Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1888 — THE NEW AGRICULTURE. [ARTICLE]

THE NEW AGRICULTURE.

The Results of Subterranean Irriga- . f* ' tion. ; The Husbandmen. r Will you be good enough to lay the following facts before the Farmers’ Club of Elmira? I, last season, proved to mathematical demonstration that by an expense hot exceeding SSO an acre, three perfect crops of grass can be annually realized on meadow lands of re u gions of country having firm subsoils, averaging,'year in and year out, ten tons of Cured hay to the acre. I have demonstrated the fact equally, last year and this, on somewhat upward of an eighth of an acre devoted to blackberries, fitted at an expense not exceeding SSO an acre, that a thousand bushels to the acre can be realized annually, my crop netting me the present season $2.50 per crate, or bushel, up to the point where the wild berries came in competition, the average of the entire crop netting at a rate of $1 per bushel. I have two rows of a wilding, the finest berries ever grown, averaging at the rate of 1,500 bushels to the acre, and am now pushing on with five acres of new settings, most of the sets being wildings. These berries are more profitable for evaporating than selling fresh. I have one-sixteenth of an acre of black caps, averaging this season at the rate of 900 crates to the acre (bushel crates), netting $2.50 to the crate. Another plat of a twelfth of an acre of Cuthbert red raspberries has netted $2.88 per crate, and the product was at the rate of 700 crates to the acre. My strawberries were sadly damaged this season by frost, reducing them to little more than a quarter of a crop, the frost striking them in the blossom. Had the crop been full, realizing as I did a net of 12J cents a quart, 1 would have had not less than 500 bushels on an acre and a half, none of them in full bearing till next season. With good luck next year this acre and a half should give us 750 bushels, netting $4 per bushel, $3,000. Strawberry culture having been almost wholly abandoned in this part of the State, the prospect for growers on subirrigated lands is somewhat better than ordinary farming in the Chemung valley. My apple trees on sub-irrigated lands produce on an average three times as much as formerly; the fruit increased in size and greatly improved in quallity. When it comes to grapes and quinces, though these are rarely produced in our county by any one except myself. lam doubling them in size and growing from five to tenfold greater crops than the average proddeed in most favored fruit regions of our State. lam growing the Mikado tomato at rate of from 3,000 to 5,000 bushels to the acre, nor has a speck of rot been so far discovered the present season. My cauliflower presents the most amazing sight of all; one plant, to which I gave four feet of pure mold in perfect sponge before reaching water table beneath, on Friday morning last, Aug. 17, stood two feet and two inches in its “stockings” and measured eleven feet in its circuit of outside spread of leaves. The five days since of growth finds it hbout three feet in height and circumference reaching sixteen feet. To estimate the “big cheese” I am hoping for in time for our fair, first week in September, I will not but ask, urge, and insist upon it that a second committee, representing your club, shall come here and see what I am doing and once more report.. As for potatoes, I am not this year making tests of utmost degree of production, but will only say that SSO an acre should fit your hill lands in Chemung by use of one-fourth of the manure usually applied, to average from 500 to 1,000 bushels to the acre one year with another. I have oats and buckwheat on the gore, the soil worked by our old “white Indian,” Billy Weed, for forty' years without manuring or which there has been no fertilizing done in seventy years, outside of that of water running through it for four years past, coming of application of methods of the New Agriculture by myself, and here are found growing crops the present year rivalling, if not eclipsing, any to be found in Alleghany county. Ido not mean to be disrespectful toward your grand farmers of the Chemung valley, but I do not hesitate to conclude and thus declare that should the farmers of Chemung county hold on in old ways they will in all probability find Alleghany producing more of the fruits of the earth at the close of the present century than a score of counties like yours; since, so far as Alleghany is concerned, our farmers are finding out that old things are passing away and all is becoming new. In addition to all above, let it be understood that, on all farms with firm subsoils, permanent springs and flowing wells will be forgotten; and, with fifty acres fitted with reservoir trenches from five to ten rods apart along more elevated inclines, on a secondary fifty acres, lakes can be grown, and spring brooks brought out alive with brook trout. V -

A. N. GOLE.