676 THE RUBAI. MEW-VOMER. OCT 43 
weeks without one hour’s interval, following 
a dry time which kept the crops backward, 
have caused the destruction of 25 to 50 per 
cent, of the cotton on thousands of farms. 
Here is a loss from which other farmers es¬ 
caped, but which falls with crushing weight 
upon the cotton planters;-and then comes the 
exasperating-by-its meanness robbery of the 
Bagging Trust, which has advanced the price 
of bags from seven and one-quarter to 15 
cents per pound, making a tax of about $1 
per bale on the unhappy planters. About 
$5,000,000 will thus be wrung from these poor- 
people; most of whom are poor beyond the 
fancy of a Northern farmed. And, to add 
to the intensity of the wrong, the United 
States government actually presents these 
bagging thieves with three cents per pound 
on all their product, in the shape of a pro¬ 
tective ( ? 1) import duty. Pity the sorrows 
of a poor cotton planter ! 
* * * 
Mr. Jacobs thinks turkeys can be reared 
in confinement. I know they can. I have 
thus reared them for three years, cooping 
the hen turkeys both on their nests, and 
with their broods; and with an open shed, 
and a yard for protection and to prevent 
wandering. There is comfort and pleasure in 
rearing the most profitable of all poultry. 
The feed I have used is very simple, noth¬ 
ing more than corn, wheat and buckwheat, 
coarsely ground, and, as a relish, the few po¬ 
tatoes that are left from the table. No eggs, 
cakes, curd or fussy and laborious prepara¬ 
tions at all are necessary. 
WEEDS, APPLES AND SHEEP. 
Excellent results from sheep in the orchard. 
Why have poor sheep in a land of plenty ? 
Eelative values of various feeding stuffs ; 
value of manures from feeding them. 
A few days'since I had the pleasure of see¬ 
ing and learning^of a successful method of 
eradicating weeds. A large, mature orchard 
overrun with wild carrots, Canada thistles 
and a score of other weeds, was turned into a 
sheep pasture; or possibly it might better be 
called a sheep yard, as about four times as 
many sheep were put into the orchard as 
could be pastured without.extra feed. They 
were given a liberal allowance of bran and 
oil-meal witn a little corn daily. Tms meth¬ 
od was continued for four summers, at the 
end of which time the orchard had more than 
doubled in the quantity of fruit produced, 
while the quality had been much improved. 
The ground was then plowed and planted, but 
no thistles or carrots and but few other weeds 
appeared. 
Mr. J. S. Woodward has about 30 acres in 
apples, which have been treated in like man¬ 
ner, with the exception of the plowing. He 
found that he could keep his sheep cheaper by 
this method tban by hiring pasture. And 
now the result: Last year he sold nearly 
$7,000 worth of apples. And this is not all; 
the sheep kept in the orchard were bred early 
and the lambs sold at an average of $0 per 
head; and these are not isolated cases. I met 
Mr. B. from Virginia, a few hours since, and 
he gave $8 per head as his average for early 
lambs last year. 
As I came home from the State Fair, two 
days since, I saw a dozen starved and weedy 
orchards, and a hundred fields that seemed to 
cry from very hunger. Yesterday I purchased 
five sheep and two hogs, and how can I tell 
you how thin they were! True, they were 
just what I was looking for, for experimental 
purposes; but what reasons can these men 
give, in the world to come, for half starving 
their animals in this land of 19,000,000,000 bush¬ 
els of corn and hundreds of thousands of tons 
of bran, oil-meal and cotton-seed meal, and 
millions and millions of acres of land that 
would laugh with a hundred-fold crop if only 
a little more brains and manure were used. A 
letter now before me from a man in the 
northern part of the State, asks the relative 
feeding value of Timothy hay, corn and oat¬ 
meal, oat straw and bran. He says: “I do 
not want^to take k into account the enhanced 
value of the manure made by feeding the 
grain.Heys short’of jwinter feed and wants 
to know how.he may most cheaply piece it 
out. Just this kind of economy and want of 
knowledge or snap enough to wake up to the 
fact that the world is moving, is what is the 
matter with a great many farmers of the 
present. The steam is up, and he who takes 
the ox-express will get left. 
The feeding value of a ton of the articles 
mentioned below is as follows : 
Meadow hay. $11 60 
Timothy. 12 40 "% 
Corn meal. 20 60 ~ 
Oat meal. 23 80 ” 
Bran. 20 40 
Oat straw. 9 40 '% 
Cotton-seed meal. 45 00 vj 
< hi meal, new-process... 30 80 
In the above table 10 per cent, is taken from 
the German tables, in order that it may more 
nearly represent American values. Below is 
the complete value of the manure resulting 
from the feeding of a ton of the respective 
foods named : 
To To Other 
Milch Cows. Animals, About. 
Meadow hay. $9 28 $10 44 
Timothy. 9 92 11 16 
Corn meal. 16 48 18 54 
Oat meal. 19 04 21 42 
Bran. 16 32 18 36 
Oat straw. 7 52 8 46 
Cotton-seed meal. 36 00 40 50 
Oil meal, new-process... 24 64 27 72 
The above table is based on the assumption 
—which has been partly proved,—that a 
milch cow takes about 20 per cent from the 
value of the food, and other animals an aver¬ 
age of about 10 per cent. Growing animals 
will take more of the elements from the food 
than beef animals. Now go right on and 
raise and sell lambs in the fh.ll at $3. a head, 
shear long-wool sheep once a year, raise lots of 
sheep ticks, sell your mature sheep for exper¬ 
imental purposes—when you can—and trade 
off your butter at the grocery for 12 cents; 
and all the time say all the hard things you can 
about the the agricultural journals and pro¬ 
fessors; but “all the same you’ll get left. ” 
Tompkins Co. N. Y. J. m. drew. 
WHAT I WOULD DO AS A DIRECTOR. 
J. W. NEWTON. 
I would experiment with manures', with 
grasses and other fodder plants', with sil¬ 
age, and with apples and cotton-seed meal 
as stock feed', would be strictly accurate 
and plainly understandable in all bulle¬ 
tins. _ 
If I were director of an experiment station 
here in the East, I should first*try tojfind out 
how much farmers lose by handling manure 
in the way so many do. I would take a herd 
of cows and divide them into two equal lots, 
all fed alike; but one lot kept in a yard at 
night during summer. The manure would be 
thrown up in heaps m the yard, and be drawn 
into the field in the fall and put in large heaps, 
and spread or put in the. hill, in the spring. 
The other lot of cows would be kept in a sta¬ 
ble every night; all the manure would be 
carefully saved and spread in the fall or win¬ 
ter as it was drawn out. I would use,these 
lots of manure on poor land and on equal 
areas. I would duplicate and repeat this ex¬ 
periment until I knew and could tell the farm¬ 
ers definitely how much they lose by their 
wasteful ways of handling manure. Then I 
would try to find the best ways of saving 
manure, and whether a cellar of manure 
under a stable and near a house is conducive 
to health, and whether absorbents or cisterns 
and tanks are best for the busy, hard-working 
farmer. I would try to master this subject 
so that I could write and speak definitely on 
it. 
Then I should turn to our native 
grasses and fodder plants, and find their 
values as compared with each other 
and with other grasses. I should spend 
a good deal of time on grasses and 
fodder plants, investigating them in various 
ways, and should endeavor to get farmers in¬ 
terested so that they would become familiar 
with the names and values of our wild grasses. 
I would try to find out just how much dif¬ 
ferent kinds of mowing lands are injured by 
being pastured in the fall. I would divide 
fields of like soils, and pasture one part a 
month or two in the fall, and keep the cattle 
off the other for a series of years, and note the 
result. I would work, too, on the problem of 
the best soiling crops for summer and early 
fall. The pastures begin to fail with us long 
before corn is at its best, and I would try to 
find the best way to fill this gap. 
I should try to learn some things about en_ 
silage. I would take a field of corn when the 
ears had begun to glaze, and divide it into 
three parts. One part I would put in the silo, 
one part I would husk and treat as farmers 
ordinarily treat their corn; the third part I 
would husk and put the stalks in the silo, and 
I would repeat this till 1 learned the best way. 
I would experiment, too, with cheap silos, 
with silage stacks, and with the effects on 
cattle of silage fed at different temperatures; 
for if cold water causes loss, why does not 
cold silage? 
I would experiment on run-out pastures, 
and waste lands. I would want to learn how 
much it would cost per acre, and whether it 
would pay to drain wet lands,where,after one 
gets down eight to twelve or eighteen inches, 
he strikes hard-pan, every spoonful of which 
has to be dug out with a pick, and if draining 
does not pay, I would want to learn the best 
way to deal with such land. 
I would try to find the feeding value of ap¬ 
ples, both sweet and sour, cooked and raw. I 
would investigate the effects of cotton-seed 
meal on the health of cattle, and its effect on 
the healthfulness of milk and meat. 
I would try to make my bulletins as graphic 
as possible by the use of diagrams, wood-cuts 
and the like. The sole end of experiments 
is to benefit the farmers, and 1 would feel 
anxious to get the results of my work into 
such form that the common farmer could get 
hold of the facts and use them. I think the 
man who prepares bulletins and reports’ 
should cultivate a clear, forcible style, and it 
is well to summarize results after giving de¬ 
tails, to put the pith of the matter, when it 
can be done, axiomatically and in italics, or,, 
better, in full-faced type. 
As examples of agricultural diagrams and! 
experimental illustrations see the Rurai* 
New-Yorker for October 18, 1884; (the pic¬ 
tures representing the results of experiments 
with fertilizers on potatoes)—the Department 
of Agriculture’s Report for 1884, p. 466, ff. 
I would take for my motto in preparing bul¬ 
letins: “Make things plain to the farmers.” 
I would keep it before me that I was not 
writing chiefly for men who understand sci¬ 
ence, but for men who need every aid to en¬ 
able them to grasp clearly the results of ex¬ 
perimental work: and a diagram or a, picture 
often conveys more information than pages of 
writing. 
Lamoille Co., Vt. 
flettr Ctops. 
MULCHING WHEAT AND CLOVER. 
T. B. TERRY. 
Details "of an experiment on poor lands; 
beneficial for wheat production , and still 
more for clover growth ; wonderfully good 
effect on the latter; will use more in future', 
experiment stations should try it. 
The writer was too busy to put in his word 
on this subject when the rest did; but as sev¬ 
eral .references were made to his little experi¬ 
ment, perhaps a brief history of it may yet be 
of service. 
I have some land with a northwestern ex¬ 
posure, which is also quite poor, where wheat 
is apt to winter-kill. There was about an 
acre of this kind in a field, put into wheat last 
fall. I happened to think that perhaps a 
mulch of straw would help it somewhat, so on 
half of the spot—about half an acre—I spread 
with great care, an ordinary jag of straw. 
There was probably about half of a big load, or 
half atom I did not dare put it on thickly^ 
since, having no experience in this line, I 
did not know but it might smother the wheat.. 
The application w as made just before winter— 
about November 15, if I remember correctly.. 
I spent a good deal of time in spreading this, 
straw very evenly. 
It was very dry last fall, and the wheat came' 
up and then stood just about still, until win¬ 
ter; but although very little growth was. 
made I had not put on straw enough to hideit*- 
In the spring I failed to see that the straw/ 
had done much, if any, good; but at harvest, 
time the wheat showed very decidedly where’ 
the straw was. The gain in wheat would; 
have paid me well if I had covered all the ex¬ 
posed part of the field. But to me the mostr. 
wonderful benefit was to the clover. I cam 
hardly believe my eyes, now, when I go over - 
there. Clover seed was sown on the field im 
the spring. Where the straw had been put r 
almost to an inch, there is a grand growth off 
clover. On the rest of the poor spot it is a 
very moderate growth. There can be no mis¬ 
take, as in spreading the straw we were not 
particular to keep the outside line straight 
and the growth of good clover follows the 
straw out and in. 
I mowed this field yesterday for the second 
time, with the machine set high, to keep down 
the weeds and thicken up the clover. There 
is an under-drained swale and cat swamp in 
this lot, where the soil is moist and rich. Here 
there was a great growth of clover; but 
hardly better than where the straw had been 
put on that poor field. In all the rest of the 
field, although much of it is good land, I 
think there is not a half acre having as 
heavy a sod as that where the straw lies. 
"When I mowed through this place I couldfeel 
the machine hang back, as it does when taxed 
to its utmost capacity, and a blind man could 
feel the let-up when I passed out of that spot. 
If a load of straw to the acre will make the 
poor spots grow clover, to say noth¬ 
ing of the wheat, equal to the richest portions 
of my fields, why, I shall certainly use 
more. I do not understand how this could 
be ; but I give the facts. It certainly was 
not winter pi otection that made the clover 
grow so finely, as it was not sown until spring. 
THE WEEPING NORWAY SPRUCE. From Nature. Fig. 346. 
