1446 
Tht RURAL. NEW-YORKER 
December 17, 1921 
liiiaiid.il problems involved, it needs to be on a quasi- 
public scale. 
COUNTY FORESTRY.—It has long seemed to me 
that the most feasible method is to develop forestry 
on a county basis like the Farm Bureau: that each 
county, on its own referendum, initiate a policy of 
county forests on the cheaper and more remote 
lands. The county is a large enough financial unit 
to carry the burden up to the point where returns 
begin to come in. The county is also a good admin¬ 
istrative unit for the resident supervisor, which, it 
seems to me, is essential. After the forest has been 
planted, it requires continual supervision to main¬ 
tain fire checks and keep the growth properly 
thinned and protected. Of course, at the outset of 
such a plan it might be desirable for the county 
supervisor to cover two or three counties, but ulti¬ 
mately he will have his hands full in almost any 
county if the area of land best suited to forests is 
devoted to that purpose. With his flivver, the county 
forest supervisor could dodge about from place to 
place, and look after all of the labor and cutting 
that is required to maintain these public forests, and 
in a little while, probably less than a generation, 
they would be giving returns that would make a big 
hole in the local taxes, just as has been the case in 
certain sections in Germany. I am pretty thor¬ 
oughly convinced that the county system of forestry 
is the only one which will ultimately succeed in 
1 ringing back a reasonably profitable crop on much 
of the land in New York. The township is too small 
a unit, the city is a little too much removed in its 
method of thought, and the nature of the problem 
is hardly of a kind to be carried on as exclusively 
a State function. A plan of county forest develop¬ 
ment is one of the ways for a community to recog¬ 
nize squarely the economic problems of some of its 
hill farmers, and of affording a means by which 
they can be permitted to seek better pasture without 
a complete sacrifice of whatever value their property 
may have. I would like very much to see a discus¬ 
sion of this question of county forests in The R. 
N.-Y. e. o. fippin. 
Planting vs. Farming in the Cotton 
•• Country 
T |HE R. N.-Y. has a great many readers in the 
South, and I am glad to see you quoting the 
wise advice some of her public men are at last giving 
the one-crop planters. For many years I have been 
ridiculing the advice the Southern papers have 
been giving to the planters to grow their own 
supplies. They consider that corn, wheat ,and 
oats are only “supplies” to enable the farmer to 
grow more cotton. Years ago. in a North Carolina 
paper, a planter boasted that he had grown corn 
enough to last him three years, intimating that he 
did not intend to plant any more corn for three 
years, but would make that old. weevil-eaten corn 
suffice, while he ran his land down and made the 
fertilizer men rich growing cotton. All over the 
Southern uplands they have grown cotton, perpetu¬ 
ally keeping the soil in clean culture and exposed to 
the sun, the great enemy of all bacterial life, till now 
the humus is gone, the beneficial bacteria are starved 
out. and they have only the dead mixture of sand 
and clay in which to put commercial fertilizer and 
gamble on the chances. Then when a season like 
the past one comes, and there is not moisture to dis¬ 
solve the fertilizer, the starved soil makes a poor 
crop. 
For more than “0 years I have been hammering 
away in the effort to make the .Southern cotton 
growers realize that the only thing that will ever 
prevent these periodical disasters is to abandon cot¬ 
ton planting and go to farming with cotton. This 
means the utter abandonment of the one-crop plant¬ 
ing and the adoption of systematic farming with the 
permanent improvement of the soil through a wise 
rotation of crops, the growing of legume feed, feed¬ 
ing it and making manure. These periods of depres¬ 
sion must always occur so long as the cultivators of 
the South depend on cotton to buy everything else 
they need. 
In 1 SPG cotton was at the lowest price ever known, 
selling at six cents a pound. That Summer I was 
invited to address a farmers’ club in South Carolina. 
In opening my address I said that I believed the low 
price of cotton was the best thing that ever hap¬ 
pened to the South. One old man walked out. say¬ 
ing "I don’t want to hear any more of that foolish¬ 
ness.” Two years later I addressed the same club. 
The old man was there, and I asked him what he 
then thought of what he thought foolish two years 
before. “You are right.” he said, “we will never go 
to farming till we are whipped into it.” At that 
time there was a change for the better with many 
farmers in the cotton belt, and I was hopeful for a 
general change in all the cotton country. But cotton 
advanced in price, and they forgot all about the 
privations of the past, and went hard at work to 
enrich the fertilizer manufacturers and the meat 
packers. Years ago I happened to have to stop to 
see a cotton planter, lie and his sons were out in 
the cotton, and the rows ran up to the house, around 
which not a tree nor a shrub, a grass plot or a rose 
bush existed. A woman was frying some bacon for 
dinner. I saw that it was evidently packing house 
bacon. Then I got to musing. Some Western farmer 
raised that hog. and got none too much for it. The 
railroad which carried it to Chicago made its freight. 
The packer killed and cured it while he was piling 
up his millions. A jobber probably handled it and 
sold it to the Southern merchant, and the railroad 
and the jobber made a pi’ofit. and the country mer¬ 
chant, waiting a year for his money on the changes 
of the cotton crop, and that man and his boys were 
working in the heat trying to make their own crop 
enrich all these others, while they and their land 
got poorer. 
One great drawback to farm improvement in the 
cotton belt is the tenant cropper system. A man 
A Tall-growing Tomato Plant. Fig. 623 
owning a large body of land will parcel it out to a 
tenant whose only means are a mule and a plow to 
grow the plot in cotton. The first thing the negro 
does is to go to a merchant and make mortgage on 
his prospective share of the cotton crop to get some¬ 
thing for himself and mule to eat. The merchant 
puts not less than 100 per cent on all he gets, and 
if cotton brings a good price the tenant may pay his 
debt. Otherwise his cotton goes and leaves him in 
debt. This makes cotton cost the grower far more 
than it would cost under a rational system of farm¬ 
ing. I knew one farmer in South Carolina, a real 
farmer and a large one, a systematic business man. 
who kept accurate accounts of every crop. At the 
time cotton was selling for six cents he said to me: 
“1 make cotton at an actual cost of 4% cents per 
lb., but there is not a man in 10 growing cotton who 
can make it at a cost of 10 cents. But I grow my 
meat and wool and cattle, and my cotton is made 
almost without cost, when other crops are credited 
with their contribution to the expenses of the farm. 
I am now selling smoked hams and bacon, the hams 
for 25 cents, while packers’ hams are 15 cents, and 
get 18 cents for side bacon and shoulders. And that 
meat costs me the same price that cotton costs. So 
while the cotton does not bring me in debt, as it does 
most one-crop men. it does not pay like the bacon.” 
The only thing that will ever bring permanent 
prosperity to the cotton belt, is an abandonment of 
the tenant crop system and rotative farming with 
cotton, corn, wheat and oats, and live stock. Not 
mere diversification, but systematic farming and 
building up of the soil till independent of the fer¬ 
tilizer mixer. w. f. massey. 
A Tall-growing Tomato 
I AM sending a picture (Fig. 6231 oe a Ponderosa 
tomato plant which grew to the height of 11 ft., 
as the top arrow indicates. The second arrow from 
the top shows the highest tomato at 0 ft. 1 in. high; 
the other two arrows also show tomatoes, the one at 
7 ft. 9 in. and the other at 7 ft. 5 in. Before the 
frost came the plant grew to be 12 ft. high. The 
tomatoes at 7 ft. 9 in. and 7 ft. 5 in. ripened. This 
plant was grown by Mr. Vieyra, whom you see in 
the picture. This plant was grown at Erie, Pa. 
LIXDA BUTTERFIELD. 
Short Farm Stories 
What About Asparagus Tops 
Me would like to have your advice on cutting aspara- 
gus tops. \\ e have cut ours this Fall, and covered bed 
with manure, as a neighbor who has a bed does his that 
way. Since then a number of people say the Spring is 
the best time. This is our first experience with it, 
although it will be set three years this coming Spring. 
Glenmont, N. Y. (J . T . 
0 1 R plan is to lot the tops remain over Winter. 
Wo cut thorn in the Spring. These tops hold the 
snow and give some protection. It seems to make 
little difference, but most growers leave the tops un¬ 
til Spring. 
Forest Leaves for Keeping Ice 
. IIos any reader of The R. N.-Y. ever tried covering 
ice with leaves? I have noticed in Spring that a pile of 
snow or ice covered with leaves lasts a long time. Saw- 
cinst is becoming scarce and hard to get, and expensive, 
and I have wondered if one were to gather in the Fall a 
quantity of leaves and use them to cover the ice in the 
icehouse if they would make a good covering to preserve 
the ice. I think it might he wise to bore a few holes in 
the roof or otherwise provide for wetting them down 
occasionally. What about it? n w c 
Boonvilie. N. Y. 
Me would like to know what others have done 
about this. M r e tried it in a small way. and found 
the leaves very inferior to sawdust. Chaff and fine- 
cut straw 7 was much better. 
Buying Bees by the Pound 
I. How many pounds of bees are required to stock a 
10-frame luve? 2. Is it preferable to buy bees bv the 
pound or a number of nuclei for such a hive? 
V. M. W. 
1. Three pounds of bees put on to combs in the early 
part of May in most of the Northern localities will 
stand a very good chance of producing a crop of 
honey the same season. One pound of bees re¬ 
ceived later in the reason would make increase up 
to a full colony, but probably would not be able to 
got any honey, except perhaps enough to carry them 
through the M Inter. Three pounds of bees will 
make a very much better start, and under ordinary 
conditions and proper management would pay for 
their first cost and give the owner something in 
addition. 
2. It is much safer to buy bees in pound packages, 
without combs, than nuclei made up of combs, brood 
and bees with a queen. The pound packages are 
cheaper in first cost because a given amount of money 
in bees without cornu will go further so far as honey 
production is concerned than the same amount in¬ 
vested in bees, comb and brood. As a rule, the be¬ 
ginner will succeed better with nuclei because the 
bees are less liable to swarm out as soon as they are 
Put into the yard. There is some difficulty on the 
part of the beginner holding bees in the package 
form in the hive, unless he uses perforated zinc ex¬ 
cluders to hold the queen within the hive until they 
are quieted. It is advisable to put pound packages in 
hives and then put them in a cellar until they make 
a little start in drawing out the comb foundation. 
They should be kept there a couple of days in the 
dark, after which they can lie set on their Summer 
stands without much danger of their swarming out. 
.,1 E. R. ROOT. 
Straw for Killing Quack Grass 
The proposition of smothering out two acres of 
quack grass with straw seems hardly feasible when 
one considers the amount of straw necessary to do 
this. Me had a little experience here in the use of 
leaves for the same purpose. In the course of re¬ 
moving (ho leaves from (he campus quite a quantity 
were dumped into a little hollow, partly to try to 
exterminate the quack grass there. The depth of 
leaves was perhaps a couple of feet before they be¬ 
came wet and compact, and yet the quack grass 
found no difficulty in coming up through them, and 
seemed to find the mulching beneficial rather than 
otherwise. M’lien we compare the open nature of a 
straw mulch with the compact nature of a layer of 
leaves, we can form an estimate of the depth of 
straw necessary to smother this pest. M r hile I have 
no direct evidence on the matter, it does not seem 
reasonable, in (he light of the above experience, to 
be able to apply a layer of straw light enough to en¬ 
able the potato stalks to pass through it and at the 
same time heavy enough to inhibit the growth of the 
quack grass. paul thayer. 
Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station. 
