BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 57 
actual harm would be done the animals to which it might be fed. These 
differences of opinion are all the more remarkable, in view of the facts 
that buckwheat has long been cultivated, and that very large amounts of 
~ it are grown in some localities. It may perhaps seem still more extraor- 
dinary to the reader that Iam myself obliged to confess that an experi- 
ence of fifty years has not been sufficient to clear up these contradictions 
in a manner satisfactory to myself. Several facts have been communicated 
to me by trustworthy persons, which certainly go to show that under cer- 
tain circumstances the pasturing of buckwheat stubble and the eating of 
buckwheat straw and chaff occasion unusual appearances. It is said, for 
example, that the heads of sheep swell up, and that swine become be- 
numbed. Such appearances have, however, always been transitory, and 
it has not been perceived that the animals ever suffered any permanent 
injury. I have myself, on the contrary, in many years, harvested more 
than 2000 bushels of buckwheat grain on single farms, and have 
never experienced any thing but the greatest advantage on feeding out 
the straw and chaff to sheep and neat cattle. In seasons when the 
weather had been specially favorable for harvesting the straw, my sheep, 
although not actually forced by hunger to do so, have eaten up the buck- 
wheat straw as clean as if it had been hay, leaving scarcely a single stalk 
of it uneaten. In the course of this long-continued and wholesale use of 
the buckwheat straw, I have never seen with my own eyes any of the 
injurious effects that have been ascribed to it, and I am consequently 
inclined to believe that the locality in which the straw is grown must have 
a very important influence in producing these effects.”’ 
It is to be observed that in the old tables of Hay-worths, which were 
supposed to give the value of each kind of fodder, as determined by farm 
experience, in comparison with that of good hay, buckwheat straw was 
often classed with barley straw, as being worth about half as much as 
hay. 
