398 
‘Ihc RURAL NEW-YORKER 
March 1, l!)lf> 
owerful yet Light 
^ ~ y Tli<? 'Tractor 
o fEconomy 
% 
Plowing 40 year-old sod on 
Ruggles Farm, Circlevllle, Ohio. 
T HE HUBER LIGHT FOUR is powerful 
enough to break the oldest and toughest 
sod, pulling three bottoms and turning 
an acre an hour; but its balance between traction 
power and tractor weight is so nice that it works 
on plowed ground, discing or harrowing without 
packing the soil. 
High test steel in frame and gear reduces tractor 
weight. Less power is required to move the 
tractor, leaving more power for the draw-bar. 
Direct drive through all spur gear and anti-fric¬ 
tion bearings, carries the maximum of power 
direct to the draw-bar. High front wheels roll 
over the soft ground—instead of pushing it— 
increasing the pull by reducing the resistance 
in moving the tractor. Center draft on all loads 
saves power for the draw-bar and protects the 
frame from strain. 
Thus the Iluber Light Four delivers greatest power with 
least fuel, also has ample power at the belt for the ensilage cut¬ 
ter, hay baler, clover huller, small grain thresher. 
Write for the booklet, 
4 ‘Doing the Impossible. ” 
Dealers: We want live men in territory now open. 
THE HUBER MANUFACTURING CO. 
Weighs about 5,000 
pounds. 12 h. p. at 
draw-bar; 25 h. p. at 
belt. Four - cylinder 
Waukesha motor. 
Hyatt Roller Bear¬ 
ings. Perfex Radia¬ 
tor. Short turn. Self¬ 
steering in the furrow. 
Center draft. Bums 
gasoline, kerosene or 
distillate. Road 
speed and 4 miles 
per hour. 
663 -Center Street MARION, OHIO 
Makers also of Uuber Junior Thresher 
CANADIAN BRANCH, BRANDON, MANITOBA 
one man ca 
—without experience, at small expense, 
with the least labor—is described in the 
new edition of our book, “Better Farm¬ 
ing with Atlas Farm Powder”—120 
pages, 146 illustrations. 
More than 200,000 copies of this book 
have gone to progressive American 
farmers. Hundreds of them have writ¬ 
ten us to send copies to relatives, friends 
and neighbors. Experiment stations vise 
it; agricultural colleges and schools dis¬ 
tribute it to their students. 
“You surely are richt in saying Atlas Farm Powder 
is the easy, quick and cheap way to get rid of stumps,” 
writes Mrs. J. R. Cronister. Martha, Pa. ' I fired 
the blasts and enjoyed it.” 
If you have stumps to blast, trees to 
plant, land to drain, etc., you will need 
“Better Farming with Atlas Farm Pow¬ 
der.” Write for a copy at once—the cou¬ 
pon at the right is for your convenience. 
ATLAS POWDER CO., Wilmington. Del. 
Dealers everywhere. Magazine stocks near you. 
ATLAS POWDER CO., Wilmington, Del. 
I Send me “Better Farming with Atlas Farm Powder." 
I am interested in explosives for the purpose before 
which I mark "X.” RN3 
I □ Stump Blasting □ Tree Planting 
. □ Boulder Blasting □ Ditch Digging 
I □ Subsoil Blasting O Road Making 
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^Address-■— 
Atlas Farm Powde 
The Safest Explosive 
The Original Farm Powder 
Truck Crops and Methods on the Eastern 
Shore 
The two counties of Virginia On the 
eastern side of the Chesapeake and the 
two tiers of counties in Maryland on the 
Peninsula, as well as the lower half of 
Delaware, are largely devoted to the 
growing of truck crops. The Maryland 
and Delaware counties produce large 
areas of strawberries, while the Virginia 
counties ore mainly devoted to early Irish 
potatoes and sweet potatoes, though grow¬ 
ing some strawberries, cabbages and on¬ 
ions. The lower Maryland counties plant 
largely of sweet potatoes and to a lesser 
extent of the early Irish potatoes, but 
grow a considerable area in the late crop 
of Irish potatoes, mainly for home use. 
The center of the greatest strawberry 
shipping is about Bridgeville, Del. The 
Eastern Shore of Virginia produces usu¬ 
ally several times as many barrels of 
early Irish potatoes as it does of sweet 
potatoes. The Maryland counties pro¬ 
duce at least five times as many sweet 
potatoes as they do of Irish. 
The methods, too. vary in the different 
sections. The Virginia growers prepare 
for the sweet potato crop by raking dur¬ 
ing the Winter the pine leaves and rotten 
trash from the woods, and spread it on 
the land and turn it under for the sweet 
potato crop, while in the lower Maryland 
counties the sweet potato crop is mainly 
grown with commercial fertilizers or sta¬ 
ble manure reinforced with acid phos¬ 
phate. Those who have grown the sweet 
potato crop ou a turned-under growth of 
Crimson clover have found that it is a 
profitable method. 
The general neglect of Winter cover 
crops is apparent in the whole lower part 
of the Peninsula, and it involves a heav¬ 
ier use of the commercial fertilizers. This 
Winter I am besieged with letters from 
all over the South asking whether they 
should plant early Irish potatoes this 
Spring. Growers in the Virginia section 
who make large crops per acre may be 
able to grow and deliver at railroad sta¬ 
tion Irish potatoes at an actual cost of 
$1.50 per barrel, but, taking the average 
crop per acre, the average cost will be $2 
per barrel. Isolated farmers who are not 
professional truckers will be at a greater 
expense for barrels and covers, and will 
pay heavier commissions than where 
there are organized exchanges, heavier 
freight and more for packages, as well as 
more for fertilizers. The chances are 
that where the whole community is devot¬ 
ed to truck and there is an organized sell¬ 
ing agency, the crop may pay moderately 
well this season, as there will not be an 
over amount of old potatoes ou the mar¬ 
ket. 
In Southeast Maryland the sweet po¬ 
tato crop has always in the long run been 
more profitable than the early Irish po¬ 
tato crop. There is less competition: in 
fact, in the East there is little competition 
with our growers, except in Southern 
New Jersey, and while the Irish potato 
crop in some seasons pays well, it is often 
unprofitable, while the sweet potato crop 
never altogether fails either in produc¬ 
tion or sale. Hence the great increase 
here in the area devoted to the sweet 
potato crop. The average crop here is 
about 300 baskets an acre, the baskets be¬ 
ing five-eighths of a bushel, but we have 
growers who make over 400 and up to 500 
bushels an acre, and as just now the po¬ 
tatoes are selling at the station on the 
railroad for $2 a bushel, it looks like a 
profitable crop. 
The greatest area in any vegetable crop 
on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and in 
Delaware is that devoted to tomatoes, 
mainly the late crop, for the canning fac¬ 
tories. This Peninsula leads every other 
section of the country in the packing of 
tomatoes. During the war the growers 
got fine prices, and the canners throve, 
too. Just now both of them are in a state 
of uncertainty. The crop last season 
promised to be large, but in July there 
came the torrid spell, and thousands of 
bushels were literally cooked on the 
plants. One grower estimated his loss at 
4,000 baskets, and as he was getting 50 
cents a basket, the loss was heavy. But 
on the whole the crop was profitable. 
As a rule the strawberry crop has been 
profitable to those who produce good fruit 
and cull it properly. There are. with the 
strawberry crop, as with all other crops, 
good growers and poor ones. I noticed 
this last season when I was looking at 
the sales of strawberries at a station near 
me. The wagons drove up one* by one. 
and the auctioneer sold them. As some 
wagons came up I noticed that there was 
a spirited competition among the buyers. 
Then came an old wagon drawn by a lean 
mule with harness tied up with twine. 
One buyer said to another: “Jim. you 
can take that load at your own price; I 
do not bid on that sort.” He had not 
looked at the berries, but knew whose they 
were. And that load went down below 
the average, and the grower probably con¬ 
cluded that he had been swindled, when, 
in fact, his own reputation had cheated 
him. Very few of the products are ship¬ 
ped from here on consignment. If not sold 
by the exchange, they are bought by the 
buyers from the North, who have their 
refrigerator cars at the stations and are 
I competing for a load every day. 
While in general our sandy soils are 
best suited to the production of early 
vegetables, we have found that these 
sandy soils will not make the crop of 
late tomatoes as the more heavy clay 
loams will. The sandy soils seldom make 
over four or five tons an acre, and the 
general average not much over three, 
while the heavier soils will make 10 to 
12 or more tons an acre. And with the 
highest improved lands of each texture 
there are many things connected with the 
soil and production which we do not yet 
understand. We cannot, in our sandy 
type of soil, make lettuce head as it does 
easily on the clay loams. We get heads 
after a fashion, puckered up. but never 
the solid white heads grown on other 
soils and northward. It. is not a matter of 
plant food, either, for I have made the 
soil fat with manure and fertilizers, and 
the sandy soil will get the heads puckered 
in first and then stop, while that on the 
heavier type of soil will be slower hut 
will head up as tight as a cabbage. Tin* 
sandy soil carries the crop rapidly to a 
certain point and then will do no more, 
but will shortly run to bloom. I have 
two types of soil in my garden, and have 
had a good chance to test, the productive¬ 
ness of each. One end of the garden is a 
strong loam with stiff clay right under 
the surface soil. The other end of the 
garden is sandy and no clay till down 
several feet. The loamy end is later, hut 
makes the heaviest crops of all kinds, 
while the manuring of both is the same. 
If any difference in this, the sandy part 
probably has had the heavier manuring. 
But I can get more and sweeter can¬ 
taloupes on the sandy soil, and the earliest 
tomatoes. I avoid the late tomatoes. The 
sandy soil gives me the earliest sugar 
corn, while the heavier soil gives me the 
best late crop. 
I have said we get the manure in the 
hills for melons in the Winter. This has 
come about from the fact that we can 
only get fresh stable manure. Hence it 
pays to give it time to decompose and 
get into condition that will feed the crop. 
A fertilizer, largely phosphate and potash, 
is added at planting time, and the hills 
are made and planted. They are thinned 
to two plants when a stand is as¬ 
sured. and a light application of nitrate 
of soda is made around each hill, the can¬ 
taloupes being in hills 20 inches apart in 
rows five feet apart. Then as the fruit 
sets it is a common practice to sow Crim¬ 
son clover all over the patches of melons 
and tomatoes for a Winter cover. In the 
Virginia counties, after using a very heavy 
application of fertilizer on the early Irish 
potato crop the growers try to recoup 
from any loss on potatoes by getting a 
big crop of late corn ou the same land 
to use up the remainder of the food. ?o 
that the soil is as poor as ever at the end 
of the season. A crop of cow peas after 
the potatoes would give a great mass of 
organic matter to turn under, and that is 
the greatest need today of the soils of the 
two counties. And yet when those two 
small counties sell from eight to ten mil¬ 
lion dollars worth of truck in a season 
and the growers make money and ride in 
touring cars, there is no chance to argue 
against a success. The black muck soil 
here makes the heaviest crops of straw¬ 
berries. largely because of the uniform 
soil moisture. The sandy uplands will 
make good early crops, but not as heavy 
as the black soil, which makes the best 
late crops. There are not a great many 
early tomatoes grown for Northern shio- 
ment. though it is evident that this crop 
would be far more profitable than the 
late canning crop, hut it demands the use 
of an abundance of glass sashes, hotbeds 
and cold frames. It will come as tie- 
growers understand the value of more in¬ 
tensive gardening. W. F. MASSEY. 
New York State Breeders’ Association 
Meeting at Buffalo 
Part II. 
Maj. Henry Leonard. United States 
Marine Corps, pleased his audience by 
telling the probable effect that the war 
had had on the horse market. Contrary 
to the claims of truck manufacturers. In* 
contended that motor power had not re¬ 
placed the horse, even in war. and that 
the clearing away of war -wreckage was 
obviously a job for teams, not tractors, 
lie pictured the terrible conditions that 
follow in the wake of battle, stating that 
craters and shell holes often 30 feet deep, 
filled with dead horses, wrecked tanks and 
barbed wire entanglements, were frightful 
not only in their appearance, but that 
the blood-stained mud and corruption was 
beyond description. As far as the human 
eye could see was desolation and destruc¬ 
tion. and if reclaimed areas were to come 
forth, the horse must be the agency, and 
bear the brunt of the burden of rehabili¬ 
tation. 
The foreign farmer always raises two 
or three colts each year; he is not a me¬ 
chanic and will not turn readily from 
horse to the tractor to work his small 
fields. The French farmer has traditions 
to maintain; he wants to return to the 
small area used by his father or grand¬ 
father in their farm operations, and lie 
will do the work in much the same way. 
even though the best of the fertile soil 
has been literally buried. 
He said that demobilization would not 
liberate many useful horses; that many 
would stay with the colors, and that only 
the scrulis would again be placed ou the 
market. Europe, he said, was 5,000.000 
horses short. 
Belgium, lie said, was actually horse¬ 
less. Many of the famous Belgian horses 
had been killed by the Germans, simply 
