402 
FARMERS’ CLUB-DISCUSSION. 
A Dismal View of Illinois Farming. 
F. P. A., Petersburg, III.—Something 
will have to be done soon to relieve the 
farmers of the West or they will all, or 
very nearly all, become bankrupt. I have 
just returned from the county recorder’s 
office for this county (Menard), where I 
went to get an estimate with regard to the 
amount of the real estate of this county 
recorded under mortgage, and the re¬ 
corder told me that the lowest estimate 
is 33% per.cent, and this is one of the least 
afflicted counties in the State in that re¬ 
spect. Absolutely some more and better 
markets must be opened up by this Gov¬ 
ernment for agricultural products. It is 
folly, and worse than folly, to think that 
home consumption is all the farmers need, 
when Illinois alone can easily produce 
enough bread and meat for all the States 
and Territories of this nation. The follow¬ 
ing correct statement shows the price per 
acre at which farm lands have been chang¬ 
ing hands in this county for half a decade. 
A glance will also show that at the present 
selling prices of corn, wheat, oats, beef and 
pork farmers are losing money, and they 
will continue to do so until something is 
done to increase the price of agricultural 
products. I am now living less than a 
day’s drive from the place where I was 
bom and reared. My parents immigrated 
to this State in 1819. I claim, therefore, to 
know something about Central Illinois. 
This town is within 20 miles of the geo¬ 
graphical center of the State. 
A STATEMENT of the valuation of farm 
land in central Illinos, and an estimate of 
the production of cereals per acre with the 
present prices of products: Average farms 
have been selling at from $60 to $75 per 
acre. Such land will produce, on an aver¬ 
age, 40 bushels of corn and 15 bushels of 
wheat per acre. These two are the staple 
crops, corn always taking the lead. With 
land at $65 per acre and legal interest at 
eight per cent., the interest value of each 
acre is $5.20. The lowest price of corn is 
12% cents per bushel, and 40 bushels at 
12% cents per bushel, make $5. Now, taxes 
and repairs will not amount to less than $1 
per acre. Again, thrashing the corn and 
hauling it to market will cost five cents 
per bushel or $2 per acre. The outlay per 
acre now foots up : 
Interest....$5 20 
Raising corn. 5 00 
Repairs and taxes... . 1 00 
Thrashing and hauling .... 2 00 
Total cost per acre.SIS 20 
Now, we will take profits both in corn 
and wheat. For corn 23 cents per bushel is 
the highest market or shipping price now 
paid, or which has been paid since the 
present crop came into market. 
Forty bushels, then, at 23 cents per bushel 
would give $9.20 as the income from an 
acre, while the expenses would be $13 20, 
leaving a loss of $4 per acre. 
We will now see how wheat “pans out.” 
Fifteen bushels to the acre is the average 
yield in this State. The present price for 
shipping wheat here is 68 to 70 cents for No. 
2 grade ; 15 bushels at 70 cents equals $10.50 
—the income. Now for the outlay : 
Interest on cost of land... $5 20 
Preparing ground and sowing.. 2 00 
Reaping and putting in shock. 1 50 
bushel seed at 70 cents. 1 05 
Thrashing and hauling to market. 1 05 
Stacking or hauling thrashing machine 0 SO 
Total cost per acre.$11 10 
Income.. 10 50 
Total loss per acre. 00 70 
You may say we should raise corn and 
feed it to cattle and hogs. Well, fat cattle 
are worth about 3 to 8% cents per pound 
for such as are fit to ship to the Chicago 
market. Hogs would be the most profitable 
for the farmer if hog cholera would let his 
hogs alone. 
New England Farmers. 
T. H. Hoskins, M. D., Newport, Vt.— 
As a New England farmer I would like to 
have those friends who write about us 
thoroughly understand our situation. It 
is true that our railroads do not serve us as 
they should, and as they no doubt would, 
if the managers owned no stock in or took 
no bribes from the express companies. But 
it is not on butter freights that we suffer, 
as “A. T. T.” seems to think. Butter is 
the one thing that we can get to market 
cheaply, even by express. On potatoes and 
hay by the car-load, and on cattle and 
horses in the same quantity, rates are not 
worse, perhaps, than in much of the West. 
But on all shipments less than a car-load, 
the rates are more than double, and in 
times past have exceeded the car rates four 
times. These rates may have orginally been 
put on to throw business into the hands of 
country merchants, and save the railroads 
the trouble and expense of handling small 
THE RURAL N 
shipments; but in doing this the farmer was 
subjected to so many extra charges, profits 
and commissions that it was difficult to 
get a new dollar for an old one, or realize 
the cost of production on small lots of any 
kind of farm produce. Rates have been some¬ 
what reduced on these small shipments; 
but they are still too high to offer the 
farmer much encouragement, and are 
higher for the same goods and quantities 
from the farm than to the farm, so that 
car-loads of apples, etc., are brought into 
our markets to compete with home-grown 
fruit at half the charge for the same quan¬ 
tities carried the other way. One reason 
for this is, no doubt, that so many cars re¬ 
turn empty; but this does not make it less 
hard for the farmer. 
The R. N.-Y.’s comments on “ A. T. T.’s ” 
letter are a little misleading. It says 
“ fully 60 per cent, of these farms were left 
before the war.” There has never been 
anything like 60 per cent. Perhaps the 
R. N.-Y., meant to say 60 per cent, of those 
which have been left, were lett before the 
war, and this may be true. [Yes. We 
supposed the context clearly indicated that 
that was the meaning.—E ds.] The sale of 
1,000 in the State of Vermont within one 
year would proba.bly add to the selling 
value of the remaining 34,000 many times 
the price of those sold. It is the lack of de¬ 
mand that causes the excessively low price 
of land. There are really now all the time 
more farms necessarily offered for sale to 
settle estates than there are purchasers. 
But the land is just as good and the busi¬ 
ness as profitable as when farms sold 50 per 
cent, higher. 
Double Crops. 
C. E. C., Peruville, N. Y.—Where prac¬ 
ticable a double crop gives the largest 
profit. A mixture of one half bushel of 
barley and one and a half bushel of oats 
will increase the number and weight of the 
bushels yielded, as well as their feeding 
value. If to this mixture be added a few 
quarts of the small, yellow, Canada pea, 
the yield and value will be still greater; 
but the peas should be omitted on laud 
where the vines will be so rank as to pull 
down the grain and make bad work for 
the machine. Quick, dry, gravelly land, 
where straw and vines do not grow too 
large, is best suited for this crop. If you 
persist in sowing corn thickly for fodder, 
put in some oats. They will get ripe, but 
the corn will keep them from lodging, and 
they will be the best part of the fodder. 
Coin planted broadcast, or too thickly in 
drills, is a mass of water with just tissue 
enough to hold it together. To be at their 
best, corn needs plenty of sun, and potatoes 
a partial shade. One field was planted 
with both with satisfactory results, the 
rows were two feet apart each way. Every 
other row was corn, so that each hill had 
an area 16 square feet. With so much 
light and heat the ears were large and per¬ 
fect, and the yield above the average in 
this vicinity. For the best yield of corn 
ever grown there were lour feet between 
the rows one way. The corn can be cut 
and drawn to the silo and not be in the 
way of digging the potatoes. The latter 
were deep between the rows of corn, and 
seemed to be benefited by the partial 
shade, yielding as much as the crop on the 
adjoining fields. The bugs are not so 
harmful after the corn has got large 
enough to shade the potatoes. The corn 
can be drilled in with a grain drill, one row 
at a time, and another hoe left down will 
mark the position of the potato row at the 
same time, if one doesn’t care to row more 
than one way. Put a little more brains 
into your management. Hire a little more 
muscle. Don’t let your land lie idle and 
bare half of the year. Don’t put too much 
of a kind in one place, either of plant or 
fertilizers. Make the labor on the growing 
crop, or the crop itself, fit the ground for 
the next one. 
The Bennett School Law. 
B. B., Farmingdale, III.—I hope the 
R. N.-Y. will not champion the “compul¬ 
sory school law.” Why? Because its en¬ 
forcement is the rape of liberty. To 
parents belong by all laws but those of 
despotism the right to control their chil¬ 
dren. Compare a director’s love for your 
children with your own. Nearly all are 
alive to the fact that education is necessary 
and will give their children all the “school¬ 
ing” they can afford to, and the very few 
of whom this cannot be said, should be 
forced into doing what is right by public 
sentiment and not by a dangerous law 
that is a provocation to a hundred where it 
benefits one. It will be a prolific source of 
very bitter controversy between parents 
and school officers, for until the independ¬ 
ent spirit (encourage it!) which our ances- 
E W-YORKER. 
tors bequeathed to us is stamped out by 
oppressive laws (may that time never 
cornel) parents will ill brook any such in¬ 
terference in their domestic affairs. The 
grade is easy to all imaginable Puritanic 
despotisms. At the next mile stone I read: 
“You may not marry until you can prop¬ 
erly support a family,” and: “ Coffee, tea 
and tobacco are injurious and must be used 
only medicinally;” “Fine clothes, car¬ 
riages and horses must be discarded; ” 
“Collars, cuffs, gold rings and laces must 
give way to the useful:” “Ugly dreams 
distress you ; it is from imprudent eating ; 
a medical man will dictate the proper 
rations.” Where is this oversight to end ? 
Are the “blue laws” of old New England 
and the sumptuary laws of the feudal ages 
to be reenacted? 
A Potato Talk. 
J. D. L., IndiANOLA, III.—Will rotten 
potatoes infect the soil with disease for the 
next crop ? For two years in succession 
the June freshets destroyed two acres of 
early and late potatoes on a river-bottom. 
Of 60 varieties some were nearly matured. 
The odor of those decaying potatoes could 
be smelt half a mile away. I have since 
taken smooth, fair tubers, without scab 
or disease, from the same field and wintered 
them perfectly. I find scabby potatoes on 
prairie soil. If these are planted in timber 
clay-soil there will be no scab among them 
and vice versa. A change of soil gives 
fresh vigor to any seed. I waded in three 
feet of water and fingered out a hatful of 
late Green Mountain potatoes, which had 
just begun to set, as they cost then $1 a 
pound. The tubers were the size of butter¬ 
nuts. I sprinkled them with lime, and 
they wilted soft, but wintered safely, and 
made a vigorous growth next year. As 
an experiment, I am taking out of 
the growing hills every year, in 
July, a few of the late Green Mountain 
potatoes for seed before they are half 
matured, to see if the crop from such seed 
will ripen earlier. Stranger things have 
happened. Corn will grow if the seed is 
plucked wheD in the milk. 
“Succession of Forests.” 
Dr. W. J. Beal, Agricultural Col¬ 
lege, Michigan. —I see that some one ob¬ 
jects to the way some questions were 
answered in relation to the succession of 
forests, page 269 of Rural New-Yorker. 
I thought I did the best that could safely 
be done under the circumstances. I didn’t 
want to come out squarely and say what I 
now do, that I questioned the statements 
made to be facts. That White Pines suc¬ 
ceeded oak and chestnut where there were 
no Pines anywhere about to produce seed, I 
do not believe. The same is my opinion 
with regard to hemlocks. The fact that I 
have very often followed up such state¬ 
ments made by untrained eyes, and found 
them mistakes, causes this unbelief. That 
the White Pines and hemlocks come from 
seeds but a very few years old, there can 
be no doubt in the minds of those who 
have grown such trees, and tested the vital¬ 
ity of the seeds, etc. If a man’s statements 
in regard to what he says he has seen are 
questioned, he often loses his temper and 
fires away at random. No doubt the in¬ 
quirer thought that he stated facts. The 
longer I live the less I am surprised to 
find any sort of man ignorant of many 
things that less able men well understand. 
THE GREAT WEATHER PLANT 
(ABRUS PRECATORIUS.) 
This is a slender climbing tropical vine 
belonging to the pea family of plants. It 
has acacia-like, pinnate leaves and little 
clusters of purple flowers. Its small, 
scarlet, pea-like seeds which are tipped 
with black, are called crab’s eyes or Pater¬ 
noster peas, and are well known to visitors 
to the East Indies, the West Indies, the 
Mediterranean and other warm regions 
where the plant is a native or naturalized 
weed, and where the seeds are very plentiful 
and are gathered and made into necklaces 
and other ornaments. So writes Mr. W. 
Falconer in our excellent contemporary 
the American Florist. 
During the past two years this plant has 
caused considerable agitation in Europe in 
botanical and meteorological circles, and 
all on account of Mr. Joseph F. Nowack, 
an Australian chemist who made up his 
mind to make some money by it. He has 
been growing the plant for about four 
JUNE 21 
years. The leaves and leaflets of this abrus 
are very sensitive to light, moisture and 
temperature, and display their sensitive¬ 
ness in very marked movements; they also, 
like those of many other leguminous plants, 
go to sleep at night. 
Nowack became very much Interested in 
these movements, and it didn’t take him 
long to come to the conclusion that they 
were caused by the condition of the weather 
at some future period. But as the leaves 
displayed many kinds of movements and 
we get many kinds of weather, of course he 
had to systematize his notions and fix 
upon particular movements for different 
kinds of weather. That didn’t take him 
long, however, and the poor little plants 
were booked to foretell the weather 48 hours 
ahead, and this they did “ with marvel¬ 
ous precision.” They prognosticated fair, 
bright, dull, showery, wet, changeable, 
calm, breezy, very windy aud hot or cold 
weather, and told where these special kinds 
of weather should take place, whether in 
the immediate locality or five, 10 or 50 miles 
away. They also forewarned us of snow 
or hail, fog or mist, electrical disturbance 
of the atmosphere, thunder storms, cy¬ 
clones, explosions in miues, and other 
wonderful things, aud indicated the very 
directions in which all these changes or 
events would occur. 
Scientists and reporters were attracted, 
the newspapers were full of it, sensational 
stories regarding the wonderful weather 
plant set the atmosphere aflame between 
Berlin, Vienna and London, royalty became 
interested in the phenomenon, fashion 
smiled, science inclined and prosperity 
dawned upon the discoverer. For who 
could gainsay it ? There was the plant 
well known to botanists aud no one could 
look upon it without beholding the move¬ 
ments, so sensitive are the leaves, aud as 
the witness wouldn’t care to wait there 48 
hours at a time to affirm or deny its infalli¬ 
bility, it became accepted gospel. 
And we are told of an observatory in the 
Styrian Alps that threw away aneroid and 
barometer and depended upon the weather 
plant alone for its weather reports, that 
farmers, agricultural unions and whole 
townships in Austria had indorsed it, 
that the committee at the Jubilee exhibi¬ 
tion in Vienna had found it to indicate the 
coming weather precisely 96 times out of 
100 ; and that Nowack himself had made 
over 34,000 careful experiments with hun¬ 
dreds of plants, and found it almost infalli¬ 
ble. And so on. 
The late Crown Prince Rudolph of Aus¬ 
tria became interested in Nowack’s weather 
plant and brought it to the notice of the 
Prince of Wales. Then Nowack invaded 
England, and through the interposition of 
the Prince of Wales was given facilities at 
Kew for carrying on experiments there 
long enough to convince the skeptical Eng¬ 
lish that the weather plant grown in Now¬ 
ack’s patented apparatus and according to 
his directions was exactly as he represented 
it to be. So he brought over some of his 
own plants and his own apparatus, and he 
himself conducted the experiments. These 
and the observations made were watched 
and recorded by Dr. Francis Oliver, lecturer 
on botany at University College, London, 
and one of the most eminent of modern sci¬ 
entists. Observations were taken about 
eight times a day for 23 days in October, and 
the Kew Bulletin of last January was wholly 
devoted to the matter. Alas for poor Now¬ 
ack, Dr. Oliver found that the movements of 
the weather plant were not governed in the 
least degree by the weather of a future 
period, near or remote, aud that it had no 
prognosticating power of any kind what¬ 
ever. Further, that Nowack himself was 
much befuddled in his computations; some 
days the prognostications would be for one 
day ahead, on others for two, three or four 
as the case might be, and then only decided 
after the days had passed and the actual 
weather had been recorded ; and even then 
no patent medicine almanac in the country 
could prophesy the weather a year ahead 
with less exactness. 
But now a Yankee florist—our friend J. 
Lewis Childs, though Mr. Falconer does 
not say so—appears upon the scene and 
reaps the shekels that Nowack failed to 
find. The florist, nosing around the world 
for something new, struck Nowack’s thun¬ 
der, and at once perceived a splendid op¬ 
portunity for a sensational novelty. And 
he quietly secured a quantity of seed and 
now, making the most of the notoriety al¬ 
ready given to it, he booms the plant both 
here and abroad, but in a popular way. 
Nowack appealed to one person in a mil¬ 
lion, but the Yankee to the multitude; for 
a quarter of a dollar he will furnish seeds 
of this .wonderful weather plant, and you 
