260 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



five tons of corn-fodder is a good crop. That was the stand- 

 ard I used, not fifteen. There the gentleman would place 

 me wrong before you. 



Mr. Ware. Excuse me. I said fifteen or twenty. 



Mr. Sanborn. I did state that that was the amount 

 raised this year ; but at the same time I preferred to use as 

 the standard twenty-five tons in order to meet any criticism 

 that might come from such arguments ; and I also said that 

 Mr. Cheever had raised as much dry matter from millet this 

 year, per acre, as is raised in twenty-five tons corn-fodder. I 

 maintain that these results show accurately that dry food is 

 substantially or fully as valuable as green food. Further- 

 more, I did say that I had fed from eighty to a hundred 

 pounds of corn-fodder, for three separate years, to cows 

 against hay, the exact weights of milk being taken (and they 

 say that two pounds of ensilage are equal to one pound of 

 hay) ; and yet, in that exact experiment, carried on for three 

 years, that quantity of corn-fodder, varying from eighty to 

 a hundred pounds, even the hundred pounds, did not make 

 so much milk as twenty pounds of hay. That is definite and 

 decisive, and right to the point, it seems to me. I found, as 

 regards superiority of green crops, the same result also from 

 the root-crops. There is no scientist behind all that. I am 

 not a scientist : I am engaged in practical farming. That is 

 all I have to say on these points. 



Now, I am not talking as an attorney or advocate. I have 

 no interest one way or the other. I farm a very large farm ; 

 and there are very few farmers in New England who have 

 more at stake than I have personally. I do not believe there 

 is a farmer in New England who would be more glad to see 

 the enthusiastic predictions of the believers in ensilage fully 

 realized than myself. Indeed, it was with the deepest regret 

 that I found that this new revelation was not to fulfil the 

 expectations of those who so warmly preached it. We have 

 got to meet stern facts. A few years ago steaming food was 

 going to revolutionize our whole system of farming ; and yet 

 a gentleman who had a very extensive herd of cows told 

 me that he had met with various difficulties in consequence 

 of the use of steamed food. So, too, of muck. There was 

 a time when it was supposed that every farmer who had a 

 muck-bed could make himself rich. It was thought that 



