170 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. 



partly their own fault. My corn, as I said, was planted on 

 gravelly soil, and manured with raw manure, which the Pro- 

 fessor says will not stand the drought so well as the chemicals, 

 and my corn never rolled up. I will venture to say that 

 there is not an acre of upland on that college farm that is not 

 far superior to this poor land of mine. 



Prof. Stockbridge. What is the subsoil of your land? 



Mr. Moore. It is first rate to make concrete of. It is 

 gravel mostly. It is not really good road gravel. There is 

 no clay to hold it together. It is seventy-five feet above every- 

 thing else there is around there. I was going to tell you how 

 to keep clear of drought. You cannot do it with every crop. 

 You cannot do it on that land with a crop of strawberries or 

 grass, but with a hoed crop, like corn, that you can run a 

 cultivator through, so as to keep the ground stirred up, you 

 are substantially independent of drought, because the effect of 

 stirring that ground is, that it becomes dry on top, which acts 

 like a mulch, and prevents the evaporation of moisture to a 

 large extent. It certainly prevented drought in that case, for 

 that corn never rolled up ; and if it is going to roll up any- 

 where, it will surely roll up there. 



So much in regard to drought. Now, I have one experiment 

 that was made by Mr. Joseph A. Smith, a neighbor of mine, 

 in Concord. I watched the experiment carefully, and know 

 as much about it, perhaps, as he does. I do not know the 

 cost of ploughing the land, because that is not put in. He 

 planted three acres of corn. One was planted with Stock- 

 bridge fertilizer, costing $27.50, with the understanding that 

 he was to have fifty bushels of corn over and above the nat- 

 ural yield of the land. Two-thirds of that was sown broadcast, 

 and one-third was scattered in the hill or in the row. The 

 product of that acre was thirty-two barrels, weighing 2,964 

 pounds. When you make an experiment, you want to know 

 the number of pounds of the crop. You cannot get at it by 

 measuring an ear, reckoning so many hundred ears to the rod, 

 and so many quarts for so much length of ear. That is the 

 way the Middlesex South Society made their great error in esti- 

 mating Dr. Sturtevant's corn, which he corrected when he came 

 to get at it accurately. Then the next acre was manured with 

 Foote's phosphate. That cost $19.62, and was applied in the 



