FOURTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VI. 403 



up, these cattle will give twenty per cent more for the corn and grass 

 they consume and he has nailed down his paper profits so long as he se- 

 cures these results. 



Another way of nailing down these paper profits is to study the bal- 

 anced ration and learn how to get the full feeding value of every kind of 

 grJain or grass grown on the place. 



In short, whether land retains its present high prices or not depends 

 more on the farmer than on anything else. The rise or fall in interest 

 may affect him, the general prosperity of the country may affect hint, 

 the mutations of politics may change more or less the value of his land 

 from year to year, but if he can increase the actual productiveness of his 

 farm in bushels and tons in proportion to the increase in prices during 

 the last two years, he need be in no hurry to cash in and move to town, 

 live on the interest of the money and possibly shorten his days. For a 

 man who has been active, energetic and pushing can not afford to quit 

 until he is from sixty to seventy years of age, and even then he ought to 

 Keep in close touch with the farm and the boys. 



SMUT IN OATS. 



Wallaces' Farmer. 



We do not know that we can add anything to what wfe have been 

 saying during the past year. Buy a pound of formalin, which, as our old 

 readers know, is a 40 per cent solution of formaldehyde, and can usually 

 be bought at the drug store. Put a pound of this solution into from 

 forty to fifty gallons of water, spread your oats in a thin layer on the 

 barn floors, and sprinkle them with a common sprinkling can or a spray- 

 ing machine, using from one to two gallons per bushel of grain, then put 

 on more oats and sprinkle again, then shovel them into a long pile, say 

 eighteen inches deep, and over this spread gunny sacks or any other 

 covering convenient, and let it remain over night. The next day spread 

 out on the floor, so as to dry out. 



This treatment should not be undertaken in freezing weather. It 

 should be attended to, however, in good weather in March, or at least 

 pre\ious to the time of sowing. Treated in this way, and dried out by 

 shoveling around, they can be sown as usual. When we began investi- 

 gating this subject, we were of the opinion that oats from seed treated 

 this year would not need treatment next. In this, however, we were mis- 

 taken. This treatment, if the formalin is fresh and properly applied, 

 will almost, if not entirely free it from smut. The oats will grow much 

 more vigorously than that not treated, and will yield from five to fifteen 

 bushels more per acre. It is foolish for any man to sow oats without 

 first treating them for smut, the fact being that smut destroys from 10 

 to 20 per cent of the untreated oats sown in any of these central states 

 every year, and sometimes as high as 30 per cent. Not one farmer in 

 ten understands the amount of loss he suffers from not treating his oats 

 now that an easy method has been devised. 



