No. 4.] BUSINESS SIDE OF AGRICULTURE. 91 



and a half or five feet apart, and afterward cultivate it two 

 or three times, and sow cow peas between the rows and let 

 them grow and fill up the whole row with a solid mass of 

 green three or four feet high and let it die down ; the next 

 spring they plant the corn where the cow peas were the pre- 

 vious year, and plant cow peas where the corn was. They 

 continue in this way year after year. Probably the yield 

 of corn would be improved by the addition of potash and 

 phosphoric acid. But this is a tremendous lesson in econ- 

 omy of production, and I believe that something of the kind 

 might be practised here with good effect on certain of our 

 farm crops, especially if by better ploughing and more thor- 

 ough tillage we aimed to free more of the mineral elements 

 now locked up in all our soils in such abundant quantities. 



I spoke a little while ago about the necessity of a more 

 thorough culture of the soil. I got that ground into me in 

 my early boyhood. I have been at farm work ever since I 

 was able to work at all, and since I was eleven years old I 

 have not attended school in summer. In those early days 

 my brother and myself planted an old pasture with sweet 

 corn, about two acres ; when it began to come up, the land 

 was full of witch grass. I do not know as I can give the 

 scientific name of this grass, but you know what I am talking 

 about. We commenced by running a cultivator lengthwise 

 and crosswise. I rode the horse, and he was pretty bony, 

 and I can almost feel the effects of it yet. To kill out that 

 grass we ran the cultivator up and down and across that field 

 every way, week in and week out. It was a terribly dry sea- 

 son, — a season that the farmers of central Connecticut will 

 all remember, from the nearly total failure of all crops be- 

 cause there was no rain for several months. The constant 

 cultivation kept the corn growing. In the struggle to kill 

 that witch grass we forgot all about the corn ; but the corn 

 plant kept thinking for itself, and kept growing until early 

 in September, and there was a good crop of well-matured 

 ears of corn there. One neighbor said, "What are you 

 going to do w T ith it ? " We told him we were going to feed 

 it to the pigs. And he told us that we could sell it at 

 a good price in the market. AVe took it to the market 

 and put the price at twenty-five cents a dozen ; the next 



