58 PRACTICAL CORN CULTURE 



productive. About thirty years ago clover began to find a 

 place in the Corn Belt rotation. The benefits resulting from 

 growing this legume were very marked, especially when it 

 was grown for the first time. At the present time nine-tenths 

 of the corn land is so deficient in nitrogen and humus, that 

 a rotation containing at least one leguminous crop is not only 

 profitable but necessary. 



Today a rotation of crops will be found on all the farms 

 of the Corn Belt. To be sure, this rotation varies from an 

 intelligent, scientific changing about of farm crops, in which 

 the requirements of the soil are always kept in mind, to the 

 haphazard rotations which still prevail on many of the Corn 

 Belt farms. 



We are learning facts about our soil today that the eastern 

 states learned to their regret twenty and thirty years ago 

 and even longer, that it is an expensive and tedious process 

 to restore fertility to land after it has been exhausted by the 

 continuous growing of corn year after year. Twenty years 

 hence the wheat belt farmers of the northwest will be con- 

 fronted with the serious task of restoring worn-out wheat 

 lands. It seems that the older fields of a community must 

 first become so deficient in plant food that it no longer pays 

 to grow the money crop of the country before that com- 

 munity will adopt a rotation of crops that will in any way 

 build up the land. The farmers of this country have been 

 slow to adopt good rotations. They have waited until they 

 were driven to it by necessity. We are, however, optimistic. 

 We feel sure that through intelligent management thousands 

 of farms in Illinois are more fertile today than they were 

 five years ago. On the other hand tens of thousands are 

 becoming less fertile. We believe, though, the time is not 

 far off when the turning point will be reached in Illinois 

 and that farms will gradually become more productive in- 

 stead of becoming less productive, as they are today. 



