154 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



cost to raise it by the hoe a dollar and a half. The man who 

 uses these horse implements for the cultivation of his crops has 

 a great advantage over the man who uses nothing but the hoe 

 and ploughs a furrow between the rows in the old style. We 

 want to invest our capital in these improved tools just as fast 

 as we can get our land into shape to use them. In this way we 

 can make our farming more profitable than it is. 



And we not only want that, but we want better barns and 

 farm buildings, in order that our crops and cattle may be shel- 

 tered, and that we may have the best facilities for making 

 manure. I do not know how large a proportion of the cattle of 

 New England are properly sheltered ; I know there are a great 

 many more put under cover now than ten, fifteen or twenty 

 years ago ; but, as I came up on the railroad yesterday, I saw a 

 great many cattle in the fields and around the stack-yards, ex- 

 posed to the cold and pelting storm of the previous night, and I 

 wished that their owners had been compelled to spend the night 

 out there in the stack-yard. There is no kind of doubt that it 

 takes one-third more hay to support an animal at the stack- 

 yard than it does under shelter, in a barn or hovel, and the 

 animal does not come out so well in the spring as it would from 

 the stable, with two-thirds the amount of hay. The husbandry 

 cannot be very profitable that is pursued in so wasteful a 

 manner as that. 



We want barns that will furnish facilities for making and 

 sheltering manure. I know barn-cellars have got to be very 

 popular, but yet not half the farmers of New England have got 

 cellars under their barns. I saw all along the line of this rail- 

 road barns standing as they did thirty years ago, with no facil- 

 ities for making manures ; and one-half the hay and provender 

 cut on the farm is stacked and stands out exposed to the weather 

 all through the winter. I was talking with a very intelligent 

 farmer a few months ago, who was then stacking some hay, and 

 I asked him what he thought was the waste of hay that was 

 thus exposed in the stack, and he said : " At least one-quarter. 

 Hay that you put into the stack will not go so far by twenty-five 

 per cent, as that which you put in the barn. It loses its aroma, 

 its sweetness, and there is a loss of one-fourth of all you put 

 into the stack." That, he said, had been the result of his inves- 

 tigations, and he was going to build a barn, 80 by 40, with a 



