90 HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 
The Cuarrman. That is yet to be determined? 
Mr. Wurrney. That is yet to be determined. 1 go down there this 
week. 
The Cuarrman. J understand you can not teach a man how to treat 
tobacco during this fermentation, exactly. 
Mr. Wuirtney. It isa matter of experience, Mr. Wadsworth. You 
can puta man in the way of acquiring experience. We go into a 
warehouse in Ohio. A large concern wants to change their method of 
fermenting from a ‘‘case” method to a “‘bulk” method. They want 
to give it a thorough fermentation according to our method. Our 
man goes there and takes up the work himself, builds the bulks, using 
the labor of this concern—we are at no expense whatever—using their 
lumber and their warehouse, and he visits them once or twice a week, 
two or three times a week, as often as may be necessary, to see that 
the work is done in a proper way, and he tells them when that bulk 
must be turned. The whole thing is the amount of moisture contained 
in the tobacco and the length of time it is left down, and the rapidity 
of the rise in temperature as the tobacco heats up, and they have 
to watch those things. He may get reports in the meantime. In 
Connecticut we had reports over the telephone. 
The Cuarrman. How many years will you have to send that man, 
for instance, to this case you refer to in Ohio before the people them- 
selves are taught to take care of their tobacco? 
Mr. Wurrnry. That work goes on very rapidly. We have a dozen 
or fifteen farms in Obio doing this now themselves, but that work is 
incidental to our efforts to see if the tobacco itself can be improved. 
We have three men in the party in Ohio, and this same party has for 
two years now raised a crop of tobacco from selected Cuban seed, and 
we are judging now of the quality of the tobacco that was grown the 
year before last. There is sufficient promise in it to justify us in con- 
tinuing. We believe that the tobacco that we grew last year is better 
than the tobacco we grew the year before, and we believe we can 
improve still further on the tobacco if we try it again. 
In our work in Texas we made mistakes. There is no question but 
that we made mistakes in our crops in Texas, Alabama, and South 
Carolina. The soils and the conditions were absolutely new to us, and 
we went in there without any experience. The tobacco that had been 
raised there had been barbarously treated. We did not have much 
material to judge from. We did not have much profitable experience 
to aid us, and we went in and did the best we could. On some of 
those soils the tobacco ought to have been planted closer. On the 
Orangeburg clay it ought to have been planted closer and cropped 
higher to reduce the size of the leaf. We have got too large and too 
heavy a leaf. We have got to go in and crowd it a little more, give 
it less room, and crop it higher, so as to let more leaves grow on the 
stalk, In that way we will be able to tone down. the leaf, get it to 
the size we want, but those are mistakes that are necessarily made in 
an investigation of this kind, and it is through watching those mistakes 
that we finally arrive at a desirable result. 
Mr. BurteEson. And it is on those points that Mr. Hinson is to 
advise the grower? 
Mr. WHITNEY. Yes; and it was from the experience that we our- 
selves had had in growing this tobacco, in actually handling it, that 
the probabilities of success are going to rise. 
