No. 4.] CATTLE FOODS. 35 



manure to keep your land rich ; especially have you l)een 

 buying grain which is too rich in nitrogen comparatively 

 and too poor in mineral matter. 



Mr. Lynde. I have sowed ground hone sixteen hundred 

 pounds to the acre and six hundred i)ounds to the acre, and 

 I have sowed in connection with the ground hone muriate 

 of potash; so I have conformed to all these conditions, hut 

 still I have failed to secure the crops of clover, year after 

 year, that I formerly did. 



Professor Egberts. I said that that was probably the 

 reason. Another reason why you do not get clover as you 

 formerly did is on account of the ])orer that attacks it. 

 It bores down to the roots in the ground. With us our 

 clover never leaves out, and we plough it up. Another 

 reason why we cannot get clover is that the leaves are often 

 attacked by a fungous growth. A year ago I had twelve 

 acres on my own farm, some sixteen or twenty miles from 

 the University, where all the conditions, so far as I know, 

 were good for a clover crop, and I got no clover. In that 

 district, embracing nearly a whole county, a disease attacked 

 the leaves of the young clover and destroyed them. So that 

 there maybe various reasons, but I think the prime reason 

 for not getting good clover crops here in Massachusetts will 

 be found to be the want of readily assimilable mineral mat- 

 ter ; that where the land has been kept up it has too much 

 nitrogen in proportion to the mineral matter. You have 

 taken that away. 



There are some other things in regard to this subject, Mr. 

 Chairman, that I would like to speak of, and one is the ease 

 of raising grass. The question I wanted to raise was not the 

 question of feeding concentrated food, but how are you to 

 make good use of the land that you have manured ? 



Now, in regard to raising corn. (These are only hints at 

 better methods.) First, the corn wts a laro^e amount of its 

 plant food from the sun. That is free carbon. That is a 

 free ffift from the arods, and never exhausts the soil. Car- 

 bonaceous matter never exhausts the soil. Carbon is not 

 manure. The plant gets it from the sunlight. Therefore 

 the corn, being quite largely carbonaceous, takes compara- 

 tively little out of the soil ; it takes mineral matter. Now, 



