300 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



across the place, spending considerable money in building the grade through, 

 and to-day that grade is under water at least three feet and a half deep. 

 After the water came up there and remained permanently this green jack 

 pine around the border began to die, showing that some time in the past this 

 had been a pond of water before, that the water had come there and killed 

 out the jack pine. There is something curious about the matter. It seems 

 to be a periodical thing, but how long the period is I don't know. It shows 

 that jack pine don't flonrish well where its roots are in the water. 



As to what soils produce the three varieties of pine, the white, the Norway 

 and the scrub or jack pine. Along the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania where 

 the jack pines grew, the soil was sandy mixed somewhat with gravel ; in this 

 State we find them on all kinds of soil, as already stated ; in Crawford county 

 the Norway or yellow pine grows on about the best lands we have, that is 

 on the high lands, where the soil is gravel mixed with clay loam and sand, 

 what you may call solid soil. Where the timber is exclusively white pine the 

 soil is lighter and more sandy. This is my experience in the pine lands of 

 Michigan, Pennsylvania and western New York. 



Pres't. Willits: Let us get back to the question under discussion. Have 

 you raised any wheat? 



Mr. Love: Two years ago last summer and fall I cleared up fifteen acres, 

 broke it up and sowed it to wheat. The conditions where quite unfavorable 

 and my crop, after being threshed by a machine, yielded only seven bushels to 

 the acre and I had a big, tall wheat stack too. The next season I broke ten 

 acres of the fifteen, harrowed and cultivated and sowed right on the raw sod 

 without any fertilizer. The Hessian fly troubled it somewhat and I threshed 

 again in the same manner, with a machine that paid a mighty big toll to the 

 ground upon which the machine stood and also to the straw stack and it 

 yielded about eight bushels. Last fall (being the next season) I turned the 

 sod back on the same ten acres and sowed to wheat again on September 12th, 

 and when it went under the snow it made a fine appearance, covered the ground 

 nicely and looked as though it miglit produce a much larger crop next year. 

 As a riile I would prefer to sow a little later, on account of the Hessian fly. 

 They injured the last year's crop a good deal. 



Mr. O'Dell: I have been in Crawford county fourteen years the coming 

 spring. I came up here for the purpose of farming. My land is plains and 

 some of it had this large Norway timber and some white pine, some little 

 hills had what we call jack pine on; there was not much jack pine on my 

 place. I have tried to raise wheat on the pine plains. I never could get over 

 twelve bushels to an acre. I cleared a piece a year ago last summer of twenty 

 acres, stump land; it was Norway with once in a while a white pine and once 

 in a while one of these yellow jack pine, as we call them, that grew to be 

 twelve or fifteen inches through. I cleared the land, broke it up and sowed 

 it to wheat the same year without any fertilizer. This last summer I threshed 

 about two hundred bushels from the twenty acres. I cleared off an acre six 

 years ago and put it into potatoes; the potatoes didn't come up, I broke it 

 up in the fall and sowed it to wheat. I had eight men and boys picking up 

 roots after the drag and made it look like a garden, no fertilizer on it, and I 

 took thirty bushels of wheat off from it. I sowed to clover and timothy right 

 off that fall, after having plowed it and dragged it and picked up the roots 

 again and made it as nice as I could; the next summer I got a ton and a half 

 and the summer following two tons of clover and timothy hay. Then fire 



