According to the agricultural census of that year, Beatty Mahaffie produced 2000 bushels of corn on this farm in 1865. The average Johnson County farm produced 667 bushels. This small field is slightly less than one acre in size. With forty bushels per acre a good average for the day, Beatty likely had fifty acres or more devoted to corn.
Our demonstration plot is planted in check rows, just like cornfields in Beatty's day. Rather than a continuous row, the kernels of corn are planted in "hills" four feet apart. American Indians planted corn in actual mounds or hills of earth. The hills might be arranged in a circular or irregular pattern. Early American settlers adopted the plant and the technique from American Indians but arranged their hills in straight rows like a checkerboard, making it possible to cultivate, or weed, the corn in two directions with a small plow or harrow pulled by a horse.
By the middle years of the nineteenth century, farmers like Mahaffie replaced hand planting with mechanized equipment pulled by horses. These early corn planters still dropped kernels at equally-spaced intervals rather than in a row.
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