Published by 
The Rural Publishing Co. 
333 W. 30th Street 
Netv York 
The Rural New-Yorker 
The Business Farmer’s Paper 
Weekly, One Dollar Per Year 
Postpaid 
Single Copies, Five Cents 
Vol. LXXIV 
SHORT SERMONS FROM READERS. 
The Wonder of Alfalfa. 
IIE recent editorial on Alfalfa lias started me. 
The old geographies that T studied when a boy 
at school 55 or more years ago had the “Great 
American Desert” coming east almost to the Mis¬ 
souri River at Kansas City, and when I first went 
< ut across Southern Kansas 35 years ago it looked 
as though “the desert” was really there. Ten years 
later I found a straggling and struggling population 
scattered along over that desert, with a few 
oases here and there. 
Ten or 15 years later 
there began to be evi¬ 
dences of quite a little 
prosperity in spots all 
along the line, and I 
have read of the great 
development in recent 
years. Still I was thor¬ 
oughly unprepared for 
the wondrous trans¬ 
formation scene that I 
found had taken place 
when T went over last 
F all; splendid farms 
a nd fa r m buildings, 
good substantial houses 
and home surroundings, 
great stacks of Alfalfa, 
many fields still being 
harvested for the fourth 
time the first week in 
November; fat sleek 
cattle by the tens of 
thousands, c o r n a n d 
grain fields, populous 
and thriving towns, and 
Alfalfa the foundation 
of all that wonderful 
awakening and develop¬ 
ment. 
Any man . who has 
lost faith in agricul¬ 
ture, or does not know 
what can be realized 
out of the soil when the 
right sort of plants are 
put into it and given 
the right care, wants to 
take a trip out through 
Kansas and back again 
with his eyes open, and 
if there is any good 
agricultural blood in his 
veins it will begin to 
move rather lively and 
he will want a piece of 
the same prosperity. 
But he just wants to re¬ 
member that it is not 
necessary to go to Kan¬ 
sas, or very far from 
his own farm, to get 
into the game. We 
have several hundreds 
of acres of clover and 
vetch growing on our 
farms here in Connecti¬ 
cut, and I wanted you 
to come up sometime 
last Fall and let m e 
show you, and tell you 
about the wonderful re¬ 
sults we have secured 
from bacteria inocula- 
lation of the seed, even on land where we have been 
growing these plants successfully for the last 25 
years, and the soil ought to have been inoculated 
properly anyway. But this special treatment this 
year has rather convinced me that it will pay to 
have “a bottle of yeast” up your sleeve every time 
you intend planting any of these seeds. 
J. H. HALE. 
Several people ask if “heaves” in the horse is a 
contagious disease. No. It cannot be contracted from 
an afflicted horse, or from the stall where one has stood. 
NEW YORK, JANUARY 9, 1915 
A WEST VIRGINIA CORN CROP. 
Giant Growth in a Mountain Valley. 
R. ELIJAH TRIPLETT of Randolph Coun¬ 
ty, West Virginia, sends us the remarkable 
picture of Eureka coni shown at Fig. 6. Mr. 
Triplett said he saw the picture of a shock of 
Eureka which was grown on Long Island, and so 
he wanted to show what his farm could do. lie 
lives in a small valley on top of the mountains. 
This valley is about three miles wide and 35 miles 
long, running north. Last Spring Mr. Triplett 
wanted to build a silo 10x36. The neighbors said 
it would take five acres of corn to fill such a silo, 
but Mr. Triplett planted four, and said that would 
have to fill it. lie could only get the crop on two 
acres into the silo, and thus he had nearly half of it 
left outside. The corn was not fully ripened be¬ 
fore frost, so they had to shock it early, and fed 
the grain to hogs, and the stalks to cattle. In this 
way only about half of the value of this big Eureka 
corn was realized, and evidently such a crop belongs 
in the silo. They were nearly done husking this 
corn when one of the boys suggested that they 
No. 4289 
ought to have a picture of it to send to The R. N.-Y., 
and here the picture is. The ladder on which those 
boys are standing is 16 feet high, which gives an 
idea of the kind of a tree this Eureka makes, and 
you will see from the stock shown in this picture 
that they raise something besides corn on Valley 
View Farm. As to the way this corn was handled, 
Mr. Triplett writes the following little account: 
“The land on which the corn was grown was a 
meadow sod, a bit run out; this land is a sandy 
loam. It had an application of lime about 12 years 
ago, hay one half ton to the acre. We put from 12 
to 15 loads (of 40 
bushels) to the acre of 
horse and cattle ma¬ 
nure right from the 
barn, and plowed it un¬ 
der. This ground was 
plowed the latter part 
of February and first 
of March. There was 
a b o u t three acres of 
this manured, the re¬ 
mainder was land that 
had never been plowed. 
We took the stumps 
T h i s was oak brush, 
out and plowed it with¬ 
out any manure. Just 
before planting the soil 
was run over with a 
double disk cutaway 
and smoothed with a 
smoothing harrow. Then 
we took 1,000 pounds of 
16 per cent, acid phos¬ 
phate and 200 pounds of 
nitrate of soda and 
mixed it thoroughly. 
We set the grain drill 
for 200 pounds to the 
acre, but did not get 
that m u c h on, some¬ 
where between 750 and 
SOO pounds to the four 
acre s. May 1<S we 
drilled the corn; the 
r o w s were 42 inches 
apart, the stalks any¬ 
where from eight to 14 
inches in the row. 
There were 84 rows 37 
rods long. We culti¬ 
vated it six times; I 
think it would have 
been better to have cul¬ 
tivated more, but other 
work was pressing, 
hence the neglect. In 
cultivating we use an 
ordinary one-horse cul¬ 
tivator. Ours has seven 
shovels. We go once 
over the row. This way 
we cultivate just as fast 
as they do with a two- 
horse cultivator. W e 
finish a row every time 
we cross the field. I 
think I could beat 
this corn yield if 1 
tried, especially to see 
what I could do by ex¬ 
tra soil preparation, 
fertilizing and cultiva¬ 
ting to the limit. The 
treatment given w a s 
nothing extraordinary—only what good farm prac¬ 
tice demands and usually finds profitable.” 
A WISCONSIN ALFALFA FARM. 
HE office of Farm Management of the National 
Agricultural Department gives the following 
facts about a farm in Southern Wisconsin. 
It is said to be one of the most successful of the 
farms studied last year, and is a good illustration of 
the wonderful value of Alfalfa. 
While this farm contains 527 acres, a large part 
