266 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



His ditches are dug only two and a half feet deep, and thir- 

 teen inches wide at the top, sloping inward to the bottom, where 

 they are just wide enough to take the tile. 



Mr. Johnston says, tile-draining pays for itself in two seasons 

 sometimes in one. Thus, in 1847, he bought a piece of ten 

 acres, to get an outlet for his drains. It was a perfect quag- 

 mire, covered with coarse aquatic grasses, and so unfruitful, 

 that it would not give back the seed sown upon it. In 1848 a 

 crop of corn was taken from it, which was measured and found 

 to be eighty bushels per acre, and worth at that time, one 

 dollar per bushel ; this crop paid not only all expense of drain- 

 age, but the first cost of the land. Another piece of twenty 

 acres, adjoining the farm of the late John Delafield, was wet, 

 and would never yield more than ten bushels of corn to the 

 acre. This was drained at a great cost, of thirty dollars per 

 acre. The first crop after this was eighty-three bushels an acre. 

 It was weighed and measured by Mr. Delafield, and the county 

 society awarded a premium to Mr. Johnston. Eight acres and 

 some rods of this land on one side averaged ninety-four bushels, 

 or the trifling increase of eighty-four bushels per acre, over 

 what it would bear before those insignificant clay pipes were 

 buried in the ground. 



Mr. Johnston says he never saw one hundred acres in any 

 one farm, but a portion of it would pay for draining. Mr. 

 Johnston is a hard-working Scotch farmer, who commenced a 

 poor man, borrowed money to drain his lands, has gradually 

 extended his operations, and is now at seventy-five years of age, 

 written to by strangers in every State in the Union for informa- 

 tion, not only in draining matters, but all cognate branches of 

 farming. He sits in his homestead, a veritable Humboldt, in his 

 way, dispensing information, cheerfully, through our agricul- 

 tural papers and to private correspondents. His opinions are 

 therefore worth more than those of a host of theoretical men, 

 who write without practice. 



Henry S. Porter, 



For the Committee. 



This Essay was read and laid over under the rule, when the 

 Board adjourned. 



