286 Transactions of tee American Institute. 



conviction that all of this, and more too, is practical, and along with 

 this conviction is an intense sympathy also for the good of our wide 

 countr3 r , and as Lknow of no body of men so well organized as this 

 Club to work out any problem to improve the material condition of 

 our farmers, I appeal to you to offer some small prize for the best 

 plan of a farm barn and yard, embracing manure-house, hog-pens, 

 and all points going to make up a complete home compost factory, 

 and at the same time a perfect store-house and stable, both practical, 

 scientific and economical. As a leading feature, I would suggest that 

 the stable or basement floor should be a pavement, and that the driv- 

 ing floor should be over the stable, and although I would drive in 

 from the bank, yet there should be no bank against any part of the 

 barn or stable, as it interferes with many important things, not the 

 least among which are light and air. 



Teue Pkogkess in Farming. 



J. B. Lyman — This session, Mr. Chairman, is our last for a num- 

 ber of weeks. Some of us have farms and gardens and orchards 

 where we wish to practice all that we may know of rural art. Some 

 of us will become tourists, and, speeding across the mountains and the 

 great central valley that lies beyond, we propose to study agriculture 

 as it is practiced in that magnificent plain which feeds and clothes the 

 greater part of this continent and a large part of Europe. We hope to 

 come back in September to these meetings with many important and 

 valuable results of observation with which to enrich our sessions and the 

 reports of what is here said. It is now twenty-eight years since the 

 American Institute Farmers' Club was formed. All have seen great 

 advances made in the mechanism of farm labor. When we began to 

 meet and to talk, the hay and grain of the country were harvested 

 by the toil of human muscle. Now, horses cut nine-tenths of these 

 crops. A few hundred quarts of strawberries were sold by a few of 

 our grocers. Now, New York handles from four to seven million 

 quarts of small fruits. Fifteeen years ago, New York and Pennsyl- 

 vania gave us our steaks and our roasts. Now, the meat supplies of 

 the great seaboard cities come from beyond the great rivers, from the ' 

 plains of Colorado and the savannahs of Texas. These important 

 advances are, some of them, the result of greater knowledge and 

 skill and enterprise in our farming community, and they are in part 

 the result of the amazing extent to which railroads have been pushed 

 westward and multiplied. I propose to-day to speak of those defects 

 and difficulties in our farming which may to a great extent be over- 



