164 THE BUSINESS OF FABMING 



Orchard or small fruit growing cannot be made 

 a success without constant summer cultivation, 

 yet many orchards are never cultivated. 



Wheat is benefited by spring harrowing, which 

 is nothing more than cultivation. Alfalfa grow- 

 ing is likewise made doubly successful by intensive 

 harrowing after each cutting. 



CHOP BOTATION. 



It is constantly being urged that crop rotation 

 is the salvation of the soil and so is one of the 

 greatest aids to the business of farming. And 

 yet crop rotation as practiced in the past has been 

 responsible for nearly all our worn and worn-out 

 soils. In districts where it has been the most 

 practiced we have the greatest area of these soils. 

 Crop Eotation is a gay deceiver. She has cast 

 her alluring smile towards the husbandman, he 

 embraced her, hoping she would restore his sick 

 and dying soils, but she only led him farther into 

 the worn soil "red light district" to be the greater 

 contaminated with its shame and sickening life. 



We believe in crop rotation rightly practiced. 

 But it is not a "cure all" for the diseases of the 

 soil. The rotation of corn, oats, wheat and clover, 

 so long practiced in the corn belt, under the belief 

 that it was the right system of farming, and was 

 all that was needed to keep up soil fertility, has 

 driven millions of acres of our best lands into 

 fertility bankruptcy, just as it drove much of our 

 abandoned soils of the East into fertility bank- 

 ruptcy. It is a system of soil robbery so long 

 practiced along the highway of agriculture that 

 it has become like the vice "to be hated needs but 



