APPLICATION OF FINE BONE. 187 



as the hay crop is one of the most important and profitable of 

 any produced upon' our farms. 



A series of extended and systematic experiments have been 

 undertaken upon my farm in connection with fields which are 

 elevated and dry, and which were unproductive at the time 

 they were commenced. Let me call attention to a single one of 

 these. A measured acre of land of this nature was ploughed in 

 the autumn of 18G3, and in the succeeding spring dressed with 

 five hundred pounds of pure, fine bone, sown broadcast, and 

 then planted with corn, a handful of farm-made superphosphate 

 being placed in each hill. One hundred and fifty-seven bushels 

 of corn in the ear were taken from the field in the autumn of 

 1864. After the corn was removed the land was ploughed and 

 again dressed with eight hundred pounds of a mixture consist- 

 ing of ashes, bone dust and refuse saltpetre, and sowed down to 

 winter rye and seeded with timothy. The crop was thirty-one 

 bushels of nice, plump grain. The season of 1866 was exceed- 

 ingly dry, and the tender grass roots were so parched with heat, 

 that the hay crop was cut short materially. The product of 

 this field was only twenty-three hundred pounds. The next 

 season a top-dressing was given it of five hundred pounds of a 

 compost of gelatine and peat (the gelatine being the liquid or 

 resultant product coming from the steaming of bones), and the 

 hay crop reached forty-three hundred pounds. The crop of 

 1868, with the aftermath, reached two and a half tons. That 

 of 1869, after a top-dressing of two hundred pounds of Peruvian 

 guano, was two and a quarter tons. The present season it was 

 a little less than two tons. In this experiment, a dry field, orig- 

 inally exhausted, has been treated exclusively with concentrated 

 fertilizers, and carried over a period of seven years, the seasons 

 embracing the extremes of dry and wet, and these are the 

 results. Are they satisfactory, or is the experiment a successful 

 one? 



The corn crop, seventy-eight bushels of shelled corn to the 

 acre, is not bad ; the rye crop, thirty-one bushels, would not be 

 disappointing to most farmers ; and the succeeding crops of hay, 

 amounting in the five consecutive years to nearly ten tons, are 

 certainly a fair product for high land, subject to unfavorable 

 influence of drought. The cash value of the crops at the farm 

 from the acre, if they had been sold at the time they were 



