144 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



place, and he tried to reclaim some land by using blue 

 gravel. It was not a success. Sand is the material to use, 

 and almost always where you find a peat meadow you will 

 find sand somewhere near. ThosS are the two extremes. 



Mr. Edson of Barnstable. I have been very much 

 pleased with the lecture and with the remarks of the last 

 speaker. What the farmers of New England want is some 

 system by which they can bring their farms to a higher state 

 of fertility. We are farming old, worn-out lands that our 

 fathers and grandfathers have cropped as long as they could 

 get a crop of Indian corn or rye, until they have become 

 worn out. Unfortunately for us, we have got to build them 

 up. Now, the question is, can it be profitably done? I, 

 like Mr. Moore, am modest, and do not like to speak of No. 

 1, but I do not know how I can get at this matter unless I 

 speak of what I am doing. I hope you will excuse me, 

 therefore, if I bring myself in pretty often. I do it only for 

 the sake of showing others what I have done, and that they 

 can do the same things. 



I may state that I was brought up as a farmer, and always 

 liked it ; I was afterwards in mercantile business many years, 

 but in 1863 I came back to Cape Cod, my native region, 

 where there is some pretty good land. I took a farm of 

 some seventy acres, and bought the stock and tools upon it, 

 a yoke of oxen, two cows and a horse. The first winter I 

 had to buy hay for my stock. I cut the first season about 

 five tons of miserably poor June grass and weeds, — not 

 enough to keep my stock. Since then I have cut fifty tons 

 of hay upon that place ; I have kept thirty head of cattle and 

 four horses and sold hay at the same time. I have done 

 that without commercial fertilizers ; I have done it from 

 the resources of the farm. I have made it pay all the time, 

 and I have put the farm m that condition. If I can do it, 

 other men can do it. Now, the question is, how has it been 

 done? 



I have made a specialty of making and saving all the 

 manure I possibly could and plowing in green crops at the 

 same time. My mode has been to break up about four acres 

 of mowing every year. The crop that I depend upon for 

 money is hay, principally. I have four fields of four acres 



