90 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



during the summer and hand-hoeing once, but you can make 

 more money in most cases by cultivating ten or fifteen times. 

 Tillage helps retain moisture and free much of the plant food 

 naturally in the soil. Deeper ploughing in many instances 

 and a more thorough and constant stirring of the soil is what 

 is needed everywhere. There is too much idle land in the 

 farms of New England for the business to be successful. 

 Every acre of land when it is not growing a commercial crop 

 of value should be growing something to improve itself. Dr. 

 Jenkins was talking yesterday about tobacco culture. That 

 is not a general subject the State over. There are, however, 

 large areas in the Connecticut valley devoted to the cultiva- 

 tion of tobacco. The crop is grown in two or three short 

 months on highly fertilized lands, the crop taken off and that 

 land left idle and bare through September, October, Novem- 

 ber and December, and an immense waste is going on. It 

 seems to me that the farmers shrink their profits in the waste 

 of plant food by leaving the land bare after the crop is taken 

 off. The land should be growing some green crop, in my 

 judgment, if for nothing more than to cover the land and 

 hold what nitrogen is there, but still better if with nitrogen- 

 gathering plants that will add fertility to the soil. 



Farmers are buying too many fertilizers. I suppose the 

 fertilizer men will not forgive me for saying that. I buy 

 hundreds of tons myself every year, but we are all buying 

 too much. Until you have saved every bit on the farm, until 

 you have gathered in all you can gather in from outside 

 sources, do not buy a dollar's worth of fertilizer. After you 

 have saved everything that can be saved and turned every- 

 thing into plant food that can be turned into plant food, if 

 you still see an opportunity to use commercial fertilizer at a 

 profit, buy liberally, but do not buy until you have guarded 

 the other end most thoroughly. I know many who are buy- 

 ing fertilizer and wasting it. 



I am glad to see this exhibit of leguminous crops. I grow 

 on my Connecticut farm, by the way, from ten to twenty- 

 five acre's of these plants annually, and grow them by the 

 hundred acres in the south. I know many acres in the south 

 that have been growing corn continually for fifty years with 

 scarcely any fertilizer whatever. They plant the rows four 



