BY-PRODUCTS OF THE FARM 187 



seemingly harmless and much advocated thing of 

 pasturing stalks, the greatest injury has been 

 done to the farms of the corn belt, an injury in 

 dollars and cents, beyond the power of computa- 

 tion. The farmer in his mad desire to obtain a 

 little feed (and we say little advisedly) for his 

 stock with the least labor, has turned them upon 

 his stalk fields in those seasons of the year when 

 the ground is wet, muddy, freezing and thawing, 

 and when the soil should be covered if we wish to 

 preserve its fertility. The tramping of his stock 

 upon his soil has crushed out its life blood, its 

 fertility. And then to further intensify the in- 

 famy heaped upon the soil, every remaining stalk 

 not eaten or destroyed by the cattle, has been 

 raked up and burned with fire. And yet we hear 

 promulgated from the highest recognized author- 

 ity, even by some of our best agricultural journals, 

 that since the farmer has his fields fenced, there is 

 no reason why his animals should not gather their 

 own food from the stalk fields, and that not to pas- 

 ture them is to let them go to waste. And such 

 has been the practice in the corn belt for years. 

 And the corn belt farms are fast losing their fer- 

 tility, and the bulk of their best by-products are 

 utilized in such a manner as not only leads to their 

 waste, but to the destruction of our farms ' best re- 

 source, the f ertility of the soil. 



Now, we are combating a system which has been 

 practiced for generations, that has become a fixed 

 habit with the corn belt farmers, and it will re- 

 quire hard licks and knock-down arguments to dis- 

 enthrone it from the mind of the farmer set in 

 his old ways. 



