96 SHEEP FEEDING 



average." Another saj's : " I bought this farm six years 

 ago and my practice has been to pasture down most 

 of my corn each year with sheep. My first yields were 

 about forty bushels per acre ; now I average from fifty to 

 sixty. My neighbors still get about the same yields that I 

 used to." 



A Ivansas farmer says : " I have cornfields where I have 

 pastured down my corn with sheep for eight years. When 

 I started this practice I received from thirty-five to forty 

 bushels of corn per acre, and now my average on the same 

 land runs from sixty -five to eighty-five. The fields that have 

 not been pasture still yield around forty bushels per acre. 

 One of the poorest farms in our neighborhood has been 

 made one of the most productive by pasturing down corn 

 with sheep." 



A Missouri farmer gives his experience as follows : " Part 

 of my farm is very old, and I have one field that I know has 

 been cropped for thirty-five years. At no time previous to 

 five years ago, when I started pasturing my corn down with 

 sheep, could I get more than thirty-five bushels of corn per 

 acre on this land, but since that time I have harvested sixty- 

 five bushels per acre from it. I have had yields increased 

 from five to ten bushels per acre in a single year following 

 the pasturing down of corn with sheep." One who has used 

 catch crops, corn, and sheep for a number of years says : 

 " I settled on this farm, one hundred and sixty acres of it, 

 in 1892, paying seventeen dollars and fifty cents per acre, a 

 price that my neighbors thought exorbitant. The first crops 

 tliat I planted did not grow high enough to cut with a binder, 

 so f thought ]iiy first step was to improve the soil ; conse- 

 quently I seeded down my fields and fed cattle on them. In 

 1902 I tried another crop, corn, in which I broadcasted 



