People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 October 1895 — A Scientifle Farmer. [ARTICLE]

A Scientifle Farmer.

Alfred Donnelly, just north of town, hks this year fully demonstrated she adaptability of our low muck lands to truck farming. One day last week it was our pleasure to inspect his cellars and propuce bins, groaning and bursting with the newly stored crop. Two hundred bushels of potatoes, of some six or eight varieties, he now has safely housed. As a venture he this year planted from the seed 1| acres of onions, and his returns are over 400 bushels of as fine onions as we ever saw. Mr. Donnelly’s farm a few years ago was a low wet marsh, covered with cattail, flags and muskrat houses, but by hard labor he has drained it, and by intelligently experimenting, he has found how this kind of soil can be made to bring better returns than any other lands in the county. Those who have such lands can not expect to meet with the same success Mr. Donnelly has unless they pursue their work systematically and intelligently as he has done.

Soil is not every thing; it is only half in the raising of any crop. We are talking of building monuments to men’s memories, or naming sand hills and huckle berry patches for them because they have made successful land ventures in the county, but how shall we honor him who by manual toil, hard study, and experimental farming has shown us the great capabilities of the soil we once thought so worthless?

Mr. Donnelly’s farm and growing crops for the last three years have been very closely watched by those interested in low muck lands. It is said that there has been scarcely a day since the middle of June but what passers have hitched their teams and gone into Donnelly’s field to get some new pointers on “taters” and “ingings.” What this gentleman has so successfully done on forty or fifty acres can, with, the same labor intelligently applied, be done on hundreds of other forties and fifties of just such land in Jasper county —lands that are now lying uncultivated and worthless. Two thousand and two hundred bushels of potatoes and over 400 bushels onions on acres of ground, this unfavorable year for such crops, is something to brag about.— Neighbor.