166 Practical Farming 



crop or harvested as hay. But in either event the land 

 should be replowed as soon as possible after harvest, and 

 one bushel of cow peas sown per acre, using on them the 

 same appHcation advised for the oats. Cut the peas for 

 hay as soon as properly matured, and sow crimson clover 

 again on the pea stubble without any preparation. A Httle 

 rye sown at the same time will not be amiss, as there may 

 be a poor stand of clover in the first practicing of this rota- 

 tion, but which will improve as the soil gets inoculated 

 with the bacteria that Hve on the clover. These legumes 

 will give you all the nitrogen now needed by the cotton, 

 and we can now start with only the broadcast appHcation 

 of the phosphoric acid and potash, planting our cotton 

 flat and working it always as shallow and as level as pos- 

 sible. With each round of this rotation you will find the 

 crops of cotton, corn and oats improving in yield if you 

 feed all the com fodder and the pea hay. With the 

 amoimt of forage produced the cotton farmer with such a 

 rotation should soon be able to raise enough manure to 

 cover his entire corn planting, and this with the peas and 

 clover following the oats crop will make the farmer 

 annually more and more independent of the fertiHzer 

 factory. Following this rotation several years, one far- 

 mer made a crop of seventy-five bushels of oats per acre 

 and made two tons per acre of pea vine hay after the oats 

 were cut on the same land the same season, and he found 

 that this double crop was of far more commercial value 

 per acre than the cotton crop which he had been taught 

 to consider the only money crop in the South. 



