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Mr. Sloan-The yields, I presume, are good for the plats of ground, but as relates to the other plats, the one not manured at all seems to be fully up to the average, and it would seem that you lost the manures placed on the other plats. Is not that the conclusion?

Prof. Daniells—Yes, if you should draw a conclusion from these three years; but what I want to call your attention to is that in my opinion it is not possible to draw any conclusion from these three years during which they have received the same treatment; the yield varies greatly. In the other plats there have been only two years in which they have received any different treatment from that plat.

Now, in my opinion, you cannot draw a conclusion safely, from those two years, of the value of the fertilizers upon any plat. If you take those two years alone, I should say it would be better for a man not to use any fertilizers than to use them. I have not looked it over enough to say whether that would be true in regard to all the plats; it certainly would be as to some of them. I have left the matter without any discussion, because I did not believe one could safely draw any conclusions from a two years' trial. It is too short a time to carry on the experiment. What do you think of a plat that raises 420 pounds of ears in one year, and 690 the next? That is a difference of over fifty per cent. That was on the same ground, and treated the same way, and the ground not manured at all.

Take plat one, which received a heavy coating of stable manure; the yield was considerably more than double in 1878 what it was in 1877, and I have known that much difference in plats of land in the yield of potatoes, where the land was treated in precisely the same way, and the plats were adjacent to each other. Then you will see that the yield on plat four, which received no manure, has steadily increased during these three years, while plat one, which was heavily manured, has diminished in yield from last year to this. From such results I cannot get data upon which to base conclusions. The experiment will be conducted through five or six years, possibly longer.

Mr. Sloan-I suppose these unmanured plats had been highly manured previously?

Prof. Daniells-There never was any manure upon them. The land was never plowed until a year before these experiments began. We took virgin soil on which to try the experiments, in order to know precisely how the soil had been treated in each case from the beginning of the cultivation.

Question What shall be done about fences?

Mr. Field opened the discussion of this question, advocating the use of wire fences, on the ground of the expensiveness of the common wood fence, and its inefficiency. He thought a cheaper fence should be built or none at all.

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Mr. Babbitt I am really surprised that as good an agricul turist and as smart a man as Mr. Field should in this day of civilization, immediately after having espoused the cause of our reverend friend from Milwaukee, who has already started the society to prevent cruelty to animals, advocate such an outrageous, infamous, barbarous, contemptible thing as the barb wire fence.

Mr. Field-I believe the gentleman lost a valuable animal some time ago.

Mr. Babbitt My experience is the experience of every farmer that lives in the neighborhood of a wire fence. I have good fences around my yard. One day the Lord in His infinite mercy sent a strong wind up the valley, and the fence came down. That was after nine o'clock at night. Before five o'clock in the morning my beautiful animals came down into the yard, and they looked as though they had been through the war. My honest opinion is, that if they had received the injuries they did in any other place than in front of a poor widow's establishment, some one would have had to pay for it; but there was a lady there who could not afford to build a fence, and she ran a wire along by the road about half a mile from my place. My horses felt undertook to go

pretty nice, and they skipped around there and in and see what they could do. I suppose they wanted to show themselves off; they were not very hungry. They came back all torn to pieces. I was offered $1,500 for one of those animals five or six days before the occurrence, and to-day I would be willing to sell the animal for $150.

Now the protection and the encouragement that the farmers are giving these speculators is really a disgrace to the farmer. They are cruel to start with. Every single animal has got to earn his experience as the boy does, and he does it at the expense of his owner. The farmers can better afford to day to advocate a tax to pay for fencing every rod of land in Wisconsin that needs fencing than to pay the damages that one of these days they will have to pay. The only aspiration I have in life is to see the time that I can go to the legislature and introduce a bill- and pass it which shall send to the penitentiary every farmer in this intelligent community who will advocate that species of barbarism, the wire fence.

Mr. Field - My friend Mr. Babbitt will have to come to it pretty soon, for nearly everybody is advocating it, and nearly everybody is building it that is building new fences. Our railway corporations are building it, and our friend Babbitt has got to come to it. If he wants to build board fences that cost three or four times as much, he is at liberty to do it from this on and be called an old fogy.

Mr. Babbitt - The Hon. I. C. Sloan is here. I believe I can secure him, and I believe he will take care of me fully and make you fellows that put up wire fences pay for it. I would like to hear from him on that subject.

Mr. Goodrich I am a Rock county farmer and have four or five miles of fence on my farm, and I have learned that from the very hour I get a nice board fence completed it begins to decay, the timber to rot, the nails to rust, the wind to whip it one way and another, and all the elements of nature combine to tear down the barrier that you have put up. I have found from practical experience this year, keeping some sixty head of cattle and a dozen head of horses, that the most practical and perfect fence I ever built to turn stock, is the barb wire. I simply stretched it from tree to tree-second growth trees or from grub to grub, using them as posts. Knowing that my cattle were not acquainted with that kind of a fence, I strung along on the wires, limbs, hazel brush, or anything that was light, to show that there was something there. I did not have a single creature injured by the wire.

My fence was between my grain and my meadow and pasture, so that nobody's stock but mine was there. I used two wires where the ground was level, and three where it was side hill. Two wires will turn horses or cattle every time, and it will cost about ten cents a rod for each wire, which is twenty cents a rod for a fence, and a couple of men can put up eighty rods of it in a day. The posts cost nothing; they are growing trees — growing every hour, instead of tearing and rusting and blowing down. I have lived in Wisconsin forty years. I have lived on the prairie, where it has always cost something to build a fence. I have lived in a neighborhood where we have considered that a man that could not keep his farm fenced ought not to farm it. I have seen the grubs grow up along the line of our fences until every fence that we have maintained for years at a great expense was a row of grubs and weeds, and anything and everything that was an incumbrance and a disgrace to a farm; whereas for the last few years we have taken away our fences and grubbed out the grubs, removed the old bottom logs, plowed up the soil, and sowed our crops clear up to the line of travel in the highway, allowing travelers to use whatever of the road was necessary. When you come to work your corn, in the room of coming out and turning around by the fence, and leaving a strip of weeds be tween the fence and the grain, you can drive out in the road and turn around. With a reaper and mower you can do the same.

When we come to learn that it is every man's business to take care of his own stock, to keep it on his own premises, and to raise the most he can on his own land, we will all discard our fences. I have traveled in Iowa and Minnesota, and seen the grain growing by the side of where I drove my buggy, leaving only the width of travel instead of leaving this row of weeds.

Mr. Babbitt-If you will come to Beloit, I will show you within a ride of ten miles, a species of barbarism that has been perpetrated upon animals that has not been excelled, but is parallel with the barbarities of the bull fight that King Alphonso has exhibited to his subjects.

Mr. Goodrich -Your horses never ran on to the fence twice? Mr. Babbitt - No, sir, because three of them were killed.

Mr. Millett I have never heard of cattle being injured by barbed wire. Horses are apt to get to racing and run on this wire. Farmers in our vicinity use two wires and a board in the center, so that horses can see it.

Mr. Adams-Some time ago, I saw an advertisement of the American barb wire, which was said to be so constructed as to obviate all the difficulties which occur. I sent for a specimen. I would like to know if any person has used any. It is a single wire with a scroll around it, and short barbs, not long enough to injure any animal that runs against it. It costs the same as the ordinary wire, and it seems to me it is much better.

Prof. Daniells—I have just figured up here what it would cost if we took a 160 acre farm and divided it up into 20 acre lots. It would require 1,280 rods of fence, which, at 40 cents a rod, would be $512, as Mr. Field estimated the three wire fence would cost. A board fence at $1.25 a rod would cost $1,600.

Mr. Field I desire to answer Mr. Babbitt's point, that it would be cruelty to animals. I had forty cows on my farm that never knew what a wire fence was until I turned them out of a lot of twenty-five acres, with a nice board fence that will keep pigs or anything else, into seventy-five or eighty acres inclosed with a three-wire fence, and a corn field close in sight, feed not over good, but fair; and I watched that stock when I turned them in, to see what they would do with that fence. They walked as straight for that corn field as they could march, but when they got to that wire fence, they did not go any farther. There were three wires, and not one of those creatures drew a drop of blood. They came up to those wires, and smelt of them, and it pricked them a little bit, but I do not think it drew blood on one of their noses. I think the highest wire was four feet two inches, and the lowest eighteen inches from the ground.

It has been a perfect fence for my cows all summer. I have the posts two rods apart, and on the side where I had corn close up to the fence, I put two slats between and put some little wires in, which cost me about five cents a rod more. The slats go up

and down, and hold the wires so they will not hang so far apart if they happen to get a little loose, as they sometimes will if they

22-W. S. A. S.

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