354 BULLETIN OF THE BUSSEY INSTITUTION. 
This general fact consists perfectly with the actual farming practice 
of New England. Speaking comparatively, very little straw has ever 
been used as fodder in this region, while salt hay and bog hay have 
always been used largely, not to say universally, as regards the latter. 
It is plain, therefore, in spite of what has been sometimes over hastily 
asserted, that bog hay is esteemed by our farmers to be decidedly 
better fodder than straw. A like remark will apply to salt hay also, 
though, from the necessarily local significance of the latter, it can never 
have been so generally put in contrast with straw. 
The history of the use of salt hay in New England is a meant one. 
As has been said already, such hay was formerly held in high estima- 
tion, but it has latterly fallen into comparative disrepute. As recently 
as 1830, a committee of the Agricultural Society of the County of 
Essex, which is said to contain about five-elevenths of all the salt marsh 
in Massachusetts, reported as follows : — 
‘¢ Salt hay, when well cured, is a very valuable feed for neat cattle and 
horses, and may be fairly considered as equivalent in yalue to more than 
one-half of the same amount of English hay. . . . A mixture of this 
feed with English hay is conducive to the health of the animals fed upon 
it, and is proved to be as agreeable as it is nutritious by the avidity with 
which they seize upon it.” * 
Mr. Colman,t in reporting upon the same county, speaks as follows: 
‘The average product of well-managed salt marshes is from three- 
quarters of a ton to a ton and a quarter. The hay is valued at half the 
price of English hay.. In Salem and Boston markets, where it is pur- 
chased for a change of diet or to be mixed with English, it usually brings 
two-thirds of the price of English. The farmers in the interior of the 
county, even at a distance of fifteen miles or more from the sea-shore, 
are glad to own or hire a piece of salt marsh, considering a portion of 
this fodder of great service to the health of their stock. A shrewd 
farmer in Lynn considers salt hay as worth five dollars a ton, merely to 
spread upon his grass land for manure. His judgment is to be relied 
upon. It is stated likewise that those farmers who carry it into the 
interior in a green state, and cure it in their fields, find this process almost 
equal to a top dressing of manure. This comes undoubtedly from the 
salts which it deposits. The quantity of salt hay which is cut enables 
the farmers to sell much of their English hay, without injury to their 
farms. . . . Considerable quantities of fresh-meadow or swale hay are 
cut ; but it is composed of aquatic plants which contain little nourish- 
* “ Transactions of the Essex Agricultural Society,” 1831, p. 44. 
t ‘‘First Report on the Agriculture of Massachusetts,” by Henry Colman, 
Boston 18388, p. 19. 
