374r 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[OCTOBEK, 
Walks and Talks on the Farm— Ho. 130. 
It is hard work for the horses to break up 
sod land during the dry weather of August and 
September. But with a good three-horse plow 
and a good point, the work can be done. And 
I have an idea that one good plowing in August 
will pulverize the soil more than two plowings 
in spring. When I was a boy, my father was 
summer-fallowing a field of rather heavy clay 
soil. He had plowed it three times, and cul¬ 
tivated and harrowed it until it was quite loose 
and mellow. One day he set me to roll it 
with a heavy three-horse roller. This puzzled 
me. We had been spending the whole summer 
in trying to lift up and loosen the soil, and now 
to be told to go and roll it! “ Why, father,” 
said I, “ wont the roller press it down again 
and make it hard?” “Never again make 
such a remark as that,” he said. “ A farmer 
would think you knew nothing about farming. 
If you roll or trample land when it is wet, it 
will become hard and bake. But no amount 
of rolling will make dry land hard." I have 
never forgotten the remark. If you can break 
up and thoroughly pulverize clayey land seven, 
eight or nine inches deep during our dry hot 
summer months, it will not forget it for years. 
I think there can be no doubt on this point. 
The only question is how to do the work. 
The field that I “ fall-fallowed ” in 1808,1 
sowed to barley in 1869, sowing it to wheat 
after the barley was off in the fall, and seeding 
it clown to clover in the spring. The clover 
failed, and I manured the field in the fall and 
winter, and plowed it up in the spring, and 
sowed it to oats and peas, and afterwards to 
wheat, seeding it down with clover in the 
spring (1872). In 1873 I mowed the clover for 
hay, and the second crop for seed. This sum¬ 
mer I mowed it again for hay. I had a grand 
crop. After haying, the clover grew rapidly, 
and I turned in all my sheep and hogs, and ate 
it down as close as possible. The middle of 
August I put in the plow. The soil is a strong 
loam, approaching to clay, and I expected a 
tough job. We put three strong horses abreast 
to a good plow, and I went with the man. 
We staked out the headlands fifteen feet from 
the fence, and struck out a furrow, going all 
round the field. I do not know how it is with 
others, but I find that my plowmen have a na¬ 
tural inclination to leave the headlands to the 
last, and they like always to turn the furrow 
towards the fence. The true way, when the 
land is dry, is to plow the headlands first, and 
plow all round the field, and turn the furrows 
from the fence. But to do this, it is necessary 
to set poles to strike out by. The way we did 
this is shown in the annexed diagram. We 
* c 
* D 
E * 
* B 
F* 
* A 
* H 
G * 
measured fifteen feet from the fence to the 
pom. A, and here we put in the plow, and I 
went ahead and stuck another stake at B, and 
another at C, both fifteen feet from the fence. 
The plowman keeps the stakes B and C in lino, 
and is thus able to strike out a straight furrow. 
When he got to C, he turned “ gee,” and struck 
out a furrow to D and E, and so on to F and 
G, and then to H and A. We then, of course, 
! kept ou plowing round and round until the 
whole headland was finished, using only two 
horses and short whiffietrees to turn the land 
two or three furrows from the fence. 
“ There is nothing new in all this,” says the 
Deacon. “I never said there was,” I replied. 
“ What we want is not so much new ideas as 
energy enough to put in practice what we 
know to be right.” I have a set of short 
whiffietrees that I use for plowing in the gar¬ 
den and for turning the land two or three fur¬ 
rows from the fences. The double tree is only 
21 feet long, and the single trees 14 inches long. 
I find them very useful. I have also a plow 
with a movable beam, that can be set so as to 
turn a good furrow with the near horse walk¬ 
ing in the old furrow. In this way we can 
plow close up to a fence, and turn the soil 
away from it. Now I do not think there is 
anything “ new ” in this. But there are a good 
many of us who leave two or three feet of land 
all along the fences to produce nothing but 
weeds. And if this was all, it would not be so 
bad. But the roots of these weeds run into the 
adjoining land, and many a field has become 
infested with thistles and couch grass from our 
neglect in the first place to plow close to the 
fences, and keep our headlands clean. I often 
see a row of corn planted so close to the un- 
plowed land along a fence, that the cultivator 
can not be used between the row and the fence. 
The result is that the row of corn is yellow and 
sickly, and not worth half the labor that is 
sometimes spent on it in trying to keep it clean 
with the hoe, and the land becomes foul. I 
believe this is the principal reason why my 
farm was in such a miserably weedy condition. 
The knolls on the farm are sandy and full 
of stones. The land could not be half plowed 
and cultivated on account of these stones. 
Thistles and other weeds took possession of 
these stony knolls, and the scratching of the 
land with the plow, instead of killing the 
weeds, merely served to scatter the seeds and 
spread the roots to the land adjacent. The 
headlands were treated in the same way. The 
fence corners were a convenient place to put 
stones, stumps, and rubbish of all kinds. 
Brambles, elder hushes, burdocks, thistles, and 
a long catalogue of weeds soon got possession, 
and not a little of the land on each side was 
abandoned to them. “ I expected to find your 
farm without a weed on it,” said a recent 
visitor, “ but I find you have not succeeded yet 
in killing all the weeds.” I asked for no ex¬ 
planation. I knew very well what he meant. 
I have contended that weeds can be killed. 
But I never said that I had succeeded in mak¬ 
ing my farm clean. I have said a great deal 
on the subject, for the simple reason that the 
destruction of weeds has occupied much of my 
time and thoughts. I sometimes get discour¬ 
aged. It is an unceasing fight. It has to be 
renewed every year. But I am gaining on them. 
Looking at the trouble I have had in killing 
weeds and in restoring the condition of a run¬ 
down farm, it seems strange to me that so many 
intelligent and well-to-do farmers spend so 
much time and money in building fine houses 
and ornamental barns and fences, and so little 
in draining and in improving the condition of 
the land. Solomon says: “ Prepare thy work 
without,. ml make it fit for thyself in the field, 
and afterwards build thine house.” It seems 
to me that there are a good many farmers who 
would do well to heed this proverb. 
While the Deacon and I were talking and 
looking at the sheep and pigs, William has been 
j plowing. Perhaps two of Crozier’s Clydesdale 
horses might plow this land, and turn a furrow 
7 inches deep and 10 inches wide. Here we 
put on three horses, and turn a furrow 15 inches 
wide. Such a furrow, one mile long, turns 
over 6,600 square feet, or over one-seventh of 
an acre. If the horses travel a mile and a half 
an hour for eight hours, exclusive of turning, 
they would plow (1.8), say If acres; if two 
miles an hour, they would plow in eight hours 
(2.4), nearly 2£ acres. With a 10-inch furrow, 
the same distance of travel would plow less than 
acre, and a little over 14 acre respectively. 
In England an acre is considered a good day’s 
plowing, and three-quarters of an acre is a fair 
average. When an American talks about plow¬ 
ing two or three acres a day, an English farmer 
shakes his head. He cannot understand it. 
And yet if the English horses walk one-third 
slower, and the plowman works one-third less 
time, and the plow turns one-third less furrow 
—if the Englishman plows one acre in the day, 
the American would plow 3f acres ! 
“ I should not think it would make all that 
difference,” said the Deacon. “Figure it out 
yourself,” I replied, “ perhaps I have made a 
mistake, though I think not. At any rate, it is 
certain that we usually plow much more land 
in a day, than they do in England and Scot¬ 
land—probably on an average not far from 
double. “You are now plowing nearer 18 
inches than 15 inches wide, I think I never 
saw you plow so wide before. You have 
always advocated narrow furrows.” We will 
not discuss that question now. What I want 
you to observe, is the splendid condition of this 
land. It turns up beautifully. It has a rich 
look about it. It crumbles all to pieces. It 
has not forgotten that fall-fallowing we gave it 
six years ago, nor the top-dressing of manure 
in the fall and winter of 1870. 
The Deacon and some other farmers thought 
I should lose half the value of the manure, by 
spreading it on the surface. They thought it 
should be plowed in. They have great faith 
in the mechanical action of manure. They 
think it lightens the soil. There is some truth 
in this, but I have more faith in underdraining, 
good and repeated plowings, and thorough cul¬ 
tivation, in connection with rich, well decom¬ 
posed manure. 
“ Yesterday,” said the Deacon, “a farmer 
took a load of clover hay to Rochester, and all 
he could get for it was $10 per ton. Another 
farmer took a load of wheat straw, and sold it 
readily for $12 per ton. This does not look 
as though farmers had much faith in your 
chemical notion, that the manure from a ton of 
clover hay is worth three times as much as from 
a ton of straw. The facts seem to be against 
you.” “ So much the worse for the facts,” I 
replied. “ But I am not going to argue that 
matter with you. There are some things so well 
established, that it is no use listening to the 
objections of those who do not understand 
what they are talking about. A farmer who 
sells clover hay at the above prices, and keeps 
his straw, is not a wise man. When he can 
exchange a ton of straw for half a ton of bran, 
he had better do it.” 
“You pretend to be able to tell,” said the 
Deacon, “ what a ton of manure is worth, but 
I notice that the chemists differ very much 
among themselves, as to the value of the same 
identical manure, and I do not see how you can 
tell with any certainty how much good a ton 
of manure will do.” No one pretends to do so. 
