44 Farmer £ Institutes. 



govern ni eut should reduce it, especially that part of it that bears so heavily Upon 

 formers. He had raised beets with small labor, getting a bushel of them from 

 ground four feet square, at a cost of not over three cents. 



Alfred Peck of Great Barrington. questioned if the prosperity of the beet su- 

 gar industry in France was owing to bounties offered by the first Napoleon, and 

 M.I, Wheeler said that it was. Beet sugar cost eighty cents per pound in 

 Fvauce in 1811, and now she stands first in the world in cheap beet sugar. 



Mr. Beebe regarded the beet crop as the best root crop for stock purposes,and 

 the cost of raising was small, if not hoed too much. 



Joseph A. Kline of Egremont, raised 600 bushels of beets on a half acre last 

 fall, and said that the stock farmer should raise beets. He fertilized the half 

 acre with dirt from under a stable floor; and 400 pounds each of phosphate and 

 salt. He feeds six quarts of beets and four quarts of a mixture of cob meal, 

 wheat, shorts, rye and oats, to each cow once a day, besides hay and straw 

 twice a day. 



G. H. Wheeler, of Monterey, liked carrots better than any other root crop. 



President Kellogg preferred to feed mangolds for quantity of milk. He 

 raises beets on land used for tobacco in the previous year, and needs little or no 

 fertilizer. 



W. H. Day of Great Barrington, said that he had experimented with his milch 

 cows in feeding beets with gi-ain. The extra amount of milk obtained made the 

 beets worth nine cents a bushel to him. Also, hay cut in the last of June made 

 three quarts of milk more per cow, than hay cut late in August. 



Mr. Beebe thought that moderate feeding of roots was best, for a great quan- 

 tity of them make's the cow's blood thin. They were appetisers and made di- 

 gestion thorough. 



Lester T. Osborne of Alford, got the best results from his milch cows by 

 feeding meal, one-third oats and two-thirds corn, two quarts night and morn- 

 ing, and by cutting his grass from the last of June to the middle of July. 



M. I. Wheeler was of the opinion that farmers' experiments were worthless 

 for want of exactness, and from failure to take into account all elements. He 

 thought that hay has the most nutriment when grass is cut at the maturity of the 

 seed. When roots are feed, cattle eat just as much hay as they do without 

 them, and in this Mr. Day concurred, though Mr. Bidwell declared that a cow 

 will eat two tons of hay in a season without roots, while one and a half tons are 

 sufficient with them. 



At noon a bountiful collation was served in the hall, provided by the attendant 

 farmers. Twenty or thirty ladies were also present and social enjoyment 

 reigned for two hours, while all were waiting for the arrival of John E. Kus- 

 sell, secretary of the State Board of Agriculture, who had been detained in Lee. 



Secretary Bussell was on the stage soon after lunch, and greatly entertained 

 the meeting with an address of a kind rarely listened to. His address was elo- 

 quent, classical, Biblical, agricultural, spicy, humorous, statistical and practical. 

 It was so pleasing that the farmers were loth to let him stop. He expressed his 

 regret that the Institutes in Western Massachusetts had not become more popu- 

 lar, but said that he stood before the largest one he had seen in this part of the 

 state. The Institutes of the Berkshire Society at Pittsfield were almost a 

 failure. In speaking of Agriculture, he remarked among notable men rising 



