It will be seen that the cost of sowing superphosphate on these crops
is merely nominal. But for corn and potatoes, when planted in hills,
the superphosphate must be dropped in the hill by hand, and, as we are
almost always hurried at that season of the year, we are impatient at
anything which will delay planting even for a day. The boys want to go
fishing!

This is, undoubtedly, one reason why superphosphate is not used so
generally with us for corn as for wheat, barley, and oats. Another
reason may be, that one hundred pounds of corn will not sell for
anything like as much as one hundred pounds of wheat, barley, and oats.

We are now buying a very good superphosphate, made from Carolina rock
phosphate, for about one and a half cents per pound. We usually drill in
about two hundred pounds per acre at a cost of three dollars. Now, if
this gives us an increase of five bushels of wheat per acre, worth six
dollars, we think it pays. It often does far better than this. Last year
the wheat crop of Western New York was the best in a third of a century,
which is as far back as I have had anything to do with farming here.
From all I can learn, it is doubtful if the wheat crop of Western New
York has ever averaged a larger yield per acre since the land was first
cultivated after the removal of the original forest. Something of this
is due to better methods of cultivation and tillage, and something,
doubtless, to the general use of superphosphate, but much more to the
favorable season.

The present year our wheat crop turned out exceedingly poor. Hundreds of
acres of wheat were plowed up, and the land resown, and hundreds more
would have been plowed up had it not been for the fact that the land
was seeded with timothy grass at the time of sowing the wheat, and with
clover in the spring. We do not like to lose our grass and clover.

Dry weather in the autumn was the real cause of the poor yield of wheat
this year. True, we had a very trying winter, and a still more trying
spring, followed by dry, cold weather. The season was very backward. We
were not able to sow anything in the fields before the first of May, and
our wheat ought to have been ready to harvest in July. On the first of
May, many of our wheat-fields, especially on clay land, looked as bare
as a naked fallow.

There was here and there, a good field of wheat. As a rule, it was on
naturally moist land, or after a good summer-fallow, sown early. I know
of but one e