8 FARMING. 



notion of "supplies" to enable the farmer to make more. cotton or 

 tobacco, and the idea of corn as a sale crop has never been considered 

 except in the peaty reclaimed swamp land of the eastern section, 

 where single farmers annually produce many thousands of bushels, 

 one grower in the swamp country of Virginia, near the North Caro- 

 lina line, shipping 40,000 bushels of corn annually. How many 

 farmers in the great corn belt do this ? The practice of the cotton 

 growers in the piedmont section has long been to confine their corn 

 to the fertile bottom-lands, while all the upland is devoted to the 

 cotton crop. On the bottom-lands, of course, the superior fertility 

 and moisture of the soil enables them to grow moderate crops of corn, 

 but even on these lands the crop is not what it should be made if some 

 system of rotation was practiced ; and the fact that the uplands can 

 be made to produce the largest of crops of corn has been abundantly 

 demonstrated at the North Carolina College of Agriculture and 

 Mechanic Arts, where on a natural upland soil a crop of 88 bushels 

 of corn per acre was grown after but few years of rotative farming, 

 and without any extravagant expenditure. 



Since the raising and feeding of live-stock lies at the very founda- 

 tion of successful farming, no matter what the money crop may be, 

 it is evident that in any improving rotation in the State the corn 

 crop must be one of the crops in the rotation, and the more of it that 

 is fed on the farm to stock the greater will be the profit in the crop 

 itself and the more it will aid in the improvement of the soil for the 

 money crop through the manure made from the feeding. 



Gradually, in various parts of the State, farmers are coming to 

 realize the importance of the corn crop for the making of ensilage, 

 and here and there, especially with those near the larger towns who 

 are engaged in dairying, silos are being built and used, and with the 

 silo of course come the stock to eat the silage. 



Corn is especially the crop needing humus in the soil, and hence 

 it succeeds best on the moist and fertile bottom soils and on the 

 black, sandy, and peaty soils of the coast region. But with good 

 farming in a rotation in which peas or clover come in frequently on 

 the land, and are fed to stock and the manure applied to the corn- 

 field, there is no part of the State in which large crops of corn cannot 

 be grown. The long growing season, especially on the coastal plain, 

 makes the special selection of seed for earliness needless. In fact, 

 early varieties of corn are not so productive as the later kinds, and 

 are not needed here except in the high mountain plateau of the north- 

 western section. It is a common practice all over the State to sow 

 cow-peas among the corn at last working. These do not damage the 

 corn at all and are of help to the soil, and, where no small grain is to 

 follow the corn, crimson clover seed can be sown among the pea-vines, 

 as the leaves fall in September, and will make, with the dead peas, 

 an admirable green manure crop for cotton in the spring. 



