18 
Rotations. 
the manufacture and use of various “cakes” has, however, 
altered all that. The Agricultural Holdings Act, which comes 
into force on January 1, 1909, practically legalises freedom of 
cropping. So long as the farm is kept clean and well 
manured this is as it should be. There can be no objection of 
course to insisting on a farm being left in a regular rotation at 
the end of a tenancy. A new tenant coming in to a farm may 
not want to crop or farm generally as his predecessor did, and 
therefore it is but right and fair the land should be left to him 
on some recognised system suitable to the district so that he 
can start off knowing that crops have not been unduly 
repeated on individual fields, and then he can modify the 
rotation to suit himself. Even under such circumstances — 
provided the land is clean and in good heart — a hard and fast 
rule need not be laid down. 
Crops are grown either to sell or to feed stock, and 
therefore in fixing on those to be cultivated a farmer naturally 
tries to stick to those which give the best returns. The land, 
however, must be kept clean and in good manurial condition, 
and therefore cleaning and renovating crops must be alternated 
with those which bring in cash. But of course these latter must 
be more than self-sustaining also, and thus roots, beans, clover, 
and plants like these, which have a direct value in addition to 
improving the soil, are preferred. A cleaning and renovating 
“ shift ” in the form of a bare fallow is the least desirable from 
this point of view, but on the other hand it thoroughly cleans 
the soil and allows some of the elements of fertility to 
accumulate. Very often, indeed, we find the fallow work 
comes in very handy at a slack time, and therefore the labour 
spent on the same may not really he a very great outlay, 
though charged in a valuation as “tillages.” 
In any system of rotation or of changing crops in any 
form the preserving and improving of the fertility of the soil 
ought to be kept in view. It is always possible in most districts 
in this country, of course, to keep the fertility right by the 
extraneous addition of manure in some form or another, but 
we know enough now about the growth of the various crops 
to be able to follow a sequence that will, to a certain extent at 
least, replenish by the residue left by some of them. Thus 
corn, potatoes, and roots are exhausting crops where sold or at 
least, removed from the fields where they grew ; but clover, 
beans, peas, and indeed all leguminous plants leave a nitrogenous 
residue behind in their roots. And thus these, while yielding a 
saleable crop, will, if supplied with the cheap mineral manures, 
at the same time replenish the soil. It is therefore desirable to 
alternate these and other replenishing crops with those of an 
exhausting nature as much as possible. 
