PROCEEDINGS OF THE xVNNUAL MEETING l«i9 



the dej;i'('i' to which that <ir()iMRl is liancii of any verdiiie of au.v kind is 

 soua'thiiig astoiiishiiii;'. It is pciiVctly worthless. I saw one I'aiin par- 

 ticidai'ly, which 1 was told had at one time received a iji-eniiiim 

 as the most fertile farm in the state. It had produced an enoiinous crop 

 of cotton. That was a great many years ago. Today it looks as barren 

 as any land I have seen. There is nothing growing on it, it simply looks 

 like a pile of clay. Neglect goes on — the water has been allowed to fall 

 upon it in such a way as to wash out all its available nitrogen and potash^ 

 and that has been continued year after year until the laml is bairen. 

 Yet, years ago, it was the most fertile land in all that count ly. 



It seems to me that the suggestion of this instance is just this. That 

 in an orchard or field of any crop, the moment we have got through that 

 cultivation of the soil which fs necessary to secure the (juick, early growtli 

 in the spring which is essential to the highest development of any vege- 

 table — from the moment we pass that time we should immediately do 

 something which will keep the land under cover until the next spring. It 

 seems to me it is just as wasteful for a man to leave a farm exposed with- 

 out an}^ covering or any protection from the winter and the rains as it 

 is to leave his manure pile in the same condition, and I think he suffers 

 in one case in exactly the same way that he does in the other. 



I came here to make a iilea for the reasonableness and desirabilitv of 

 cover crops. Is it practicable to do this? We have found that it is so. 

 My pica is not so much — is not entirely, at any rate — for a crop which 

 will gather and increase the plant food in the soil, as it is for a mechanical 

 covering of the soil preventing the ill effects of driving rains, and so 1 

 do not adhere so tenaciously to a nitrogen-gathering plant, like clover, as- 

 desirable; but the plant above all others, if we could grow it here, which 

 would be desirable for this purpose, is crimson clover. I have found that 

 mammoth clover can be profitably sown in nearly all of our crops. The 

 moment we have finished our cultivation for green crops we sow in all of 

 the fields either clover or rye or peas, or something of that kind, and some 

 of my neighbors have followed the piractice. One instance I know of par- 

 ticularly, where a field has been planted in squashes year after year, I 

 think it is for eight or nine successive crops. The moment the last culti- 

 vation to that squash field is given, the man immediately sows common 

 mammoth clover, and every year he has succeeded in getting a good crop. 

 By the time he got ready to use the land in the spring he had a consider- 

 able gi'owth to plow under. His first work in early spring is to put some 

 manure on the clover, and then he plows it under just before he puts in 

 his squash crop, and he always had a crop of squashes. I think there have 

 been eight successive crops on this field, and they have always done well. 

 I do not approve of that general method of manuring, but I suggest it 

 «is an illustration, as it is to me, of the value of a cover crop. We do 

 not confine ourselves to clover. We sow corn frequently, we sow rye, we 

 SOAV peas, we sow practically anything we have, and it seems to me, in 

 my experience, that we have had better results from using a diversity of 

 cover crops — that is, not using one thing, but some j^ears clover and some 

 years corn, etc. Xow, I use sowed corn as a cover crop. That may seem 

 foolish. When out at our farm at rontiac, in the middle of Xovember, I 

 found sowed corn plants w'hich were still living. The to])s were killed 

 away down nearly to the roots, but I took some of those })lants out and 

 put them in the greenhouse, and found that they started. They hold the 



