180 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
discharged. Railways have not been losers by 
the present excited state of the guano trade. 
We repeat, however, there can be no security 
for obtaining a genuine article, but by insisting 
on an analysis, and paying the market value.— 
North British Agriculturist. 
- - 
BROOM CORN. 
Why is it that so little attention is paid in 
Chester county to the cultivation of Broom 
Corn. There is scarcely a farmer in the county, 
I presume, that supplies his family with brooms 
of his own growing , and yet he could readily 
do so, and sell several dollars worth besides, and 
that, too, with so little expense and labor in the 
cultivation as would make no perceptible in¬ 
crease of either. I have no means of ascertain¬ 
ing the amount expended by the farmers of 
Chester county in the purchase of brooms for 
family use, but it no doubt amounts to a good 
many dollars. Whatever it may be, however, 
it is just so many dollars thrown away , and 
which ought to be applied to such purposes as 
purchasing fruit trees, improving the grounds 
around our houses, or if you please, Mr. Editor 
in subscribing for the Farm Journal. 
As a general rule, a farmer should buy noth¬ 
ing that he can raise on his own land, and there 
is nothing easier to be accomplished than every 
farmer to grow and make his own brtfoms. As 
a profitable crop, too, Broom Corn could be 
grown to advantage in many situations. The 
Rev. Henry Colman —we can have no better 
authority—says, that the seed is considered 
about two-thirds the value of oats; and that 
mixed with corn it is excellent for the fattening 
of cattle and swine. The return of seed is often 
precarious, but still it is frequently abundant, 
and will often more than pay the whole expense 
of culdvation and preparing the crop for market. 
The seed varies from twenty to one hundred 
and fifty bushels to the acre, according to the 
nature of the soil, the quality of seed, culture 
and season. One thousand pounds of broom, 
and seventy bushels of seed to the acre, are 
considered a fair crop in those parts of New- 
England where special attention is devoted to 
the culture. The quantity rarely falls below 
four hundred and fifty pounds per acre, and as 
seldom exceeds twelve hundred. The average, 
at the present day, is probably seven hundred 
pounds to the acre, which, with very little extra 
attention, might be easily brought up to one 
thousand, now considered by many cultivators 
a fair crop. 
In an old number of the Farmers' Cabinet , I 
find the following remarks by a correspondent 
upon this subject: “The seed of the broom 
corn makes excellent food for hogs and cattle. 
Its nutritious quality may easily be discovered 
from the fine color and taste which it imparts to 
butter from the cows which are fed on it. The 
best way to use the grain, is to grind it with a 
portion of oats —say about one-third of oats to 
two-thirds of the seed. Indeed it is so hard 
and flinty that it should always be ground before 
feeding it to any kind of stock. 
Good broom corn seed weighs about fifty 
pounds to the bushel. Its value compared to 
oats may be considered as about half as much 
again ; so that should the market price of oats 
be, say, twenty-five cents per bushel, the broom 
corn seed would be worth thirty-seven and a half 
cents. 
Brooms . — I think there is a difference of 
twenty-five, if not thirty per cent,, in the qual¬ 
ity of brooms sent to market, from such as I 
generally use in my family. I always endeavor 
to procure from the manufacturer, and for which 
1 pay him an extra price, such as are made from 
the stalks before the seed ripens on them. A 
broom made from such tops will last much lon¬ 
ger than one made from the ripe brush. But 
the peculiar excellency of the broom consists 
in its fibres being more soft and elastic, and per¬ 
forming the act of brushing or sweeping, simi¬ 
lar to the brush made of bristles, without injur¬ 
ing the carpet if used prudently. After the 
broom shall have been used in sweeping the 
parlor, and the finer parts worn away, it will 
then be as good to sweep the other parts of the 
house as the best new broom made from the 
ripe corn. Ladies who set so deservedly such a 
high value upon their beautiful Turkey and 
Brussels carpets, should purchase none other 
than such as are made from the unripe brush. 
The broom made from such may be easily 
known by the color of the straw, which is that 
of tea or sage; the fibre or straw is much finer 
and of a softer feel than that made from the 
ripe corn—the color of which is red, or inclin¬ 
ing to red.”— H. S., in Farm Journal. 
-»*-«- 
PASTURE LANDS. 
Farmers pay too little attention to their pas¬ 
tures. Those pasture lands capable of cultiva¬ 
tion should be cultivated. We know there are 
many hills and mountain ranges, hollows and 
valleys that cannot be cultivated, and of these 
we do not speak. But there are thousands of 
acres of good tillage lands as there are in the 
State “ turned out to pasture,” or that have re¬ 
mained as pastures since the first crop of rye 
was taken from them. We know of hundreds 
upon hundreds of acres of intervale upon the 
Merrimack that have been used as pastures for 
the last quarter of a century! Now this is 
wasteful farming—a sheer waste of money. 
With a little exertion, one-half of this land 
might be made to pasture the same number of 
cattle, turning the other half to tillage, or the 
same pasture might be made to pasture double 
the number of cattle. Either method would 
“ coin money” for the owner, as produce is rea¬ 
dily marketable; and pasturing, from its scarcity, 
is at a high price. 
Twenty acres of pasture land is enough for 
an ordinary farmer, and with proper care, will 
pasture as many cattle as forty and fifty acres 
will under common usage. The pasture should 
be divided into three or four lots, and should be 
cultivated. That is, the lots should be occasion¬ 
ally plowed up, manured, planted, and sowed 
down with grass. In this way the pasture 
bears sweet and luxuriant grass. And there is 
another advantage arising from lotting off a pas¬ 
ture. Cattle when turned into a pasture are 
uneasy—they will roam over the whole pasture, 
cropping here a little and there a little—treading 
and wasting as much as they eat. In a small 
lot they get over their roaming sooner, and go 
to eating in earnest, and get their food in sea¬ 
son. Trees should be left standing or planted 
in every pasture, that a cool shade be provided 
for the cattle in the heat of the day. It is need¬ 
less to add, that there should be an abundant 
supply of water, where cows are to be pastured. 
For horses and calves it is not so necessary, and 
sheep require no water in their pasture, as the 
grass and its morning dews are sufficient to meet 
their thirst. 
It is usual to turn cattle to pasture the 20th 
of May, and farmers often turn them out much 
earlier. But the 20th of May is full early, and 
much too early for some pastures. A pasture 
should not be fed, till it has grass enough to 
satisfy the cattle without roaming over the 
whole pasture. 
If the pasture is divided into small lots of 
from G to 10 acres each, great advantage can be 
taken in feeding them. The one most forward 
can be used first and then the next, and so on 
through the lots. They can be pastured 2 to 3 
weeks each through the season, till in Septem¬ 
ber or October, the cattle can have a free range 
through the whole of the lots. The driest pas¬ 
tures should be used first, as this gives oppor¬ 
tunity for wet ones to become dry, and if cattle 
are turned into wet pastures, they not only do 
not thrive so well, but their flesh is not so good, 
and in addition, they destroy much grass by 
readily treading it into the mud, and thus not 
only injure the grass but the pasture.— Granite 
Farmer. 
A CHAPTER ON FERTILIZERS. 
NITRATE OF SODA VS. GUANO. 
Any thing throwing a new fay of light upon 
the subject of manures, we seize with much 
eagerness. The following, from the Marie Lane 
Express , will not be found uninstructive. 
Vegetable physiologists were as much offended 
with Boussingault when he asserted that the 
manurial influences of substances were mainly 
due to their nitrogen, as those acquainted with 
animal physiology were at his similar remark, 
that feeding materials were chiefly valuable in 
proportion to the quantity of nitrogen they con¬ 
tain. There is now, however, admitted to be 
much truth in both these statements; and, while 
the latter admits of certain modifications, to 
which we shall afterwards allude, the former is 
pretty nearly established as a general rule— 
that, on soils in ordinary circumstances, and 
therefore supplied, at the beginning, with most 
of the materials plants require, in a secondary 
degree nitrogen is the principal fertilizing ele¬ 
ment. 
Nor does it seem important (or, at least, 
nearly so important as it might appear) in which 
condition it is applied—as the alkaline ammonia, 
or as the acid, nitric acid; or whether it may 
be applied as a neutral salt, in the shape of the 
nitrates of soda, of potash, or of lime. 
Mr. Pusey has shown most successfully, that 
the dilute acid may be applied directly to the 
soil with advantage, without the neutralizing ef¬ 
fect of an alkaline base; and, as the Germans 
sometimes manureby sprinkling dilute sulphu¬ 
ric, he manured successfully with dilute nitric 
acid, and obtained in several instances as much 
result in the grass crop by the application of di¬ 
lute nitric acid, as by ammonia itself, and nearly 
as much as by the application of nitrate of soda 
itself. He thus sums up the general results of 
his experiments: “ The nitrogen of most ma¬ 
nures is committed to the soil in a neutral 
state ; capable, therefore, of uniting either with 
oxygen, to become nitric acid, or with hydro¬ 
gen, to become an alkali ammonia. Some few 
manures contain ammonia ready formed; some 
few others, nitric acid. It seems clear that the 
neutral nitrogenous matter is converted into 
ammonia or into nitric acid before it is absorbed 
by the plant. So that we have only two alter¬ 
natives—not three. But it is uncertain, as yet, 
whether plants can feed indifferently on each of 
the two substances, or whether one of these is 
first transformed into the other—whether, that 
is, the acid is changed into the alkali, as Dr. 
Wilson deems possible, and Dr. Hartstein as¬ 
serts, or whether what appears a more easy 
transformation takes place, and ammonia is 
changed into nitric acid.”— R. A. S. Journal, p. 
382, vol. xiv. 
Offended at this, Dr. Anderson, in a late paper 
before the Highland Society, rebuts the general 
drift of Mr. Pusey’s paper—which is, to show 
that the nitrate is as good a mode of supplying 
nitrogen to the soil in that shape as guano is, 
or any other product which supplies it more in 
the shape of ammonia—and charges him with 
ignorance of Kuhlmann’s experiments having 
an opposite tendency. 
The fact is, however, that Kuhlmann’s experi¬ 
ments proved both ways. He commenced them 
at Lille, in French Flanders, in 1843 and 1844, 
and continued them in 1845 and 1846; and 
though some gave an excess of produce in fa¬ 
vor of guano of 4,500 lbs. of hay, another 
afforded a reverse increase of nitrate over guano 
of 6,500 lbs. 
Recent experiments have come up to the res¬ 
cue. To Mr. Pusey himself an experiment has 
been communicated, in which 4 cvvt. of guano 
gave 270 stones of hay; and 2 cwt. of nitrate, 
with 1 cwt. of salt, gave 300 stones; the pro¬ 
duct without manure being only 140 stones. An 
experiment in oats has been lately published, 
wherein 2 cwt. of Peruvian guano gave 27 cwt., 
3 qrs., 16 lbs. of grain ; while 104 lbs. of nitrate 
gave 28 cwt., 1 qr., 25 lbs. 
Mr. Pusey shows that nitric acid as well as 
