No. 4.] CROP ROTATION. 85 



CROP ROTATION FOR THE DAIRY FARM. 



BY H. 0. DANIELS, MIDDLETOWN, CONN". 



I feel that a great honor has been accorded me, in the 

 opportunity to come to your meeting and talk to you to-day ; 

 and I need not say it is also a great pleasure, as you must 

 know it is such, from my accepting the invitation. I believe 

 it is good for men in all kinds of business to meet together 

 at times and to study their needs ; and what is true for other 

 lines certainly is true for the agi-iculturists or farmers, if you 

 please, of our States. While I am accepting your good 

 wishes and the glad hand of fellowship, I in turn wish to 

 extend to you the greetings and best wishes of the hundreds 

 of dairymen and farmers of my own State, Connecticut. I 

 feel a good deal of hesitancy in coming before you, as I real- 

 ize the fact that many of you are better fitted to talk to this 

 audience, knowing their needs, than I am; but in the hope 

 that what I may say may help some brother over some of 

 the rough places, I am going to tell you some of the experi- 

 ences I have met and some of the problems I have solved in 

 my work on my own dairy farm. 



Mr. James J. Hill, the great railroad promoter and student 

 of our country's needs, contends that the time is at hand when 

 our population will call for all the agricultural products of 

 this country for home consumption, and that in the near fu- 

 ture we shall be obliged to import wheat, corn and other staple 

 products, unless we practice more thorough, intensive meth- 

 ods of farming than we use to-day. I think in a measure 

 this is true ; and when we look back for a few years, and 

 study our systems of growing crops, we can see where we 

 have been very wasteful of the soil we own, in allowing 

 tremendous losses by leaching and washing. With your 

 permission I will try to outline a plan for conserving the soil 

 fertility, at the same time adding to what we already have, so 



