90 AGRICUI^TURE OF MAINE. 



possess "neither riches nor poverty." But it is to be remem- 

 bered that the result comes from annual manuring and the best 

 production of the annual crops, and the best feeding ones of the 

 world for your dairy cow. If you have forty acres, you will 

 have forty times the amount given above, and if you have lOO 

 acres, you will have lOO times that. It is too large, so large 

 that it will be said, "This is a professor farming in the clouds." 

 I suppose that everywhere in an audience like this there are men 

 who will say, this is romance in farming. I do not feel that 

 way. It is simply an estimate of what intellect and ambition 

 in farming ought to do when their disposition is to make of one's 

 self all that is possible. High farming means capital, labor, 

 tools, plant food, better social standing, for broad farming 

 means broad men and better farming means better and higher 

 thinking. 



You want to build the man up, — begin by building upon the 

 piece of nature that the good Lord has put in your possession. 

 But you say I offer you the unattainable, as the plant food is not 

 available. Let us see. I use six sources of plant food, the 

 first being crop rotation. Crop rotation will give you more to 

 the acre than non-rotation, but do not transplant my eight year 

 rotation into different conditions. Form your own on founda- 

 tion principles and follow out a system M rotation that rests 

 upon the law of nature, your tastes and markets, and you will 

 get more to the acre than in any other way. When you have 

 fixed a good rotation you have cheapened the cost of farming 

 wonderfully. In that rotation the crops should so succeed each 

 other that you are never hurried in operations and never with- 

 out an economic piece of work. Under my rotation seeding 

 and harvest are almost continuous every day from the first day 

 of April, when we get on to the land, until the ground freezes 

 in the fall, and our horses are kept ever at work. What about 

 the man who has two or three acres of plowed ground and the 

 same amount of grain ? He has kept two horses the entire year 

 round, and before he has struck the plow the horses have eaten 

 up often the gross income of the plowed area. But by this 

 system of rotation that keeps your team at continuous work, 

 the horse power cost on an acre of ground is reduced one-third 

 from what it is under ordinary farming, perhaps still less. It 



