58 N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 



through and the developments and improvements have been made 

 to the tractor which Mr. Reiley will describe to you this afternoon 

 and which he hopes to demonstrate to you tomorrow morning on the 

 marshes. The result has been that with the tractor and the equip- 

 ment we have now, instead of the highest number of feet of ditches 

 we could cut with our two machines and two squads of men being 

 4,500 feet a day, now, with one tractor, we have cut 9,200 feet a day. 

 We have only one, but we believe with another we ought to increase 

 our efficiency four times. So I think that is a very decided advance 

 and a very decided increase in our efficiency and methods of getting 

 along. And that is one of the big things for Atlantic. I think it 

 is one of the things we should be very proud of. 



The ditching started by this new tractor on the i6th of July. 

 We found again that the spurring was getting away behind. We 

 cut ditches so fast we could not keep up to them. So we thought it 

 over to see if we could not use that tractor to do some spurring, and 

 we constructed a cutter that cuts about eighteen inches instead of 

 thirty, for the spurring, and you can hitch that up to the tractor 

 and cut your spurring work and get along very much faster than 

 you can with your old hand spurring. 



Of course the short ditches we still have to cut with the hand 

 spade, but the tractor is very efficient lots of times in doing spurring 

 and keeping up with the work. 



One question I want to emphasize that I think is very important, 

 and I do not think some other commissions do think so, and that 

 is the filling up of holes with sod. When you fill up a hole with 

 sod you have destroyed that hole forever ; you do not have to bother 

 with it any more. We feel that the filling up of holes with sod as 

 we go along is a very important part of this work. We have been 

 forced to fill those holes for several reasons. In the first place, 

 if you do not fill them up the high tide comes and floats them every- 

 where, and therefore we have a great deal of complaint from the 

 haymen and baymen and oystermen of floating sod that get over 

 the oyster beds, and they also plug our ditches and make trouble 

 for ourselves. Now as we go along, if we have adjacent holes that 

 we can fill up it makes the work a little bit more expensive per foot, 

 but it is well worth while doing, and when you have filled up your 

 holes you have provided for the sods not to float and you are destroy- 

 ing the breeding places forever. And we filled up 15,617 square feet 

 of holes. 



The footage for the year was nearly half a million feet, 456,356. 



I 



