142 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



would turn it six inches, and I am now working upon that 

 principle. After the land is turned, and through the winter, 

 the manure is to be applied to it, and there it lies, until the 

 spring comes round, about the time when I want to plant the 

 crops ; then I usually turn the manure under three of four 

 inches. That is, for my root crops, for spring wheat, for barley, 

 and SHch crops, I should put the manure on in that way. We 

 generally put our corn upon quite light land, because sandy 

 land is worked much better than heavier lands, and the corn 

 crop will do better there. 



Now, this subject leads us to inquire what plough we had 

 rather use. We must have a plough to plough with. I have 

 tried a great number of ploughs, and I have watched the differ- 

 ent ploughing exhibitions throughout the State for the last five 

 years pretty carefully, to see the kinds of plough used, the 

 manner of ploughing ; and I have always noticed that a plough 

 with a short mould-board, if the mould-board was very concave, 

 and the land stiff and hard, would throw the top edge of the 

 sward off before it was ready to leave the convexity of the 

 mould-board. It will roll along, leaving a place where a horse 

 would break his leg if he undertook to go crosswise of the 

 piece, if he put his foot down into that deep hole. I saw the 

 ploughs at the exhibition here this fall, and the Michigan 

 seemed to work better than some others on hard soil ; but our 

 lands are light, sandy loams, and the Michigan would- be of no 

 use. If you put two or three inches of the surface down seven 

 inches, you would never hear of it again. You have got to wait 

 until you can make some new soil above before you can get a 

 crop. Therefore, I do not like that. There was the Morse 

 plough, which seemed to be just convex enough. From the 

 time it lifted the sod, it continued to give it a regular curve 

 until it turned bottom up. I obtained one, and tried it in 

 competition with the Doe plough and the Universal plough. 

 There were over twenty men in a lot where the sward had not 

 been turned for the last six years, and the last time, or the time 

 before the last that it was cultivated, it raised sixty-five or sixty- 

 seven bushels of shelled corn to the acre, and it would cut three 

 tons of hay to the acre. You can see that that must have been 

 good soil, and therefore the sward quite deep, and full of 

 twitch-grass. I had two horses, one four and a half years old. 



