CULTIVATION OF THE TURNIP. 849 
a 4o-acre lot to produce what really should be produced on ten acres. I 
would advise all to investigate his method if you have more land than you 
can grow fruit on. It is simply growing turnips, sorghum, rape, sweet 
corn and all kinds of forage and feeding it to sheep by folding the sheep 
on the crop, and the excrements enrich your land and save the labor of 
hauling and spreading manure. 
If you will follow this plan you will find your soil so enriched it will 
be a pleasure to harvest your potatoes and corn. In the place of forty or 
fifty baskets to the acre, it will be nearer two hundred. Prof. Shaw’s 
method is not an experiment. I was familiar with it in my boyhood days; 
that is just the method today that enables the British farmer to pay his taxes 
to the government to fight the Dutch Boers in Africa with. 
Now I seem to hear some of you say, if we all go into sheep, that will 
be overdone. Never fear! The great state of Illinois does not raise sheep 
enough to supply the city of Chicago with mutton; the whole of the New 
England states does not furnish enough to supply the city of New York; 
and we are importing millions of dollars worth of wool annually. While it 
is true sometimes there are reverses in that industry, when such is the case 
you have a rich soil to fall back on that the sheep has created. Another 
thing we must remember, the vegetarian societies of Europe and America 
are only in their infancy, as yet, and as long as the human family re- 
main a carnivorous race of animals, it will be better to become a nation 
of consumers of mutton and less of hog. 
My fellow tillers of the soil, when you receive those beautiful illustrated 
catalogues from the windy seedsman next year with liliputians on ladders 
climbing to the top of a cabbage head and hand spikes to roll a turnip 
up an inclined plane to secure it in the wagon, and they call those mon- 
strosities mortgage lifters, and they invite the mossbacks to jump into the 
band wagon—I suppose they want us to play second fiddle—that is thetime, 
my friends, to paste in your hat, that turnips, sorghum or any other forage 
that sheep will eat when folded, to enrich the land, is the true mortgage 
lifter, and don’t you forget it! 
Mr. Yahnke: I enjoyed the paper very much. Turnips can 
be grown as a second crop on the farm, after early potatoes. This 
year I sowed turnips so, and they make a fine stock food. They 
can also be raised after barley. If the ground is not rich enough 
put on some rotten manure and sow your turnips on it, and you 
will be surprised to see what your second crop will produce. I 
know it will please you. If you sow your seed before the roth of 
August, you can raise a good crop of turnips. 
Mr. Reeves: I will state to the gentleman that I have raised 
three crops in a season, on the same ground, and the last crop was 
turnips. 
Prof. Shaw: I was not in the room when the gentleman read 
his paper; I do not know whether or not he stated the kind of turnip 
the farmer should grow. That is an exceedingly important matter, 
the kind to sow. 
