S62 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



The first loss that I wish to call your attention to is the universal and care- 

 less waste of farm food. I believe it to be the greatest one sustained by the 

 farmer, and was in hopes Selden would recommend legislation to prevent it. 



You will all agree in this, that oats or its equivalent sustains that noble 

 animal, the horse, while he plows and cultivates your fields. If he is supplied 

 with as much food as is required we find him in as fine condition for work at 

 the end of the season as when he began. 



Allow me to contrast the care you bestow upon the food of the horse and 

 the care you give the food of the farm. You watch with eager eye the field 

 of ripening grain, and with almost mathematical precision you put in the 

 reaper. You house and thresh with as much care as you do the food for your 

 own table. You place it inside of strong walls and keep it more secure than 

 the prisoner in our county jail. You deal it out to the horse in as even doses 

 and with as much precision as your doctor docs the poison to his suffering 

 patients, and the result is that the horse is kept up in condition to make 

 ample returns for all food consumed. 



Having pointed out the usual method of caring for the food of domestic 

 animals, we will now call your attention to the usual treatment of food for the 

 farm. Do not imagine that 1 intend this for some other locality — I wish it to 

 apply directly to Tuscola county. 



Do you see that barn with a manure pile at each end, a short distance 

 from Vassar? Have you ever been by there when they were smoking like coal 

 pits? A short distance from here we find a farmer manufacturing a quantity 

 of number one farm food by feeding young cattle for beef. The food for the 

 cattle is securely kept in the barn, and the food for the farm is chucked out 

 through holes and is being leached under the eaves of the same building. 

 Passing along we come to a fine barn nearly one hundred feet in length. Not 

 only the hay and grain are securely kept but there is a commodious cellar for 

 the safe keeping of vegetables; and where do we find the food for the farm? 

 It is wheeled out into the yard to firefang in a pile, or spread out to be 

 bleached and leached by sun and rain. 



If we should continue through our county we would find the farm food in 

 conditions similar to the ones I have described. 1 think writers on this ques- 

 tion generally agree that the liquid portion is about equal to the solid. If this 

 be the case is not the construction of our stable floors such that a large per 

 cent (and nearly all that is in condition to enter the soil as plant food) passes 

 through the floor and is lost under the barn. 



Now, gentlemen, isn't this true? How many barns and yards can you show 

 me where this portion of the farmers' bank (I think it should be called 

 national) is not running to waste. In the Farmer's Review of May 11th, 

 1883, we read that in the Atlantic and Middle States the farmers annually 

 purchase five hundred thousand tons of fertilizers, at a cost of twenty millions 

 of dollars. And why this enormous expense? The soil by nature is good 

 — and by proper treatment should improve, or at least hold its fertility. We 

 venture an answer — that those farms have suffered for years from the same 

 cause that yours are endangered now, from a careless, indifferent treatment 

 of farm food. In short you are contradicting in practice what you advocate 

 in theory. 



We have something over three thousand farms in our county, the average 

 being a fraction above eighty acres each. The average number of cattle to 

 each (including cows) is five. The average number of sheep on each farm is 



