354 STATE BOARD OF AGRICULTUEE. 



Some one has wisely said, ''iti building a house, build as if you expected to 

 live forever." The same rule is emphatically applicable to farming. Manage 

 your farm as if you expected to live forever. Whatever treatment will injure 

 your farm in future time, avoid in the present time. The house, tliough hewn 

 out of granite, will fall at last, but the farm may be so conducted that for 

 thousands of years it may exhibit ever-increasing productiveness. Manage your 

 farm so that your fields shall keep green your memory long after 3fou have 

 turned to dust. To this end, the fore-sighted, farmer will carefully guard his 

 fields from certain enemies of good farming in the shape of noxious weeds that 

 are valueless in themselves, capable of indefinite reproduction, and difficult to 

 exterminate. He that will love life, and see good days, he that would have his 

 sons rise up after him and call him blessed, let him keep his land free from 

 quack-grass, the daisy, and Canada thistles. If they have gained a foot-hold, 

 proclaim war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt ! They are a trinity of 

 cursing. Let the poet sing of the beauty of "the bright-eyed daisy," but let it 

 remain poetry ; do not translate it into the sturdy prose of farming. If you 

 want any of these pests to look at, to study their habits, plant them in a flower- 

 pot, place this in a cast-iron kettle, enclose this in a brick arch, and then stand 

 sentinel over them as long as they live, that not a seed or creeping root ever 

 finds its way to your farm to spread mourning, lamentation, and woe over your 

 fair fields. Many a farmer by his negligence is leaving a heritage of evil that 

 shall curse generations yet unborn. 



When these pests are present, a naked fallow with repeated plowings seems a 

 necessity to clean the land ; and any fallowing which will do this is wisely 

 employed. But when these are absent, the laud may be effectually cleaned by 

 a fallow crop, for example of buckwheat. I consider this the best cleaning crop, 

 because it covers the ground with foliage in a very few days, and nothing will 

 grow under its shade. A crop sowed the last of June and plowed under in Sep- 

 tember will vanquish June grass as effectually as any naked fallow. It is the 

 best remedy I know for pigeon grass, red root, pig weed, etc., excej)t the culti- 

 vator and the hoe used often and thoroughly. A very intelligent farmer once 

 said to me, "The best cleaning crop I know is to plant my field to corn and 

 Tceep it clean all the season." But when a man is cursed with an ambition to 

 have a large farm, he may not be able to command the amount of labor neces- 

 sary to secure this effectual cleaning^ by constant working, and a cleaning crop 

 becomes a necessity. 



The farmer often asks himself, ''shall I make this field a naked fallow or 

 raise a manural crop?" Before we answer this question let us define a naked 

 fallow. In the strictest sense a naked fallow would be where the land is plowed 

 up and left for a season without any crop simply to secure chemical changes in 

 the mineral matters in the soil. The farmer often speaks of giving his field a 

 rest ; but tiie soil is never weary. Man becomes tired by toil, and his team is 

 fresher and more vigorous for a rest, but it is only animal nature that tires and 

 needs rest. The forces of inanimate nature are clothed with jDerpetual youth; 

 gravitation never relaxes his hold because he is tired ; the sunshine never asks 

 for a holiday, and the river runs joyously to the sea, age after age. If the soil 

 is more productive after a season of rest it is not because the soil was tired, but 

 because certain chemical changes in the soil during the fallow period have con- 

 verted some of the inert materials of the soil into the active form. If these 

 chemical changes have been secured by the action of dead matter in the soil 

 and not by the decomposition of fresh vegetable matter buried in the soil, then 



