WHAT IS A WEED? 5 
8. Call in the aid of grazing animals, particularly sheep. Turn- 
ing them into mutton and wool is a very profitable way of fighting 
weeds. In stubbles where a young and succulent growth of such 
plants usually springs up after harvest, and in old pastures where the 
more dainty neat cattle have selected the plants that they liked best 
and left the weeds to seed, sheep may be turned in and by their close 
cropping so shear down the leaf-growth as to cause many very 
undesirable plants to be root-smothered to death. 
9. Practice rotation of crops. Continued growing of one crop 
not only exhausts the soil but serves to thoroughly infest it with 
the weeds that most commonly grow with that crop. Different 
plants.take food from the soil in different amounts and proportions, 
and a proper rotation must be decided by conditions of soil and 
climate. It should be a systematic alternation on each field of the 
three general classes of field crops: grain crops, cultivated crops, 
and grass crops, including the clovers. The farmer whose scheme 
of rotation is mainly intent on the improvement of the land and 
not on his immediate profit, will, in the end, make the most money 
and have the least difficulty in suppressing the weeds. Any rota- 
tion should put much stress upon a cleansing crop, requiring such 
close care in cultivation as to allow no opportunity for weeds to 
grow. This has fully as important a place in the series as the crops 
grown solely for their money value, or as the manurial or feeding 
crop which is intended to return some of the lost fertility to the soil. 
10. More wide-reaching and uniform laws, dealing with the con- 
trol and eradication of weed plagues, should be in force. Many 
weeds are in the noxious class because they are so well equipped 
with the means of spreading their kind over large sections of the 
country. This quality increases the difficulty and expense of their 
extermination, and it should interest the entire community as well 
as the individual. If there are weed-laws already on the statute 
books, ‘they should be made effective. If there are none, then 
persistent agitation for the enactment of such laws should be carried 
on by the persons who are most interested and who would be most 
benefited by their enforcement; namely, the farmers of the com- 
munity. 
