542 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. Doc. 



corn, it is for the benefit and a paying proposition for the renter 

 to be very careful in his seed selection, as Prof. Menges spoke of. 

 It will pay him more to look after his seed and the selection of his 

 seed in order to produce a better crop. Now, then in buying a seed 

 that is not adapted to the soil, get corn adapted to this climate, 

 adapted to your soil. Then go through your fields, select your seed 

 corn as Prof. Menges has mentioned, get the right height of your 

 ear, the right stalk and you can produce your ear then after you 

 do all the selecting. In talking about the shape and characteristics 

 of the ear. There are ears that the rows are not perfectly straight, 

 but the ear carries its form out to the end, and carries its seed 

 well, and Prof. Menges says that it may not be the perfect ear, but 

 it has the vitality to it. Now, then after you get all these points 

 in order to raise such kind of a corn stalk you must have some- 

 thing back of it. You must have good soil, you must have enriched 

 your soil. We feed quite a large bunch of stock on our farm and 

 we try to eliminate this burning and wasting of manure which will 

 burn white in twenty-four hours if piled up and it is no earthly 

 good to the soil. Is this right, Professor? 



PEOF. MENGES: Well, I would not make it that strong. The 

 organic matter that is contained even after the nitrogen has been 

 burned out is of some value. 



MK. MITCHELL: That is true. We went and got what they 

 called South Tennessee brown rock, sometimes known as floats. 

 When our stables are cleaned the manure piles are levelled off and 

 there is about six hundred pounds of this rock spread over this 

 manure every day. That manure is left there until spring. We 

 plow our ground for our corn, we spread the ground with this ma- 

 nure, which by this time is in a decomposed state. We take our 

 disk harrow and disk this into the ground. Then roughly harrow- 

 ing; and then we plant our corn. At our last cultivation we put 

 I on about eight quarts of alfalfa and a little red and a little alsike 

 clover. That gives us the oxygen to our soil, and this rock is anal- 

 yzed by the State College of Pennsylvania as giving about twenty- 

 eight per cent, of phosphoric acid. 



THE KOAD QUESTION 



By DR. McCASKEY, Lancaster, Pa. 



When I heard that the question of roads was to be brought up 

 before this meeting I felt rather reluctant at first to come before 

 a body such as this, and I thought possibly there might be some 

 remarks which might be helpful because of personal acquaintance- 

 ship with this subject at first hand. You know the value of good 

 roads; everybody knows it. We have been reading about them for 

 many years, and we all know what it means to be able to drive over 



