said, I will put straw on my land, as it does not produce very well, and I put it on and plowed it in. What would have been the result? If it had been a little dry, I should not have got a thing. If it had been very wet, I might have got some crop. mention this to show that you cannot give any one rule that will apply to all soils, all circumstances and all cases. We must use judgment in these matters.

Mr. Arnold I have not much of an opinion on this manner of manuring land, but my judgment is that top dressing is the best, and for the purpose of getting at the sense of this convention, I offer the following resolution :

"Resolved, That it is the judgment of this convention that, as a rule, top dressing is the better method of enriching the lands of this state."

Mr. Plumb-I would like to offer a suggestion. When our president was talking about using manure at the rate of so many tons to the acre, hauling it from the compost heap that has made so many months of preparation, you must understand that he is using land that is worth somewhere from three hundred to five hundred dollars an acre, whereas a majority of the farmers of Wisconsin are using lands that are worth less than twenty-five dollars an acre, market value. Now your practice must be very nearly to correspond with that. The question is, Will it pay? And you will find that your twenty-five dollars an acre land will never pay for composting and preparing your manures in the expensive manner which Mr. Smith practices on his land.

Mr. Smith It will not pay to cultivate land at all if it is not worth more than twenty-five dollars an acre.

Mr. Plumb-There are as good lands in the neighborhood of Milton as are supposed to be found in Wisconsin, and I heard one farmer say that he could not afford to haul manure from the stock yards and from the livery stables in the village adjacent to his farm, because it did not pay. That he could manure his land cheaper with clover. That is Mr. Alexander. He would have to haul manure from sixty to a hundred rods. Mr. Goodrich is here. He has been hauling hundreds, and I do not know but thousands, of loads of manure, and has never paid much for it.

He can tell us whether it has paid. I presume it has, because he has been growing tobacco, which must have strong manure. This whole question depends upon the value of the land and its product, and the cost of manuring.

Mr. Goodrich In regard to drawing out manure from Milton, I have been in the habit of getting all the manure that no one else wanted, and drawing it on my farm. I cleared all the railroad cars last spring that were left standing in town for an hour, and it paid me.

The universal testimony of farmers around Elgin to me last spring, was that top dressing paid them twenty-five per cent. better than to put it into any other shape and draw it onto the land. Practical farmers have told ine they have tried it in strips, putting on a strip manure drawn directly from the stable, and on another, manure that they had allowed to lay in the barnyard until spring, and they could see the difference in favor of the strip on which they put the manure that was drawn directly from the stable to the field.

Mr. Chipman I think that would be impracticable for most farmers. If you draw fresh manure and put it on grass ground from the stables, it will be lumpy and will kill the grass; if you draw it in the spring for your corn land, you tread your land. It is impracticable and you cannot do it. If you draw out fresh manure, good bye to your grass.

Mr. Field — I can readily see where this resolution might be misconstrued. I might differ with Mr. Arnold as to the language used here, because I believe that clover is the better method of enriching the lands of this state, whereas he says top dressing. I suppose it would be understood to mean top dressing where manure is used, and therefore I do not know that it would be necessary to change it.

I believe clover is the best means of enriching a large farm, not that I would not use all the manure that could possibly be made, but I would put it on just at the time when I had the most leisure to do it. I would put it on in the winter when my teams had little to do, and draw it from the stable every day, as this gentleman suggests; but as to its being so much better than the same class

of fertilizers taken from the yard, I doubt very much. I do not think it would do any special harm to draw it into the yard and let it lay till spring and haul it out, but the trouble is to handle it so many times, and you certainly get all the benefit if you take it directly from the stable into the yard.

Mr. Arnold Chemists have discovered that all the enriching qualities of the manure are taken up by the soil. For instance, if manure is put on the surface, whatever water passes through the soil contains no qualities that will tend to enrich it, or produce growth, if it passes through one foot of earth; if it passes -the most of it-through six inches, and the large proportion of it through two inches. If that is true, and the manure goes down, and it does not go up, what is the use of burying it so far that the plants cannot get to it, when all the roots of vegetables are on or near the surface? It has been shown, I think, that very little of the enriching qualities of manure escape in the air. do not think as much of ammonia as we used to. That is not all there is of our barnyard manure. I believe it is best to draw out manure when we can do it the cheapest, because manure is sometimes more expensive than productive.

The resolution was then voted upon and adopted.

Mr. Plumb then offered the following resolution, which was adopted:

"Resolved, That where practicable it is better for the average farmer to convey the farm manures direct from the stables and spread upon the land as fast as made."

Question Will clover seed sown in September along with fall wheat give as good results as seed sown in early spring?

Mr. Chipman I have tried it twice and my experience is that clover sown in the fall kills before spring.

Mr. Main-I move that it is the sense of this convention that any man that sows clover seed in the fall is an imbecile.

Mr. Arnold I take exceptions to that. We have several imbeciles in Trempealeau county, if that is true. If you have a sandy soil you can sow clover seed right after harvest on the stubble, and you will have the best results of anyway, but under other circumstances it is nonsense to sow it.

Mr. Peffer-Clover seed can be sown in the fall, provided it is sown late enough and just as it grew, with the hull and shucks, so it will not sprout till spring.

Mr. Olds-If the ground is in readiness to receive the clover seed, now is a good time; any time from this on till the snow is gone is the best time for getting clover out of the ground.

Question - How can wild oats be killed?

Mr. Chipman - The best way I know of is to plant the ground to corn and cultivate it thoroughly; and the second best way is to seed it to clover and take the first crop for hay, and feed and pasture it thoroughly for several years.

Judge Bryant- Mr. Tollefson, who was a member of the legis lature some years ago, and lives in this county, bought a farm very cheap because it was infested with wild oats which had been brought there in some seed from Canada, and he plowed the whole farm of I think eighty acres, and planted it to corn, and the next year seeded it down to oats and clover, and put just as many sheep on it as he thought the farm would possibly carry, for two years. At the end of that time, he told me when he plowed it up there were no more wild oats.

Question - How much more does it cost to stall feed, having to buy all feed for cows in the dairy business, than in pasturing stock in southern Wisconsin ?

Mr. Field I have had no experience in that, but on general principles I should think, as dear as labor is in this country, it would be much more expensive.

Mr. Goodrich-In dairy farming, for the purpose of milking cows, to have them come in about the first of September, and feed them in your stalls through the winter and get all the milk possible from them, and carry your milk to the creamery, selling the cows that prove poor milkers in the spring when they are in good order, and allowing them to go dry in July and August, the hot and busy months on the farm, will pay the best.

Question Why should winter wheat be perfectly successful from the year 1834 to 1844, then fail almost entirely until 1877, after which be again successful?

Mr. Plumb-I do not think that is true.

Mr. Hatch I think that is an historical question.

Mr. Plumb-I find that after a series of successful winter wheat seasons, we have a series of unsuccessful ones from climatic causes, and the growing of winter wheat is suspended. If it is resumed at the right time, you will have another successful series. If you follow the history of winter wheat in this country, leaving out the attacks of the weevil, you will find that to be the case.

Whenever you have a dry time and your winter wheat goes into winter quarters with the ground dug, it will probably be dead in the spring. If we have two such seasons you will give up raising winter wheat entirely, and you may suspend it for ten years or five years until you by some chance strike into it again.

Mr. Williams- I think it is in the wind, and how it is at a certain time in the spring. The reason we had such success last year was because we had a great deal of south wind at the time the frost went out of the ground. That is what protected the wheat, and that is why we had such a good crop.

GENERAL TALK RELATIVE TO EXPERIMENTS UPON THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM.

By Prof. W. W. DANIELLS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

I will call your attention for a few minutes to the experiments on the University Farm. You will remember that a year ago at the convention, I called your attention to the success we had had in raising winter wheat; that we had raised this Fultz wheat for seven years with an average yield of something over twenty-nine bushels to the acre. This included one year in which it was winter killed. The last year the yield of our Fultz wheat was 54.4 bushels, each of 60 pounds, to the acre. The weight of a measured bushel was 62 pounds. This gives us an average yield of this variety for eight years of 32.4 bushels to the acre. This variety has been raised quite largely during the last year in the region about Baraboo and about here, and I have been told that it was raised to a considerable extent about Sparta. I have never yet heard of a yield of this variety that was not very much