34 ESSEX SOCIETY. 



seven acres. Fifty-two acres of mowing, tillage, and orchard- 

 ing, the remainder, pasture, with the exception of a few acres of 

 wood-land. He has two barns, one thirty by forty feet, used 

 exclusively for storage of hay, and one eighty-four by fortyj 

 with a cellar under the whole, both of which he usually 

 fills every year with English hay, of which he sells from forty 

 to sixty tons per year. In his large barn is kept his stock, and 

 in the cellar his swine, working over and mixing the manure. 

 He has experimented, to some extent, with raw and cooked 

 food, for fattening swine, and is of opinion that it may pay the 

 cost for cooking roots, but will not for grain or meal. The 

 produce of his orchard, the present year of great scarcity, 

 was one hundred and twenty barrels of winter fruit, picked 

 from the trees. There is, of field land, a proportion well adapt- 

 ed to the growth of corn and grain, of which, the committee 

 saw fine crops growing. He has given more attention, of late, 

 to the production of hay, which, in his opinion, gives him a 

 better profit with less labor. Much of his field land is well 

 adapted to grass ; a proportion of it being reclaimed meadow, 

 which does not admit, or require the plough, as it is kept high- 

 ly productive by occasional top dressing. Other portions are 

 moist, but admit of ploughing at dry seasons of the year, which 

 he usually does once in about six years, as soon as the crop of 

 hay is off. He then carts on about twenty loads of compost 

 manure to the acre, harrows and rolls smoothly, and sows Tim- 

 othy and Red Top seed, which never fail of a full crop the next 

 season. He is in favor of sowing grass seed in autumn, rather 

 than in the spring, with grain, on dry land. 



His pasture is on a high, smooth swell of land, where the 

 committee had a fine opportunity of witnessing the good effects 

 ■. f gypsum as a fertilizer. Comparing his land where gypsum 

 •,vas applied, with other land adjoining, of apparent like quality, 

 where gypsum had not been used, the difference was truly sur- 

 prising. Although the season was dry, there was a luxuriant 

 growth of white clover, covering the ground where gypsum had 

 been used. His method of applying is, to sow early in the 

 spring, from one and a half bushels to two bushels, per acre, ev- 

 ery year. There were in this pasture about twenty head of 



