waste of their corn fodder as anything else. 

 When I have been out in the country and seen those long stalks, 

 as big round as your wrist, lying in barnyards, trodden under 

 foot of cattle, and wasted there, I have looked upon it as one 

 of the most wasteful things of which a New England farmer 

 can be guilty, where winter food is as dear and scarce as it is 

 with us. So I use all my corn fodder ; cut it up and apply hot 

 water to it, until it is in such a condition that my cattle will 

 eat the whole of it, — the large butts, the leaves, and everything 

 else. I think that corn fodder, combined with shorts and a 

 little Indian meal, is about as good an article of food as you 

 can give to a milch cow in winter time. That is what the 

 advocates of fodder corn are talking about to-day, every one of 

 them. Why, even the Commissioner of Agriculture, who has 

 seen fit to come out with his manifesto in defence of something 

 that he knows nothing about, saying that those farmers who 

 undertake to reflect on corn fodder are ignorant, and do not 

 know how to plant it, makes the statement that this food that 

 I have just described is useful, and I agree with him that it is. 

 If you propose to take an acre of land and plant this corn so 

 sparsely that when it grows up, it will keep maturing, and 

 along in the latter part of the season will have an ear upon it, 

 and then cut it up and throw it to your cows, you cannot do a 

 better thing. I agree to that ; but it is then in the condition 

 in which my millet is when I begin to feed it ; it has reached 

 the same point of maturity. 



I dwell upon this, because, although it seems a trifling mat- 

 ter, it is a very important point for farmers to understand who 

 wish to conform themselves to the best law of vegetable economy 

 in feeding their animals ; and it is not a trifling question, in 

 that point of view, at all. I agree that the plant which I have 

 described, brought to that degree of maturity which I have 

 described, is a most valuable and useful thing. I have used it 

 this summer myself. I raised six acres of sweet corn this sum- 

 mer ; it brings us from $150 to $200 an acre, in the market 



