22 THE PEOPLE'S FARM AND STOCK CYCLOPEDIA. 



ent will find out the spirit of a community before taking his 

 family to live in it, as no pecuniary gain can compensate for 

 moral loss. " Lot pitched his tent toward Sodom," attracted by 

 a rich soil, but the wickedness of the inhabitants involved him 

 in ruin. 



Choice of Farm Products. The farm being selected, the 

 next question to settle is what particular line of farming shall 

 be followed, and as it is important to start right, you should 

 give this matter careful study. Two adjoining farms often call 

 for an entirely different system. For example, along the water- 

 courses there are usually wide bottoms, and here we have one or 

 more tiers of farms which are admirably adapted to hogs. The 

 soil is warm and rich, and will bear almost continuous cropping 

 in corn, and often it is so situated that the rains, which would 

 greatly damage rolling lands, bring rich sediment on to these 

 fields and increase their fertility. On these farms a rotation 

 which includes clover once in four years will keep the land at 

 a maximum fertility. A short distance further back from the 

 stream will be found a row of farms located on the hill side. 

 The land often slopes quite rapidly, and is broken by ravines. 

 To follow a system of corn cropping on these farms is ruinous, 

 as it soon results in the washing away of the soil, and reduces 

 the farms to sterility. The only system on these farms that 

 will pay in the long run is to make grass a principal crop. 

 These broken farms are often the best fruit lands in the vicin- 

 ity, and the farmers in the bottoms can better afford to buy their 

 fruit from their hill-side neighbors than to grow it on their richer 

 lands. 



It is not at all certain, because your neighbor whose farm 

 joins your own has found a certain crop profitable, that you 

 will do so, for the conditions of the soil or the capacity of the 

 individual may vary so as to make a system that is profitable 

 on one farm unprofitable on an adjoining one. It would seem 

 as though the above fact was so obvious that it would be unnec- 

 essary to even allude to it, but observation will soon show that 

 many farmers fail in this particular. Side-hill farms are cropped 

 and cultivated until they will not even produce grass; orchards 



