FARMING WITH DYNAMITE. 119 



There are two different ways of breaking boulders. One way is what 

 is known as mud capping, and is done in this way: 



Here is a boulder that we want to break. Now if there should hap- 

 pen to be a little depression in the boulder, take a few sticks of dyna- 

 mite and cover it with mud, first putting your fuse down close to the 

 dynamite, or right in with it, leaving about two feet stick out, or more 

 if you want to, and then put the mud all around it and on top of it. The 

 fuse is thus protruding, and the next thing to do is to light the fuse and 

 run. You wonder how that can blow the rock to pieces, and why it 

 would not just blow the mud off and do nothing further. Well, here is 

 the reason: That mud holds the shock to the rock. The mud is of 

 course full of water, and water is one of the best conductors we have. 



The other way to break boulders is when this boulder is on the 

 ground, and when you want to lift it up, as well as breaking it. Put 

 it on or under the boulder just like you would under a stump, as I ex- 

 plained before. That is what we call &nakc-holing, and you put it in that 

 way and just lift or force it out. 



In planting trees, we have another use for dynamite. This thing is 

 getting to be a great industry down in the Ozark country of Missouri. 

 You folks do not have hard pan like they do there. I said something 

 about hard pan in Topeka last week, and they took exception to it. I 

 said that was all right, "let's call it concrete then." You can imagine 

 the advantage in planting trees with dynamite in that kind of a soil 

 over the method of digging holes for them, for so many reasons which 

 i will not try to explain. 



Here is a tree to be planted. Now we will say that tree wants to be 

 planted about eighteen inches below the surface of the ground. We will 

 place half a stick of 2.5 per cent Red Cross dynamite in that hole, and 

 tamp the stick. We have the fuse sticking out here, and we have it 

 tamped just as tight as we can. Well, touch it off and let it go. That 

 explosion comes out, and goes down as well, and in going down, it 

 loosens up the soil for the roots for a radius of from eight to sixteen 

 feet in diameter. And if it is just ordinary dirt, it will go from six to 

 eight inches down. All that is necessary from that time on is to take 

 three or four spadefuls of dirt out, and you have the ground ready for 

 the tree. This loosening up of the ground on either side will give the 

 roots a chance to grow immediately. You can see the great advantage 

 of that. For if it is dug with a spade, of course the sides are packed 

 and it does not give the roots a chance to grow, that the loose dirt 

 brought about by the dynamite explosion does. 



Subsoil blasting, or hard pan blasting, as we sometimes call it, is 

 the next important thing I will take up. We call this top soil, the soil 

 which has been used up, and has not very much more plant life left in 

 it, we call that, the top soil. Well, in the subsoil blasting you get at the 

 soil that the plow can not reach, you get at the hard pan. I have heard 

 of instances where plows can be gotten under the ground twenty-two 



