American Agriculturist, October 27,1923 
283 
A Hundred Dollars Reward 
Cover Crops Save Plant Food From Leaching Away 
ATURE utterly ab- By DAVID 
hors a vacuum. If a 
horse gallops across your lawn, kicking 
out a turf, next week there will be a 
weed—probably several—growing there 
to fill that hole with humus and cap¬ 
tured rubbish and cover the bare spot. 
There is no surer sign of ignorant 
farming than bare, brown fields in fall 
and winter, excepting of course a late- 
plowed field for a special purpose. 
A crop of anything—weeds if you 
don’t provide legumes or turnips and 
timothy—is working for nothing, every 
minute for you, gathering fertility that 
might otherwise go to waste and “or¬ 
ganizing it” in tops and root, ready to 
pass along both its humus and fertility 
to your next crop—a multiplication and 
addition, not a subtraction and loss. 
You can take a growing crop of any¬ 
thing, even so poor a stuff as buck¬ 
wheat, and by plowing in under over 
and over,. make a field rich as mud with 
the addition of no particle of anything 
except the actual seed used! 
“Oh,” but you say, “those plowings 
S. KELSEY almost anything that 
will sure-eatch and grow 
quickly, we will accomplish five very 
desirable objects: 
Anticipate and smother out the weed 
crop by preoccupying this finely pre¬ 
pared seed bed with something better. 
Save the still fast-forming soil- 
nitrates, that would otherwise be 
leached away and lost, by growing 
them into “organic” forms of manure 
that will keep till another year's farm 
crop can use them. 
Provide Nature’s form of protection 
against the pounding and washing of 
rains for the eight months ahead (a 
highly important objective). 
Keep our soil bacteria active, multi¬ 
plying, and at work at a time of year 
most favorable to them—thus prepar¬ 
ing (by dissolving and growing it into 
the bodies of our catch-crop) further 
stores of mineral plant-food, especially 
potash, phosphorus and calcium. 
And finally, we shall have greatly 
increased our permanent supply of soil 
humus, which of itself will promote 
As soon as the potato crop is “off,” rye should be broadcast and harrowed 
in immediately, thereby affording a cover and furnishing a soil builder 
would cost too much.” But you are 
going to plow anyway in the cases cited 
below, so that costs you nothing. 
The great reason why hay is to-day 
the most universally and surest-paying 
farm crop, the world, -over, is that it 
fully occupies the “growing season”— 
every minute of the un-frozen year it 
is gathering something for you; and 
second, it always provides a lot of stuff 
to plow under, adding both fertility and 
that subtile, but really most valuable 
element of all successful agriculture, 
humus. The same thing is only less 
true of the winter grains, explaining- 
why they are so reliably profitable on 
the same fields year-after-year, without 
rotation, and even when the average 
yield is very low. 
To put five dollars down on a patch 
of land and pick up $100 is no longer a 
miracle. Some of my neighbors are 
doing it every year—with cover-crops, 
and one dollar per acre is a good aver¬ 
age charge for the expense, the $20 
per acre so saved is a very low esti¬ 
mate. They seed a catch-crop of most 
anything at the last cultivation—and 
behold! Instead of rag weed and shep¬ 
herd’s purse and quack and chick and a 
horde of others—instead of nine months 
of bare, washing, blowing, rain-ham¬ 
mered land from which every bit of 
soluble plant food is being soaked, its 
humus content washed away and the 
finest mineral particles blown off into 
the brush—there stands, knee-deep, a 
green and smiling preventative of all 
these self-imposed plagues of Egypt. 
The demands of intensive tillage, 
however, are far more exacting. Dur¬ 
ing September and October in any hoed 
crop, but especially in corn, the upper 
three inches of soil are far richer in 
soluble plant food than the next three 
or four inches below, where the crop 
roots have been feeding, “close-crop¬ 
ping” it as a pasture. The same thing 
is very vividly true in any August po¬ 
tato field, hence the great rush of 
every sort of foul stuff there, as the 
tops give up. Now if we seed into that 
corn a cover crop at last hoeing— 
both bacteria and chemical dissolving 
favorable to our next regular crop. Be 
what it may, your next crop on that 
land will have conditions vastly more 
in its favor. That field will be a more 
“comfortable” place for plant-life, for 
humus makes moist, cold land better 
drained and warmer, and hot, dry land 
more cool and moist. 
And it is easy to continue this list. 
If your cover-crop is a legume such as 
crimson clover or winter vetch (called 
also Russian, sand and hairy vetch) you 
will not only have provided the best of 
early spring pasture, and have gath¬ 
ered the soil nitrates, but you will 
have . captured increased stores from 
the air. If it is any kind of turnip or 
rape, these have dissolved and “organ¬ 
ized” new minerals direct and of them¬ 
selves—without the assistance of the 
usual bacteria. If, again, it is rye or 
timothy, you have there provided a fine 
March and April pasture, where poach¬ 
ing feet will do the least harm, or if 
preferred a hay or soiling crop for 
May. _ 
A QUESTION OF CROP 
ROTATION 
I plowed under seven acres of good sod a 
year ago and planted it to potatoes this year. 
I would like to know whether I could plant 
beans on this piece next year, seeding it to 
wheat next fall? Neighbors say beans do not 
do well after potatoes, although I do not see 
the difference.—C. S., New York. 
According to Professor E. V. Harden- 
burg of the New York State College of 
Agriculture, an authority on crop ro¬ 
tations, there is no basis for the idea 
that beans will not do well after pota¬ 
toes, especially since these crops have 
quite different habits of growth and cor¬ 
responding feeding requirements. Pota¬ 
toes usually do better than beans on old 
sod land. The seed bed requirements 
for beans is too little appreciated and 
therefore, it is recommended that beans 
will profit well by a seed bed in good 
tilth. Another good reason for having- 
potatoes follow sod ahead of beans is 
that potatoes nave a high humus re¬ 
quirement compared to most field crops. 
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