No. 144.] 121 



fodder. Most kinds of stock are fond of them, especially milch 

 cows. They must be got in in good order, and well taken care 

 of He considered them nearly as valuable as hay. Last year 

 he fed them out rather freely to his stock the first of the winter, 

 and he was afraid he would run short, and about the first of Feb- 

 ruary he put them on hay, and his cows in two or three days fell 

 off full one-third in milk j he put these again on stalks, and they 

 soon recovered a part of their loss. He makes no use of special 

 or concentrated manure ; he makes use of lime occasionally on 

 his land. I visited several farms in Dutchess county about the 

 same season. One gentleman had about thirteen acres of corn on 

 land he had lately purchased, and the soil, as he thought, rather 

 thin. He plowed and hoed much as the gentleman near Peeks- 

 kill did. Instead, though, of using barn yard manure entirely, 

 as he had but little of it, he used muck and guano — three shovels- 

 full of the former to one of the latter — and put it on broadcast ; 

 and a part of it he manured with this mixture in the hill -, his 

 crop was fine, and yielded him, I have no doubt, fifty bushels to 

 the acre. Another farm had about 16 acres on it, which had 

 been kept in sward about seventeen years — timothy and clover — 

 and grazed every season. Not a shovelfull of barnyard or special 

 manures, the gentleman assured me, had been put on the lot in 

 that time. All the manure it had was the falling and decaying 

 of the grass upon it every autumn, and the droppings of the cat- 

 tle grazed upon it every season, and which formed as rich a soil 

 as manure of any kind could make it, and I have no doubt it 

 yielded him at least fifty-five bushels, and perhaps 60 to the acre. 

 Another farm adjoining — larger — had about fifty acres of corn 

 upon it, and Avhich I think would yield at least forty-five, and 

 perhaps fifty bushels to the acre. Many other farms in this quar- 

 ter I visited, had corn crops upon them similar in prosperous 

 appearance. I should say the average yield of Dutchess county 

 this year, in corn, would be from thirty to forty bushels an acre, 

 . and perhaps more. 'It has been a fine season, at least fir her. 

 The Patent Office Report for 1850, puts the corn crop of Dutchess 

 county down at 782,605 bushels, for that year. This is larger 

 than any other county in the State of New- York, although 

 Dutchess county is little more than half as large in extent as 



