154 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



and knows you, and knows how to give you the safest kind 

 of good advice for your guidance ; and I thought to-day, 

 when Professor Brooks was giving his lecture on maintain- 

 ing the fertility of the soil, that if we can get him up into 

 our country we will have a reciprocity in professors of agri- 

 culture if not in agricultural products. 



Secretary Sessions. The professor was requested to 

 bring out this last proposition, how can we raise on our 

 farms complete rations? Now, I want Dr. Goessmann to 

 tell his experience with the horse bean, and when he is 

 telling us that, if he has any suggestion to make about any 

 other crop that he thinks would give us albuminoids more 

 cheaply than horse beans, I would like to have him tell us. 



Dr. Goessmann. We have experimented for a number 

 of years at the Massachusetts State Agricultural Experiment 

 Station with a variety of crops, including the horse bean, 

 vetch and similar fodder plants. During the past season we 

 raised twenty-seven varieties of fodder crops, more or less 

 prominent in different parts of the world. Our object has 

 been to study their fitness for our climate and soil. Some 

 of these crops have already proved a valuable addition 

 to our fodder supply. We have raised vetch and oats, 

 barley and the horse bean, as mixed crops. These crops 

 produce a liberal amount of fodder, from three to four tons 

 of hay per acre. This hay is equal to the best clover hay 

 we can raise. The advantages of these mixed crops are 

 many. They yield a large supply of valuable fodder, they 

 mature in a short time, can supply fodder in the form of 

 green fodder or hay or ensilage, and have proved in every 

 form a valuable supply of coarse fodder for dairy stock. 

 When we consider that our average meadow does not pro- 

 duce more than one ton of hay and our better class scarcely 

 more than two tons of hay per acre, it will be seen that a 

 mixed crop of the kind I have mentioned produces from two 

 to three times as much per acre as our meadows can pro- 

 duce, and a product which exceeds by fifty per cent, in the 

 nutritive value, our better class of meadow hay. Besides 

 these mixed crops which we can highly recommend to our 

 farmers, we find that serradella produces from ten to eleven 

 tons of green fodder of a large feed value. As to vetch, it 



