MEADOW MUCK. 223 



barn floor. My father wanted to know where I got so much 

 manure. I told hhn I went into the swamps for a large portion 

 of it, I have continued to use muck up to the present time. I 

 have been told by my neighbors that if I used it so freely I 

 should run my farm into meadow grass. I told them I would 

 take the risk, but I did not believe that those rotten leaves and 

 roots which had lain so many years in the muck bed, were going 

 to vegetate, and I don't believe they will. 



This fall I went into the meadow with my men and got out 

 some twelve hundred loads of meadow mud. I design to use it 

 on my farm. I would give more for a load of that meadow mud 

 on my farm than I would for the same amount of fire-fanged 

 horse manure. I use it as an absorbent under my barn. I 

 think three loads of that put under my barn, mixed with one 

 load that goes through the stable and with the urine and slops, 

 will come out worth more than four loads of manure would be 

 worth, if thrown out the windows in the way that farmers usually 

 do around the country. It would be worth four times as much 

 as the manure from the same cattle, treated in the ordinary way. 

 One of my neighbors showed me a field where he used half 

 meadow mud and half manure, and another field where he 

 used only manure, and asked me which I thought was the best- 

 looking corn. I told him, and he said that field was manured 

 with half meadow mud, and the other with clear manure. The 

 corn was decidedly the best where the mud had been put. 

 Using so much mud as that, I have not, in the forty-five years, 

 paid out a hundred dollars for manure to put on my land. I 

 am now enabled, on the same farm where I used to cut twenty- 

 five tons of hay, to keep four oxen, four horses, and a bull in 

 the barn the year round, and winter (including the oxen and 

 bull) forty head and over. I use about eighteen acres of pas- 

 ture, and on that I had twenty cows this summer that gave 

 me three hundred quarts of milk a day ; eight of them gave 

 me one hundred and seventy-eight quarts in a day. I have 

 brought my farm up with stable manure and meadow muck. 

 An acre of it is worth more than any five acres were when I 

 began on it. I have dug out the muck where it is fifteen feet 

 deep. 



Mr. Lawrence. I believe the value of muck is in applying 

 it to soil of a directly opposite character to the muck itself. I 



