﻿THE WESTERN CORX ROOTWORM. 7 



The second instance is that of Mr. Moses Fowler, previously men- 

 tioned on page 3. At the time referred to (1885) the Fowler estate, 

 comprising a single tract of about 18,000 acres, near Fowler, Ind., 

 was farmed by tenants and there were about 10,000 acres of corn 

 growing on the premises. Some of the fields were but slightly in- 

 jured and these were such as had either produced oats or grass within 

 two or three years. Other fields were damaged from 10 to 75 per 

 cent or more. Mr. Fowler, the following spring, directed his tenants 

 to sow 5,000 acres of the worst infested fields to oats and the re- 

 mainder of the 10,000 acres were sown to oats the second year. 

 Thereafter no attempt was made to grow corn two successive years 

 on the same ground, and as a result the pest was eliminated and no 

 further damage was sustained. 



What one man can do, who has control of thousands of acres, a 

 community can also accomplish if the people combine and follow a 

 similar course of procedure. 



Dr. Forbes, in his thorough and painstaking investigations of the 

 insect in Illinois, has found many similar instances of the efficiency 

 of crop rotation in eliminating the insect from cornfields. These 

 data have been supplemented by later studies of the writer and by 

 other observations made by him extending over the same period in 

 other States; so that there is no longer the slightest doubt of the 

 efficiency of this measure, which is now considered essential to good 

 farming. 



POSSIBLE EXCEPTIONS TO EFFICIENCY OF CROP ROTATION. 



In this period of nearly 40 years only a few possible exceptions to 

 the effectiveness of crop rotation have come to the writer's knowledge. 

 One of these came from a farmer in northern Illinois w T hom the 

 writer knew personally and who in 1886 complained of the attack of 

 these larvae on his corn, which was planted on ground that had been 

 devoted to clover and timothy the year previous. This farmer was 

 familiar with the pest and its work and sent specimens of the larvae. 

 The only explanation that could be offered for this unusual injury 

 was that the beetles forsook the cornfields after the pollen had ceased 

 to fall from the tassels and the silk of the ears had become too dead 

 and dry to afford them food, and that some of the females which had 

 not already finished oviposition made their way to the clover field, 

 fed in the blossoms, and oviposited in the soil, thus giving rise to the 

 larvae that the next year attacked the corn which followed the 

 clover crop in this field. 



The second complaint came from a farmer in Indiana who for two 

 years had fed considerable corn fodder to stock in a pasture of blue 

 grass and timothy. After plowing up this ground and planting it 



