MARYLAND WEATHER SERVICE 345 



inserted to show the amount of labor involved in the method, as 

 compared to the other methods, i. e., cutting the stalk at the ground 

 and shocking, or running the whole plant with or without the ears, 

 through shredding or chopping machines. 



Three men together work down two rows, the first man cutting- 

 tops, and the two following him pulling blades. The tops from eight 

 hills are thrown together as the men take the two rows and on the 

 return trip the tops from eight other hills are added to the pile 

 making a "stoop" of 16 hills. The blades have been pulled by the 

 strippers and made into "bunches" which are tied with a blade of 

 fodder and hung upon the standing portion of the stalk to cure. The 

 next step is to tie up the tops which have been lying in the "stoop" 

 for a day. Two or three of these are tied into a "tie" or bunch, 

 using a tough stalk for the purpose, thus putting tops of 32 or 4S 

 hills together, according to the rankness of the fodder; these three 

 "ties" are stood together to cure until time to stack. In stacking, 

 100 bunches or "ties" are set up first, being bixilt about a center 

 pole ; on the top of the tops which thus act as a foundation the blades 

 from the same stalks are added, the whole arranged to shed water 

 like a thatch roof. With one hundred ties to the stack, there are 

 4S00 hills accounted for in each stack, or a square of nearly 70 hills 

 to a side. The men each receive 10c to 15c per hour, and put in 

 ten hours as an average day. 



In thus gathering fodder, the ground is gone over several times, 

 once to cut tops and strip blades, again to gather these into "ties" 

 and to put the "ties" into trios of three ties each, to cure. A third 

 trip over the ground is required in collecting these "trios" into the 

 final stacks of 100 ties. The entire field must be gone over three 

 times with no account taken of the short steps required in collecting 

 the material into the successively larger units at the different times. 



As a substitute for hay this type of fodder is perhaps better than 

 the others, especially for horses, as the coarsest portions are left in 

 the field, but the hand labor involved is comparable to that required 

 to gather grain by cradling instead of by some of the horse-power 

 reaping machines. 



The ears may be husked from the standing stalk, or as is more 

 often the case, broken off and husked at leisure, often with pleasure 



