Would it be advisable to herd milch cows for a few hours each day on a field of black oats which is to be grown for hay? The oats are now about four inches high and rank, as the land was pastured last year. The land is sandy, rolling soil and will soon be dry enough so that the cows would not injure the plants. The idea is that the leaves which are green now will all dry up and are really not the growth which is cut for hay; therefore, I should think it would do no harm to feed it down a bit. Over-rank grain with abundant moisture will make a more stocky growth and stand against lodging if pastured or mowed. The leaves which you speak of as being lost in the later growth of the plant serve an important purpose in making that growth, and removing them is a repressive process which is not desirable when rain is short. We should allow the plants to push along into as good a growth of hay as a dry year's moisture will give. Dry Plowing for Grain. We have land that we could very easily plow now with our traction engine and improved plows, but the people here claim that it does not pay to dry-plow, that is, before the land has had a good rain on it and the vegetation has started. I believe in dry plowing. Two of our oldest farmers in Merced county dry-plowed, that is, they commenced plowing as soon as harvesting was over. If the rainfall is small and likely to come in light showers, dry plowing, if it turns up the land in large clods, might yield poorer results than land which is plowed after rain, because there would be so much moisture lost by drying out from the coarse surface when it came in amounts not adequate for deep penetration. Plowing after the rain for the purpose of killing out the foul stuff which starts is, however, quite another consideration. It is a fact that dry plowing and sowing is not now desirable in some places where it was formerly accepted, because the land has become so foul as to give a rank growth of weeds which choke out the grain at its beginning. Such land can be cleaned by one or two shallow plowings and cultivations after there is moisture enough to start the weeds to growing. These are local questions which you will have to settle by observation. In a general way, it is true that opening the surface of the ground before the rains, reduces the run-off and loss of moisture, but whether there would be any loss of moisture by run-off or not depends upon the slope of the land and also upon the way in which the rain comes, and the total amount of moisture which is available for the season. Sub-varieties of California Barley. Can you tell where I can buy seed of varieties of California six-rowed barley, described as "pallidum" and "coerulescens," and what the seed will cost?