58 VERMONT AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



jou to make heavy crops of clover grow on your land as a 

 foundation for potatoes and other crops, because you will thus 

 get fertility for nothing that perhaps now you are buying in 

 bags. You will be able to produce your crop cheaper and 

 thus can compete with the farmers in Michigan, "Wisconsin, 

 Minnesota and other states, who are growing potatoes by the 

 hundred acres on land that is rich and easily cultivated. To 

 depend on purchased fertility largely means slow starvation 

 for you on the average. You must learn a better way. The 

 writer speaks from thirty years' experience in bringing up a 

 rundown farm by growing clover until it would produce large 

 crops without any purchased fertilizer. Cultivate, cultivate, 

 cultivate. 



Your fields are usually small. The western farmer some- 

 times has one hundred or two hundred acres of unbroken po- 

 tatoes. He does things on a large scale. He rarely takes the 

 best care of a crop. Possibly he may do as well getting a 

 smaller yield on many acres as he is situated ; but we won't 

 talk about that. You can't do it; you must not try. Your 

 only chance lies in thorough work. You must work the soil 

 over and over and over again before planting; you must work 

 it many times while the crop is growing. You think perhaps 

 your soils are about worn out, but they are not. There are 

 probably fifteen tons, or more, of plant food — nitrogen, phos- 

 phoric acid and potash — in an average acre of Vermont plow 

 land, within one foot of the surface. Your plants do not get 

 this food because it is locked up. or unavailable. Nature 

 makes very little available each year. Old-fashioned methods 

 of tillage do not help her much. To plow the ground and 

 harrow it over and plant potatoes and cultivate them three or 

 four times is not enough. Work the ground over and over, 

 deeply and thoroughly. Make it very fine when quite dry. 

 Begin to harrow with a smoothing harrow as soon as the crop 

 is planted. Go over them three or four times before they 

 come up. Then use a weeder and cultivator, and later a cul- 

 tivator alone, twelve or fifteen times or more. Then you are 

 unlocking some of that plant food for the crop. If the tillage 

 is properly done, it will cost you much less than purchased 

 fertilizer. You will not only be helping the potato crop, or 

 corn crop, that you put this tillage on, but the small grain 

 crop following and the clover will be better. However, the 

 best results in liberating plant food will not come on land 

 that is deficient in humus, or decaying vegetable matter in 

 the soil. Grow clover to get vegetable matter to plow under, 

 roots and stubble. Feed out the clover and corn and straw 

 and purchased grain, and save all manure and return to the 



