150 Practical Farming 



It has been well said that sand and clay form but the 

 skeleton of a soil, and that humus, or organic decay, is its 

 life. A rotation, then, in which crops of clover or peas 

 are grown, tends through these, and their feeding to live 

 stock, to restore to the soil the humus which long clean 

 culture has used up. If the humus furnished no plant 

 food it would increase the capacity of the soil to produce 

 the money crop through the improvement it makes in the 

 physical condition of the soil, making it more mellow and 

 more easily cultivated, less liable to crust and bake hard, 

 and also retaining water better. But the humus also does 

 furnish plant food through the agency of the bacteria that 

 find their home in it and transform the nitrogen contained 

 in the organic matter into nitrates that plants can feed 

 upon. 



While, directly, the auxilliary crops may not return as 

 much cash as the cotton crop, their indirect effect on the 

 cotton crop will well warrant the rotation. The same is 

 true of any other money crop grown in this country. The 

 wheat lands of the Northwest have deteriorated from their 

 former productiveness, while the old lands in Maryland 

 and other parts of the winter wheat growing sections 

 have, through a proper rotation of crop, greatly increased 

 in the production of wheat, till in some sections where 

 formerly they made ten to fifteen bushels per acre, the 

 thoughtful and progressive farmers now average forty 

 bushels per acre. 



In the South there are also a few farmers who have 

 reaHzed the value of a proper rotation of crops, and have 

 grown legumes for forage and the improvement of their 

 soil, who produce two bales of cotton per acre, while the 



