58 PRACTICAL CORN CULTURE 
productive. About thirty years ago clover began to find a 
place in the Corn Belt rotation. The benefits resulting from 
growing this legume were very marked, especially when it 
was grown for the first time. At the present time nine-tenths 
of the corn land is so deficient in nitrogen and humus, that 
a rotation containing at least one leguminous crop is not only 
profitable but necessary. 
Today a rotation of crops will be found on all the farms 
of the Corn Belt. To be sure, this rotation varies from an 
intelligent, scientific changing about of farm crops, in which 
the requirements of the soil are always kept in mind, to the 
haphazard rotations which still prevail on many of the Corn 
Belt farms. 
We are learning facts about our soil today that the eastern 
states learned to their regret twenty and thirty years ago 
and even longer, that it is an expensive and tedious process 
to restore fertility to land after it has been exhausted by the 
continuous growing of corn year after year. Twenty years 
hence the wheat belt farmers of the northwest will be con- 
fronted with the serious task of restoring worn-out wheat 
lands. It seems that the older fields of a community must 
first become so deficient in plant food that it no longer pays 
to grow the money crop of the country before that com- 
munity will adopt a rotation of crops that will in any way 
build up the land. The farmers of this country have been 
slow to adopt good rotations. They have waited until they 
were driven to it by necessity. We are, however, optimistic. 
We feel sure that through intelligent management thousands 
of farms in Illinois are more fertile today than they were 
five years ago. On the other hand tens of thousands are 
heeoming less fertile. We believe, though, the time is not 
far off when the turning point will be reached in Tllinois 
and that farms will gradually become more productive in- 
stead of becoming less productive, as they are today. 
