METHODS OF PLOWING, ETC. 171 



the place. Out on the railroad track they threw out the yellow clay, 

 and it is yellow clay still. It has been stirred and cultivated, but it 

 has not been manured. 



Mr. Andrews: We treated a piece of soil similar to that last 

 and just loaded the manure on, and after cultivating it it was in very 

 fine shape. 



Mr. Frank Yahnke : I believe in deep culture ; we have got to 

 do it, and if you were enriching the soil less it would be the same 

 thing as if a man had a horse weighing i,8oo pounds and would feed 

 that horse no more grain than he would an 800 pound horse. That 

 same horse would do more work on the same oats than the 1,800 

 pound horse could do, but if the 1,800 pound horse got double the 

 oats he could do twice as much work. We can take this lesson to 

 ourselves in this way : if we do not enrich the soil, although we 

 plow it eight to twelve inches deep, we have accomplished nothing, 

 but if we also put on manure we will get better results, no matter 

 what crop we plant, whether fruit or anything else. 



Mr. T. T. Batcheller : Would it have been necessary to have 

 gone to all that trouble ? Could he not have got the same benefit by 

 turning in hogs ? 



Prof. Robertson : There is nothing objectionable in the hog 

 feature, except I knew I would not be on the ground where I could 

 attend to it sooner, but by cultivating for about two years the ground 

 was put in the best possible shape, and, although it takes lots of 

 work, at the end of three years the ground will be in fine condition. 



Mr. Wyman Elliot : I would like to know what he fed those 

 hogs before they were put on the ground. 



Prof. Robertson : They ate the clover that was on that land 

 until that disappeared ; then they had the timothy grass that followed ; 

 then they were fed corn and milk. There was not a great number, 

 perhaps twenty or such a matter. I expected somebody was going 

 to give me fits about putting on that strawy manure, and I would like 

 to hear somebody go for me about that. 



Mr. S. D. Richardson : I would like to ask if well rotted 

 manure would not have given the same results as the strawy manure. 

 I always get the best results from well rotted manure. 



Prof. Robertson : That would not do, because we never have 

 any of that kind ; it goes out the same year it is made. The second 

 year plowing up the clay, as I did, I think the strawy manure was 

 just the thing to put on to make the mechanical condition of the soil 

 right, and today you would not think that there had ever been any 

 clay in that soil. 



Mr. Wyman Elliot : Did I understand you to say that you did 

 not put on a subsoiler? 



Prof. Robertson: We put on an 18 inch plow and three horses 

 and made them pull as hard as they could. 



Mr. J. S. Trigg (Iowa) : How deep did you plow? 



Prof. Robertson : We had three horses on the plow and a man 

 on the beam all the time, and we made the plow go down as deep as 

 possible. The discing is the important feature. We went over that 

 ground about twenty times with the disc. 



