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masses of snow, or it is speedily evaporated by the currents of dry air from 

 the arid plains. Consequently obstructions which prevent the snows from 

 blowing into drifts, also prevent them from melting and drying away by the 

 action of the winds. 



Every cultivator of winter wheat knows the advantages to his crop from a 

 uniform covering of snow remaining upon the ground during the winter ; it 

 keeps out the frost and protects the tender roots from those sudden and ex- 

 treme changes of weather, to which they would otherwise be subjected. 

 " Winter-killing " is one of the results of the alternate freezing and thawing 

 of the soil, which by the expansions and contractions, always accompanying 

 changes of temperature, break the roots from the stem and thus destroy the 

 plant ; all this is prevented by a slight, even, covering of snow. In some 

 parts of the state where the snow falls early and is kept in its place by sur- 

 rounding forests, it is not found necessary to dig potatoes from the ground 

 until spring ; the covering of snow being sufficient to protect them from in- 

 jury by the severest frosts. In such places the ground is seldom or never 

 frozen. 



The importance of warding off the cold north-west wind that often de- 

 presses the temperature below the zero point, is sufficiently apparent to all ; 

 and it is almost equally important to secure protection against the hot, dry 

 winds that often blow with such force, and produce such blighting effects, 

 from the south-west. This protection can easily be secured by belts of trees. 



We shall elsewhere show, that at least 18.75 per cent, of the land in this 

 state is required to be cultivated with timber, in order to the occupancy ot 

 the land itself, and to the comfort of the people. Should this timber land 

 be distributed in belts around every ten square acres, the beUs will be nearly 

 one rod wide, or around every forty square acres, nearly two rods wide on 

 every side of these square fields ; and when the fields are joined to other 

 fields similarly enclosed the belts will be doubled; thus giving to each ten 

 acres at least a sufficient belt to form a perfect, compact protection to the 

 field. With such belts, it may be presumed that our spring wheat might be 

 changed to winter wheat, which from its greater quantity and quality, and 

 consequent higher price, would more than compensate for the less than two 

 acres of land included in the timber belt. 



Says J. J. Thomas : " Isaac PuUen, a well-known nurseryman at Hightown, 

 New Jersey, showed me last summer (1864) several belts of evergreens which 

 had sprung up from his nursery rows to a height of twenty-five or thirty feet 

 in ten years, and he stated that within the shelter of these screens his nurse- 

 ry treeSj as well as farm crops, averaged fifty per cent, more than on bleak 

 and exposed places'. I have known an ordinary English thorn hedge, which 

 had been allowed to run up without shearing, twenty feet or more in height, 

 to shelter and save from winter killing a crop of wheat as far as its influence 

 extended, while beyond this the grain was nearly destroyed ; yet this narrow 



