ENGLISH AGRICULTURE. 185 



crops. I may remind you of the reasons why these root crops 

 may be properly substituted for the bare fallow. I have 

 insisted on this on a previous occasion, but there will be no 

 harm in again mentioning that the root crop is essentially 

 suited for taking the place of the old bare fallow. The root 

 crop is consumed upon the premises, therefore it does not 

 remove any important constituent, as is the case when wheat 

 or other grain or products are removed from a farm. In the 

 second place, the late period at which the root crop is sown, 

 coupled with the care which is taken during the entire growth 

 of the crop, insures the thorough cleaning of the ground. 

 Then again the root crop especially requires the ground to 

 be in a state of high fertility. It is a crop which more 

 than any other suffers from the want of abundant nutrient 

 matter, and therefore the ground must be thoroughly well 

 dunged, and well assisted by other aids to fertility. So that 

 in the root crop we have really all that is required in a 

 renovating crop. The ground is also cleaned when under a 

 root crop ; it is thoroughly tilled, and the root crop leaves 

 the ground well stocked and stored with available plant-food 

 chiefly, and in fact altogether, because it is eaten upon the 

 land or upon the farm. It may as well be pointed out that 

 such would not be the case if the root crop were removed or 

 sold. Remove or sell the root crop, and we should find the 

 exhaustion of the ground would be very much more rapid 

 and very much more severe than by the selling of corn crops. 

 The root crop, then, is not renovating except from the fact 

 that it is consumed upon the farm where it is produced. 



In all rotations of crops the fallow or fallowing crop ought 

 to take the first place, because it is during the fallowing 

 process that land is prepared for supporting a series of crops. 

 Therefore in enunciating or teaching a rotation it is very 

 much the more convenient method to deal with it as the first 

 of the series as the very foundation for cropping. 





