LIVE STOCK AND SUCCESSFUL FARMING 7 



Bearing upon rotation. By rotation is meant the 

 growing of different classes of crops in succession. Crops 

 differ more or less in their food requirements, that is, in the 

 extent to which they draw on certain food elements in 

 the soil. Some call for more nitrogen than others, and so 

 of the different food elements, hence, when one crop is 

 grown successively on the same land, the equilibrium or 

 balance in fertility is disturbed, to the extent of reducing 

 some of the elements of plant food in the soil so much 

 that good crops of that class cannot longer be grown upon 

 the land without it is in some way renewed. Other evils 

 accompany such a process, as for instance, increase in 

 certain forms of weed growth, increase in insects which 

 prey upon the particular crop grown, and injury to the 

 mechanical condition of the land through depleting it of 

 humus. 



These evils may be lessened, and in a great measure 

 prevented, by practicing a judicious rotation. Some forms 

 of rotation will not, in a marked degree, prevent or very 

 much lessen the evils mentioned. Such is a rotation 

 which consists in the growing of such crops only as the 

 small cereals, wheat, oats, barley, rye, speltz and flax. 

 This is owing to the general similarity of the food ele- 

 ments on which they feed, and to the fact that they all 

 reduce the humus supply in the soil. 



Rotation, in the true and helpful sense, implies that live 

 stock shall be kept. Where kept, they consume the un- 

 salable roughage grown, along with other food, and thus 

 give back to the land each of the elements of fertility 

 taken from it. They do this in proportion to the extent to 

 which the food is fed which has been grown upon the 

 farm, and to the care and promptness exercised in putting 

 back again upon the land, the fertilizer resulting. 



The fertilizer thus applied tends to maintain an equilib- 

 rium in the humus supply in the land. It does this 

 through the admixing of the manure with the soil when 

 cultivating it. The humus thus supplied improves the 



