and all my experience and observation since tend to
confirm the correctness of his advice.

While on this subject, allow me to protest against the practice of
naming the quantity of manure applied to a given space, as so many
_loads_, as altogether too indefinite. The bushel or cord is a definite
quantity, which all can understand.

The average price of good livery stable horse-manure at this place has
been for several years four dollars a cord.

With two and a half miles to haul, I am trying whether keeping a flock
of 50 breeding ewes, and feeding liberally with wheat bran, in addition
to hay and pasture, will not produce the needed manure more cheaply.

Respectfully yours,

EDWARD JESSOP.

_P.S._--You ask for the average weight of a cord of manure, such as we
pay four dollars for.

I had a cord of horse-stable manure from a livery stable in York which
had been all the time under cover, with several pigs running upon it,
and was moist, without any excess of wet, loaded into a wagon-box
holding an entire cord, or 128 cubic feet, tramped by the wagoner three
times while loading.

The wagon was weighed at our hay-scales before loading, and then the
wagon and load together, with a net result for the manure of 4,400 lbs.
I considered this manure rather better than the average. I had another
load, from a different place, which weighed over 5,000 lbs., but on
examination it was found to contain a good deal of coal ashes. We never
_buy_ by the ton. Harrison Bros. & Co., Manufacturing Chemists,
Philadelphia, rate barnyard-manure as worth $5.77 per ton, and say that
would be about $7.21 per cord, which would be less than 1-1/2 tons to
the cord. If thrown in loosely, and it happened to be _very dry_, that
might be possible.

Waring, in his "Handy Book of Husbandry," page 201, says, he caused
a cord of well-trodden livery stable manure containing the usual
proportion of straw, to be carefully weighed, and that the cord weighed
7,080 lbs.

The load I had weighed, weighing 4,400 lbs., was considered by the
wagoner and by myself as a fair sample of good manure. In view of these
wide differences, further trials would be desirable. Dana, in his "Muck
Manual," says a cord of green cow-dung, pure, as dropped, weighs 9,289
lbs.

Farmers here seldom draw manure with less than three, more generally
with four horses or mules; loading is done by the purchaser. From the
barn-yard, put on loose boards, from 40 to 60 bushel