No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 341 



tobacco. Now, there may be some exceptions to that, where the 

 man instead of plowing corn stubble for tobacco is plowing under 

 sod ; but in general that is our rotation. Aside from that we do 

 something el.se in Lancaster county that a good many do not do, and 

 that is we feed a great deal of stock. In Lancaster county alone 

 there is fed annually over 40,000 head of steers. Instead of selling 

 our corn, selling our hay and our straw the farmer goes to our 

 stockyard — Lancaster has a very good stock market — and buys a 

 stable full of cattle. He buys from September to November and 

 takes them home and stables them and feeds the corn and hay and 

 beds the straw. In the spring the fat cattle are ready for the block. 

 Instead of getting cash, however, for his straw and hay and corn he 

 has a large heap of manure which he puts back on the land and in 

 that way he is keeping on the farm almost everything that he grows. 

 Practically the only two things he sells are his wheat and tobacco. 

 He follows that system in order to get plenty of manure, and instead 

 of our soil getting poorer j^ear after year here, as it did in other 

 tobacco sections of the country, it is getting better because the 

 humus supply is not going down. 



Tobacco grown in different sections of the United States is used 

 for different purposes and classified according to the purposes for 

 which used ; as, for instance, where they are growing a very fine 

 leaf that is adapted for cigar wrappers, they grow what is called 

 wrapper tobacco ; another place plug tobacco and cigarette and pipe 

 tobacco. Here in Pennsylvania we grow what is used for cigar filler, 

 and there is an established market and demand for Pennsylvania 

 tobacco. It is called cigar filler tobacco and whenever the name 

 Pennsylvania is applied to tobacco you can be sure that means cigar 

 filler tobacco. 



The crop is started about the first week in April. The farmer 

 makes a seed bed about six feet wide and as long an necessary, accord- 

 ing to how many acres he is going to set out, and about the first 

 week in April he sows his seed. One peculiar thing about the 

 tobacco crop is the fact that the seed is very cheap. For fifty cents 

 you can buy enough to grow $700 or $800 worth of tobacco. The 

 proportion of the cost of seed to the value of the crop is quite dif- 

 ferent from that of most crops. I have here a vial of seed (showing) 

 and you san see how very fine it is. There is enough seed there to 

 plant 20 acres and yet that seed came from one stalk. Eight along 

 this line I want to mention where they are doing a little improve- 

 ment work along the line of seed and seed cleaning. The farmers 

 clean their seed wheat, but many of them don't stop to think about 

 cleaning tobacco seed and in this way there is a lot of light chaff seed 

 gotten which will give poor plants with little vitality. Now the 

 United States government has devised a machine by which it can 

 blow out the light chaff seed. They have a machine or glass tube about 

 five feet long with fine wire gauze on the bottom and pour the seed 

 in and force air through and it takes the chaff out and leaves the 

 heavy seed in there. It makes the seed very nice and clean, and it 

 will germinate more uniformly in the seedbed and give more uni- 

 formity of plants. He sows the seed on top of the soil, usunlly 

 mixing about a tablespoonful of seed into a two gallon sprinkling 

 can full of water and then sprinkling the water evenly upon the 

 bed. An even tablespoonful will sow about 1 square rod. Over 



