118 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



•wish to address you, but we could not have it because we had no elec- 

 tricity. But altho I am not an artist, and as a matter of fact never drew 

 a picture in my life, I will endeavor to show a few things on the board, 

 so that you may the better understand the things about which I am talk- 

 ing. 



Now in blowing out stumps, which is one of the most important 

 branches of farming with dynamite, we always try to get the dynamite 

 where it will do the most good, and have the most effect. Now for ex- 

 ample, we- will suppose this is a stump here (indicating a figure drawn 

 on the blackboard) and here is a tap root. The tap root is the main root 

 of the tree, just as the trunk of the tree is the main part above the sur- 

 face, altho some trees do not have a very pronounced tap root. Now we 

 will suppose this is the tap here, and a single charge of dynamite placed 

 here at this tap root would not raise it so well, so as a remedy for thav 

 we would suggest that electricity should be used. 



The next thing we will do is to drive a hole down here (indicating) 

 on one side of it, and then go over here (indicating) and drive another 

 hole down here, and get down to that tap root. Now to the rear we will 

 put in another one, and at the bottom of each one of these holes here 

 we will take a small piece of dynamite, about an inch and a quarter thick. 

 You can get it in any diameter, for that matter, from three-fourths of an 

 inch on up, but we would recommend the inch and a quarter, and it 

 weighs a half a pound to the stick. Ti^e will take about this much (in- 

 dicating) of the cap- fuse, and put it in the end. No tamping at all, and 

 that will make a pocket down there at the bottom of each stump. 



I have been asked the cost of clearing an acre of land, and I will 

 say that that is an unfair question in a great many ways. For example, 

 we do not know whether or not the stumps are green, or dead, or have 

 a tap root, or what. Now you take a twenty-four inch stump, you take 

 a dead one, and it should be pulled cut with about four or five sticks 

 of dynamite, because it has the extra radius that the twelve-inch stump 

 did not have. Now you take the gi'een stump, their roots are just ex- 

 actly like a piece of steel, andd you would have a terrible hard time with 

 any other way of removing them, and as a matter of fact it takes more 

 dynamite to remove them than the roots of a dead stump. But we do 

 know this, that we can prove conclusively that the stumps can be re- 

 moved much cheaper with dynamite than they could be in any other 

 way, or with a stump puller. I know of one red wood stump in Cali- 

 fornia that took four hundred and fifty pounds of dynamite, but that is 

 an exception. But then, too, that was not dynamite, it was black pow- 

 der and simpler to shoot. We pour that in the bottom of the hole and 

 we use one stick of dynamite as a primer. Now you see the black 

 powder, being slower acting than the dynamite, it lifts the; stump right 

 up out of the ground, and the dynamite, being so much faster, some- 

 . times tears as well as lifts it out, and hence you do not get as good or 

 even the desired results. It might bring only one-half of the stump out 

 in some cases, you must know how to choose between them. Therefore 

 you get much better results than where they are both used together. 



