74 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



ISTo man can afford — certainly no dairyman — to bny a sin- 

 gle ounce of organic nitrogen, because you all have any 

 amount of it on your farms now. Through poor tillage, you 

 have failed to make it available. The roots of quack grass, or 

 witch grass, make one of the best fertilizers you can have. 

 They contain a large amount of organic matter and nitrogen, 

 and a pound of that nitrogen is worth as much as a pound of 

 cotton-seed or dried blood or bone. You can kill the grass and 

 put the nitrogen into circulation in the soil with one-tenth the 

 money it takes to buy nitrogen. The way to do it is to plow 

 the witch grass in in September, turning up 6 or 7 inches, — 

 not more than that. Take a field on which you wish to plant 

 something about the first of June. Cultivate it immediately 

 after plowing, using a disk harrow, and thoroughly cutting 

 up the grass and roots. If your ordinary harrow will not do 

 it, load it down until it will. Follow it up from time to time 

 through the fall and early spring, often enough so that no 

 green stuff shows above the ground. That treatment will kill 

 any plant. The roots are in a condition of semi-coma ; and 

 when a fellow is going down hill, it is easier to kick him a 

 little farther than when he is going up hill. Then plow again 

 in the spring, going a little deeper than before, about 8 or 10 

 inches. If you have done the work well, you will not have 

 more than 2 or 3 inches of sod left, and by plowing in that 

 way you will turn the sod in between two films of nicely pul- 

 verized dirt, and with ordinary cultivation and treatment that 

 will all disappear. Why buy dried blood and cotton-seed 

 meal, when we have so much valuable material right there ? 



One thing which I wanted to say I have not had an oppor- 

 tunity to say as yet. My subject is " Education of the dairy- 

 man and the dairy cow." Up to the present time we have been 

 educating the dairyman, and there is not much use in trying 

 to educate the dairy cow until we have educated the dairyman. 

 Every man's cow, sooner or later, will be just about what his 

 ideal of a cow is. If a man buys cows with a capacity of 500 

 pounds of butter, and his capacity is 150 pounds of butter, 

 those cows are as sure to land within a short time on a 

 150-pound basis as the sun is to shine, the grass to grow or 



