16 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



years, and I now cut nearly or quite three times as much 

 English hay as I did when I bought the farm. From one of 

 my cornfields I have cut and husked the corn that grew on 

 fifteen square rods. The product was nine and one-half bush- 

 els of sound corn, and one-half bushel that was not ripe ; equal 

 to one hundred and one bushels of ears of good corn, and a 

 little over ten of poor, to the acre. 



My fruit, taking into account my trees that have been grafted 

 within the last seven years, will, I think, afford me more profit 

 than they have during any previous year, unless it were the 

 year 1852. I think that my crops as a whole have never been 

 so good before. 



Westfohd, September, 1854. 



Statement of Francis Richardson.^ 



The farm which I offer to your notice contains fifty acres of 

 land in all ; about twelve acres in wood, and the balance nearly 

 equally divided between upland and meadow. Forty acres of 

 it I purchased some fifteen years ago for five thousand five 

 hundred and four dollars. Little or no improvement had been 

 made on the land further than to lay some rods of stone wall 

 upon it. I purchased it in two parcels in the years 1847 and 

 1849, paying one thousand three hundred dollars for the same, 

 or at the rate of thirty-two dollars and fifty cents per acre. 

 When it came into my hands, probably not more than one ton 

 of market hay was cut on the whole place, the rest being white 

 weed and meadow grass of little or no value, with the usual 

 variety of brakes and bushes to be found in old fields, with the 

 exception of some eight acres of ordinary pasturage. 



My first operation on the meadow was to dig two hundred 

 rods of blind and open ditches in the fall of 1849, and my ex- 

 periments have been confined to six acres of it. In the winter 

 of 1849-50 I carted upon one acre thirty-six squares of gravel 

 mixed witli loam from a knoll hard by, at an expense of thirty- 

 six dollars, spreading it three inches deep on the surface. In 

 this condition I left it until the succeeding fall of 1850, when 

 I top dressed with a compost, twelve loads to the acre, sowed 



