Published by 
The Rural Publishing Co. 
333 W. 30th Street 
New York 
The Rural New-Yorker 
_The Business Farmer's Paper 
Weekly, One Dollar Per Year 
Postpaid 
Single Copies, Five Cents 
Vol. LXXIV 
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 6, 1915 
No. 4293 
THE POTATO CROP—A SERIOUS MATTER. 
VYe Must Find New Markets. 
T HE season is a disastrous one to many of our 
potato growers. Most of them succeeded in 
raising a good crop, and they spent money 
freely in buying fertilizers and other necessities; 
the price, however, is very low, and at present the 
figures quoted to growers are in most cases below 
cost of production. This is particularly hard in 
sections where fertilizers are largely used, as such 
growers are obliged to pay cash or give their notes 
in payment for the fertilizer. When the price runs 
as low as at present the potato becomes a specu¬ 
lative crop, and occasions a serious loss to the 
growers. At the present time, while these growers 
are in trouble over the disposition of potatoes, our 
towns and cities are filled with people who would 
willingly buy tubers if they could obtain them at a 
fair price. On the street where The R. X.-Y. is 
printed, people are paying on the average $1.40 and 
over per bushel for potatoes. If they could be 
bought for $1 the consumption would, without ques¬ 
tion. be increased 50 per cent. The retail prices are 
so high, that potatoes are not considered a necessity 
in the average man's dinner, as they ought to be. 
Every effort should be made to encourage the use 
of potatoes not only in nature’s original package, 
but in every other form which can be reasonably 
introduced. They do these things much 
better in Europe. It is doubtful if 
Germany could maintain herself in the 
present war if it were not for her 
great potato crop. Germany produces 
three or four times as many potatoes 
as the whole of this great country, 
and they are used in a dozen different 
this country, now, and this will be a matter for 
farmers themselves to take hold of in the future. 
It will have to be organized and worked out by 
farmers themselves in order to make it effective, 
but something of the sort is absolutely necessary, 
and we must find ways of utilizing the potato crop 
in an economical way in order to take care of the 
surplus, and provide for such trouble as we are 
having this year in the disposition of the crop. 
The picture, Fig. 50, shows a package of Swedish 
potato flour on sale in this city. The potato by the 
side of the package weighs one pound. This flour 
is quite freely used by many wise housekeepers who 
seek to economize. It seems entirely wrong to im¬ 
port that flour from Europe at the very time that 
so many of our growers are at loss to know what to 
do with their potatoes. This potato flour may be 
used like cornstarch in pudding or desserts, but it 
has especial value as a substitute for wheat flour, 
in making fine cakes. Sponge cake, made accord¬ 
ing to a formula enclosed in the carton has a de¬ 
licacy of texture never attained where wheat flour 
is used, and it is so light that it almost seems ready 
to take wings and rise from the plate. Little drop 
cakes made with this material are of high quality, 
and it is equally fine for pancakes .and dumplings. 
It seems very much lighter than other starches, 
hence does not “sink” to give a heavy texture. 
American cook books seem to ignore potato flour, 
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ways. The war has shut off very 
largely outside supplies of gasoline, at 
the same time making it necessary 
largely to increase the use of motor cars. 
In order to supply power, the Germans 
are using large quantities of alcohol, 
and this is chiefly made from their 
great potato crop. 
It is necessary to keep up the supply 
of meat in Germany, and also to pro¬ 
vide breeding animals for the future. 
In order to provide food for this stock, 
potatoes are used in many ways. They 
are fed entire, cooked or raw. sliced 
and dried, somewhat like evaporated 
apples, and also ground into flour. 
The peelings are saved both in town 
and city for the feeding of live stock. 
In fact it may be said that the humble 
potato is as powerful a weapon for 
protecting Germany from her enemies 
as the wonderful siege guns and the 
muskets which have proved so effec¬ 
tive on the battlefield. And the po¬ 
tatoes are also being used in dozens of ways to 
feed the German people. In the form of flour, the 
potatoes enter into everyday consumption. The 
Austrian Government has passed a law prohibiting 
bakers from using more than 70 per cent, of rye or 
wheat flour in baking bread, the balance must be 
potato flour, and there is strict supervision of the 
bakeries. This potato flour is largely starch, and 
when mixed with wheat or rye flour, and properly 
baked, it makes a very palatable bread. In this 
way the people are being fed, German resources 
are developed, and farmers are helped by provid¬ 
ing a market for their potatoes. 
Something of the same sort must be organized 
and developed in this country to take care of our 
potato growers. It seems like a crime or worse that 
people within gunshot of The R. N.-Y. office should 
be unable to buy potatoes on account of the heavy 
cost, while thousands of our readers in the country 
are facing hard economy, if not financial loss, 
through their inability to sell potatoes for enough 
to pay the cost of production. It may not be pos¬ 
sible at this time to ship potatoes into the large 
cities to be sold as tubers, but the time must come 
eventually when other uses for the potato, such as 
making potato flour or alcohol, must be worked out. 
In Germany the Government, driven by necessity, 
has taken hold of this matter, and loaned money to 
farmers for establishing driers and factories for 
working up potatoes. We can hardly expect that in 
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Fig. 59. 
and experience must be gained from foreign house¬ 
wives. An extension of its use will give us variety 
in our cooking, and will furnish a new outlet for an 
important farm crop. 
I 
GRAIN FOR SMALL POULTRY FARM. 
HAVE several acres of land, and propose to raise 
a flock of 400 poultry this season, increasing num¬ 
ber thereafter. What grain would you advise me, 
having no live stock to raise to lessen the cost of 
feed? a. j, n. 
Meriden, Conn. 
The above question reminds me of some personal 
experience that may be of benefit to D. J. H. and 
others. I had a lot next my henyard 300 feet long 
by 170 feet*wide. I had it plowed, and planted flint 
corn on all but a strip on the north side 300 by 30 
feet, on which I later sowed oats very thickly and 
harrowed them in. On this oat-sowed strip I placed 
a row of small poultry houses and put 400 chicks 
in them when the corn was three to four inches 
high. The chicks were then about six weeks old, 
and the oats just beginning to prick through the 
ground. I would draw a hoe across that 300-foot 
strip making a little furrow that exposed the 
white rootlets of the oats, and the chicks would 
dig all day long after those rootlets, they seemed 
to like the white rootlets better than the green 
sprout, but they ate it all, and the oat too. When 
they had cleaned the ground I sowed more and har¬ 
rowed it in. Every time the corn was cultivated 
there was a long string of chicks following the cul¬ 
tivator. feasting on worms, bugs, etc., and as the 
corn got larger there was shade from the sun, and 
shelter from hawks all Summer long, while the 
droppings from 400 chicks every day were not doing 
any harm to the land or the corn crop. When the 
corn matured in the Fall the chicks, then weighing 
four to five pounds each, still continued to run in 
the corn, and they learned to pull the husk off and 
pick the corff off the lower side of the ears, but 
I did not mind that any, as it was all for them 
anyway. I cut corn out of the ration I fed them, as 
they got plenty of that in the field. 
This worked so well that I put a six-foot poultry 
wire fence around that field, sinking it in the ground 
to the bottom of an eight-inch deep furrow, to keep 
skunks, woodchucks, etc., from burrowing under, 
and planted that field in corn for seven successive 
years, and always had a good crop. There was a 
small fraction over an acre of the corn ground, and 
the best year I had 113 bushels of shelled corn 
from that ground; 1G5 bushels of ears that shelled 
22 quarts to the bushel. The young chicks cleaned 
that ground of weeds so thoroughly that for two 
years I did not touch a hoe to it. and only cultivated 
it twice in the season. But I went through the rows 
and pulled out what weeds I could find, before it 
was time for them to mature seed. 
I never saw a piece of ground so free from weeds. 
A piece of worn-out sod was turned 
over in another lot, about 200 pounds 
of ground bone put on it and buckwheat 
sowed. This buckwheat would average 
very near five feet high, and matured a 
fine crop, but about the time to harvest 
it a heavy rain and wind came and near¬ 
ly half of it lodged down on the ground. 
This I had to cut with a scythe and 
dumped it in a great heap in the hen- 
yard. The hens worked in the heap 
every day. and that heap utterly dis¬ 
appeared, was broken up, and washed 
away by rains, but not a kernel of 
buckwheat was lost. Prof. Clinton of 
Storrs College told me that it was not 
the ground bone that made that tall 
buckwheat, but that the soil was full 
of nitrates. 
Another fine crop for D. J. IT. to 
raise is mangel beets, for Winter 
green food. They are the easiest to 
keep of anything, can be piled up 
the cellar like cordwood, but must 
well dried off before storing away, or 
they will rot. That is, it won’t do to 
pile them up in heaps if they are at 
all damp. 
Part of mine this year have rotted, 
because I was careless and piled them 
in a bin while damp. The cornstalks 
chopped into pieces two or three 
inches long make a very good litter for the hen¬ 
houses, as the grain easily sifts down through them. 
But the best litter was oat straw with the un¬ 
thrashed oats still in the heads. Let the oats get 
ripe, cut them and tie into bundles, and store them 
away for Winter. The hens won’t let any oats go 
to waste. The shade and shelter of that growing 
corn was worth more to the growing chicks than 
the whole cost of seed and labor. Samples of the 
ears were sent to the editor of The R. N.-Y., and 
he took them to Iowa, where he was to lecture, to 
sort of corn “was being grown in Con- 
GEO. A. COSGROVE. 
m 
be 
show what 
necticut.” • 
IRON AND FRUIT TREES. 
HAT about putting pieces of iron into the holes 
where trees are planted? I am advised to do 
it, but is there any good reason for the prac¬ 
tice? j. B . 
When I was a boy it 
hang old horse shoes 
limbs of 
W 
was a common practice to 
and other scrap iron on the 
Plum trees with the idea that this would 
prevent rotting of the fruit, and promote the health 
of the trees. Of course it had no effect whatever, 
but it was a very common practice. But of late 
years it has been considered by many that if the 
old scrap iron is put into the holes when the trees 
are planted it will have a good effect. Of course the 
oxidation of the iron in the soil will put more iron 
into the soil, but so far as any practical benefit to 
the tree is concerned 1 cannot see it. Iron is of 
