1908. 
THE RURAL NEW-YORKER 
107 
DEMONSTRATING VALUE OF MANURE. 
A Wide Field for Experiment. 
I>ast Fall a reader asked the Hope Farm man this ques¬ 
tion: ‘‘I want to demonstrate to an old farmer the su¬ 
periority of fresh cow manure to some he has had behind 
his barn for two years, with the liquid washed ofT. How 
can I do it? You might, say ‘plant two adjoining fields.’ 
Kindly suggest some quick and simple method.” We asked 
the experiment station people to answer. Among other re¬ 
plies we have the following from Director C. E. Thorne of 
the Ohio Experiment Station : 
There lies upon my desk the summary of a report 
of 1« years’ work instituted for the purpose of ans¬ 
wering the question your young farmer asks, and 
answering it in such a way as to convince any farmer, 
old or young, who is open to the demonstration of 
actual fact. The work has been carried out in the 
field, because of the distrust which farmers in general 
—and I with them—have of mere laboratory investi¬ 
gation of such problems as this. It has been demon¬ 
strated on field plots the superiority of the well- 
cared-for manure, and the advantage of re-enforcing 
manure with phosphates if the manure is to be used 
on a phosphorous-hungry soil, and this demonstra¬ 
tion has been carried into the field culture of corn 
and other crops on this farm in such a way as to 
prove the applicability to large operations of the les¬ 
sons of the plot test. The difference between the 
land left without manure and that manured has been 
so great that even a blind man could have discov¬ 
ered it. That between the differently treated manures 
has in some cases required the final test of the 
scales to make it plain, but this test has shown that 
the difference between the neglected manure of the 
open barnyard and the carefully saved and rc-cn- 
forced manure taken directly from the stable has 
averaged more than 100 per cent for the entire period 
of the test. 
This experiment, as I have said, has been in pro¬ 
gress 10 years. I estimate that it has cost a total of 
$10,000, or $1,000 per year. I also estimate that if 
every farmer in Ohio, old and young, could be con¬ 
vinced of the lesson it teaches, and be induced to 
put that lesson into practice, it would add to the 
production of Ohio’s farms at least a dollar for each 
of the ten million tons of manure produced in the 
State each year. A few farmers have already learned 
this lesson. Some from seeing the actual demon¬ 
stration in the fields of the Experiment Station; 
some from the bulletins reporting it; some from 
hearing it described at farmers’ institutes; Some 
seeing the Station’s exhibits at agricultural fairs; 
some from reading about it in the agricultural press 
•—all told probably enough are now putting it into 
practice to more than recover its cost, but the great 
mass of the farmers of the State yet fail to grasp 
its import. How are they to be 
reached? This, to-day, is the greatest 
problem before the experiment stations. 
It is easy enough to demonstrate; how 
to carry the demonstration convincingly 
to the mass of the farmers is the 
problem. 
Last Fall the Ohio State Horticul¬ 
tural Society held a field meeting in an 
orchard about 50 miles from the Ex¬ 
periment Station, in which the station 
entomologist had been conducting a 
co-operative spraying test. The or¬ 
chard of about 400 trees was loaded 
with some 4,000 bushels of fine apples, 
in a season when apples are a general 
failure over the State. It was a dem¬ 
onstration which was satisfying to those 
who witnessed it, but probably there 
were not more than 200 fruit growers 
there, and half of these were already 
convinced. How are the 300,000 farm¬ 
ers who did not see it to be convinced? 
Repeatedly during the past Summer 
parties of visitors have been conducted 
over the central farms of this Station, 
where they have been shown land that 
is producing nearly 30 bushels of wheat to the acre 
as a 10-year average, while land of the same char¬ 
acter, separated by a path two feet wide, is yielding 
but 10 bushels; clover on limed land yielding at the 
rate of 2'j4 tons per acre, and on unlimed land but 
half that amount; potatoes in one row blighted to 
the ground; in the adjoining row and from the same 
seed, standing green and vigorous. But what do 
the few hundred farmers who see this work count 
among the third of a million farmers in the State? 
Some time ago I attended a meeting, held at one 
of the county infirmaries of this State, the superin¬ 
tendent of which has been conducting a series of 
corn-breeding experiments under the direction of the 
department of co-operative experiments of this Sta¬ 
tion, a department organized for the purpose of es¬ 
tablishing demonstration points in every county, if 
not in every township of the State. The meeting 
was attended by 200 or 300 farmers, and a fine ob¬ 
ject lesson was presented in the results of modern 
effort at corn improvement. Not all county farms 
are adapted to scientific demonstration in agriculture, 
and fewer superintendents of such farms are quali¬ 
fied to conduct such demonstrations. The next day 
I was an interested spectator at a little fair, held by 
a local Grange at one of the outlying test-farms of 
this Station, one of the prominent features of which 
was another corn show. Probably a thousand farmer 
people were present—it is 15 miles to the nearest 
town of 5,000 population—and all had a good time, a 
few profiting by the real object of the fair. A few 
THE CAT AS A DAIRY ANIMAL. Fig. 72. 
weeks previously 1 had met another group of farm¬ 
ers, who had gathered to inspect the work of another 
of the Station’s test-farms, where large attention is 
given to the production of a special crop. The work 
has been in progress but a few years, but it is show¬ 
ing results so definite and striking that no intelligent 
farmer can see it and fail to be convinced of its 
value. 
These test-farms arc adjuncts to the Station’s equip¬ 
ment for scientific investigation. They also serve as 
local demonstration farms. Such farms should be 
located at once on every type of soil in the State, 
and eventually in every county. For a time their 
cost of maintenance would overtop their immediate 
value; for it takes time to bring this work into in¬ 
structive form, but the increase in Ohio’s grain yield 
THE WOODPILE FOLLOWS THE LOG. Fig. 73. 
of a bushel of corn, or a bushel of wheat, to the acre, 
would maintain a demonstration farm in each county 
of the State, conducted on the scale of the three test- 
farms now belonging to this Station, and leave a mil¬ 
lion dollars annually in the farmers’ pockets more 
than they are now finding there. 
Of course it does not follow that the establish¬ 
ment of a demonstration farm in each county would 
at once result in the increase of the crop yields of 
that county. There are probably not 200 farmers in 
this county whose practice has been materially im¬ 
proved by the object lessons afforded by the Ex¬ 
periment Station in their midst. But a younger 
and more receptive generation is taking up the reins, 
and the leaven is working. ciias. e. thorne. 
Wooster, O. 
MANURE SPREADERS AND COMPOSTED 
MANURE. 
Experience of Northern New York Man. 
On page 38 I notice that R. J. S. claims much for 
the manure spreader, and when I say that it is a piece 
of machinery that can easily be dispensed with I ex¬ 
pect to call down on my head the wrath of all those 
using manure spreaders. A year ago last Fall one 
was hired to haul out and spread some manure that 
had accumulated during the late Spring and Sum¬ 
mer. It was hired more for the purpose of testing 
ils advantages than anything else. As the manure 
had to be hauled some distance from the barn the 
gain in the number of loads drawn out by the spreader 
over those drawn with a wagon and spread by hand 
did not amount to enough to pay for the hire. Three 
horses and two men were used with the spreader, 
and a team and two men with the wagon. The half 
of the piece of land where the spreader was used 
failed to produce the hay that the other half did. 
The whole piece consisted of eight acres. After going 
over four acres with the spreader it was taken home, 
and the remainder of manure was drawn with a 
wagon until the pile was cleaned up. Then the re¬ 
mainder of the piece was manured with manure 
drawn from the stable every day as made. Why was 
the crop of hay poorer where the spreader was used 
than where it was not? Some will probably say that 
more manure was put on the land where the wagon 
was used. Others will say that the manure drawn 
from the barn was better than that drawn from the 
pile in the yard. I will admit that less manure was 
used with the spreader on the same acreage than 
where spread by hand, but in my opinion the real 
reason for the difference in the amount of hay was 
that the manure from the barn was better, not be¬ 
cause of difference in feed, but because that from the 
yard had lost much of its value by being washed 
and leached out by the elements, and this is the very 
reason I do not care for a manure spreader. Why 
should a man draw his manure out and leave in a pile 
for months to lose a large per cent of value from 
tlie weather? Oil this farm the manure is drawn 
out and spread on the meadow land every day from 
the time the cows go into the barn in the Fall to as 
late in the Spring as we can drive on the land with¬ 
out cutting it up. If there is a man living who can 
use a manure spreader in the snow that we often 
have in this section I would like to see him. I believe 
the claim of evenness of distribution is more than 
counterbalanced by the saving in value and labor by 
spreading as made each day. I know a man not far 
from here who is now drawing manure into a large 
pile to stay there until next Fall, when he will load it 
into a spreader and spread on his meadows. It seems to 
me that once manure is thrown off a 
wagon it is a waste of time and labor to 
throw it back again, as the extra time of 
spreading from a wagon or sleigh is 
not much more than throwing into pile. 
There is no need for repetition in doing 
work that is both hard and disagreeable. 
There are cases in farming, as in other 
work, where the easiest way is best. 
Clinton, N. Y: t. e. k. 
R. N.-Y. — Is there any manure 
spreader that will work in snow? We 
want the facts, whatever they are, and 
call for actual experience from farmers. 
In the West we found sentiment pretty 
much all one way in favor of the 
spreaders. In the above-mentioned ex¬ 
perience we do not see that the spreader 
was responsible for the short yield of 
grass. We feel sure that we can pile 
and compost manure so that when well 
rotted it will be a better dressing for 
grass lands than fresh manure, and the 
spreader will put in on even. Does it 
pay to pile manure for composting? 
That is what we want discussed. In 
our own section there have been scarcely 
five days this Winter when a spreader could not 
have been used as well as a wagon or sled. 
This quotation is going the rounds, commit It to mem¬ 
ory : “Twixt the optimist and the pessimist the difference is 
droll—the optimist .sees the doughnut, the pessimist sees 
the hole.” 
Few people realize how good nuts are coming to be a 
staple article of food. They are now eaten by a dozen 
families where one used them 15 years ago. Fifteen years 
hence there will be 50 to 1. Here you have a tip on the 
future prolits In nut culture. 
It seems that the papers do not always fit the prize 
vegetables at county fairs. One man tells us of a case 
where 15 so-called different varieties of potatoes were 
made up from one bln. Another tells of a case where an 
exhibitor came to New York markets and bought great 
tubers of various shapes and exhibited them as “new 
varieties.” 
