CLOVERS IN THE ROTATION. 



CHAPTER IX. 



No permanent system of advanced farming is possible 

 without the adoption of some kind of rotation of crops. In 

 the very nature of things the operations of the farm can not 

 be conducted profitably by the growth of but one crop. There 

 are, it is true, temporary conditions, as for example, when the 

 country is new, land cheap and farm machinery at hand adapt- 

 ed to large operations, under which, for the time being, farming 

 can be conducted on the ranch or bonanza system, as for exam- 

 ple, the growth of wheat at the present time in the Dakotas. 

 These conditions last but for a brief period, as is evidenced 

 by the constant removal of farming operations of this class to 

 newer and cheaper lands of the farther west. Profitable 

 farming, under ordinary conditions, requires the employment 

 of labor, whether of the farmer himself or hired help, for the 

 entire year, and hence sooner or later must come diversity 

 of crops, and, later still, systematic rotation, t No instance 

 has yet occurred in the history of agriculture where the land 

 has been of such natural fertility that it could endure contin- 

 uous cropping in anyone variety of grain. The constant de- 

 mand made on the soil by one crop for potash, phosphoric 

 acid or nitrogen, speedily exhausts it of one or all of these 

 essential elements of fertility. No matter which is exhausted, 

 the land, for the time being, becomes barren. Nature,< it is 

 true, does not allow of complete exhaustion, but when the 

 exhaustion of any one of these elements has gone so far as to 

 prohibit the growth of paying crops, the land, so far as com- 

 mercial purposes are concerned, is exhausted. The exhaus- 



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