114 NEBRASKA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



cultural college and went to work on the farm, and nobody told 

 me that you ought to harrow land the same day it was plowed. 

 That was twenty years ago. Nobody told me when you go 

 into a field and plow over that land, and let it lay two or three 

 days in the hot sun before you put the' harrow on it, that you 

 are losing a great deal of moisture which you might save if you 

 follow up with the harrow. I can remember of going on and 

 plowing a piece of land, part of the field, and going onto that a 

 week afterwards, and it was all so lumpy that the harrow would 

 not touch it and going on with the rest of the field, and by acci- 

 dent harrowing right close after the plow, and it broke down as 

 even as could be. And I didn't exactly know why. Just a 

 question of saving the moisture. Following immediately up 

 with the harrow while the soil is moist it breaks down easily, 

 saves you most all the work. You otherwise never get that 

 land down fine unless you do lots of labor and have rain. That 

 is one of the things we teach the boys how to save that moisture 

 in the land. 



For example, we believe that even though you may have lots 

 of rain in a dry season, or in a season like this, that you must 

 prepare for a dry season every spring. Now we recommend for 

 example, if a man is going to list corn upon any kind of 

 land, that does not have too much trash on it to get on to, that 

 land as soon as the frost comes out of it in the spring, we 

 should harrow and double disc it to loosen up the crust and 

 save the moisture in the land; perhaps double disc it twice. In 

 that way you can save moisture enough so that without any 

 rain at all in the spring, your hster will run along in the soil 

 easily. Whereas, otherwise it will throw up in big chunks 

 from lost moisture. In the other case you have saved the 

 moisture and the land is loose and friable. Two horses will 

 work in it as easy as four the other way. 



In tillage, we teach the boys as the corn gets large, they have 

 to use shallow cultivation. I had a young man on our own farm. 

 He had been out in the fields one day without instruction. I 

 happened to see him going in with his horses. I asked him 

 how deep he was cultivating, he said he let the shovels right 

 in. He was thus killing his team, injuring the corn, simply be- 

 cause he did not know that cultivation two and one-half inches 



