GENERAL REPORT. 
33 
their farms would warrant, with an express view to an increas¬ 
ed amount of manure, and taking great pains to convert all 
unfed straw and other material, into fertilizers, have gone so 
for as to work up great quantities of muck in stall, yard and 
piggery, and still not content, have dug into neighboring marl- 
beds, and as a delicacy for certain favorite crops, even ordered 
bone-dust and plaster from other states ! It is proper to state, 
however, that the number of such is not sufficiently large, as 
yet, to be an occasion of well-founded anxiety on the part of 
the great body of our more staid and conservative farmers. 
% 
WHEAT. 
t 
During all the past years since 1860, has scarcely lost prestige 
with our formers ; who, because of the scarcity of labor essen¬ 
tial to the cultivation of all hoed crops, the increase of me¬ 
chanical facilities for harvesting, and a steady increase in price, 
have even cultivated it with more than former zeal and energy. 
The greatest crops of the period were raised in 1861 aild 
1863 ; in which years, respectively, the yield is believed to have 
been as high as twenty to twenty-five million, and twenty- 
tive to thirty million bushels. 
In 1864 to 1866, inclusive, the chinch bug {Micropus leu’^ 
copter us, of Sa\^,) committed such ravages as greatly fo 
diminish, and in some cases almost entirely destroy, the crop. 
All attempted remedies, except the very manifest but rather 
.slow and laborious one of stamping them under foot, or beating 
them to death with billets of wood—both of which were nearly 
as destructive to the wheat as to the bug—failed; so that an 
utter abandonment of the cultivation of this crop for a time 
seemed inevitable. But, happily, the intensely cold winters 
that succeeded, or some other natural cause or causes, so crip¬ 
pled the energies of the enemy that from that time forward his 
attacks were less and less serious, until the farmer again held 
undisputed possession of the field. 
In 1863, just before harvest, the wheat aphis {Aphis avenoc, 
of Fab.) also made its appearance, and occasioned much alarm, 
though it did not prove so destructive as was feared. 
3 Ag. Trans. 
