Crop Rotation — Its Purpose and Practice 153 



crop for cash and hold it if the price did not suit him. 

 Systematic rotation of crops and the feeding of stock are 

 needed more in the Southern cotton belt than anywhere 

 else, for there is no money crop in the country that 

 offers a better prospect for profitable culture than cotton 

 with good farming, while there is none that keeps the 

 farm and farmer poorer than the all-cotton practice, 

 with commercial fertiUzers bought on credit and paid for 

 out of the cotton crop. 



In the wheat-growing sections of central 

 Crop Rotations and southern Pennsylvania especially, the 

 wV^^ ^"^*®^ old practice in wheat growing — ^a practice 

 tions of the which is still common in many of the less 

 Middle States progressive sections — ^has been to break an 

 old sod for the com crop, and the follow- 

 ing spring to seed the com stubble to oats. The oats 

 stubble after harvest is plowed and prepared for wheat, 

 with which the land is seeded down to timothy, and in 

 spring has some clover seed sown on it. The grass is 

 mown for a number of years and then pastured and 

 finally broken again for com. 



This involves a long rotation, an enormous amount of 

 fencing, and a depletion of the soil before the rotation is 

 renewed by the breaking of the sod, which has been 

 allowed to remain till no longer profitable for hay or 

 pasture. Gradually the best farmers are discovering that 

 a shorter rotation and more frequent use of clover or cow 

 peas is far better for the development of the production 

 of the sale crops. In this shorter rotation the oats crop is 

 abandoned as a commercial crop and only grown for the 

 supply of feed for the farm horses, as we will note. 



