18 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
long ago. For have we not reduced our average from a very 
high to a very low figure during the period of this first gene¬ 
ration ? 
Our farmers should have learned by this time that there is 
no such thing as permanent success without systematic rota¬ 
tion and manuring. But systematic fertilization is impossible 
without a liberal supply of live stock. The conclusion is in¬ 
evitable, therefore, that grain-growing must go hand in hand 
with grass-growing and stock-raising. 
Here and there one is found who practices upon this mani¬ 
fest principle as if it were cardinal; and such farmers are in¬ 
variably successful. Besides keeping up the fertility of their 
lands, they are safe from the ruin which may come to him who 
stakes all upon a single crop. Neither drouth, nor flood, nor 
insect foes, nor yet commercial changes can utterly overwhelm 
him; and inasmuch as it is hardly possible that all these ca¬ 
lamities should overtake him at once, he is always “ master of 
the situation.” 
These principles are so simple and trite that one at first feels 
like apologizing to his readers for restating them; but then 
there are the sad misfortunes of the Sauk county hop-growers, 
and the still more common experience of the wheat maniacs, 
in proof of how little previous teachings and the reiterations 
of a multitude of writers and speakers have been heeded. 
Again, there is too little 
REGARD FOR SPECIAL CONDITIONS. 
Farmers are rotinists. They are prompt to denounce the 
blind adherence to fashion which so widely prevails in the so¬ 
cial world ; and yet no people or class of people cn earth mani¬ 
fest so little independence or so blindly and implicitly follow 
the prevailing custom—which, unhappily in their case is the 
very worst fashion they could possibly adopt. 
What we would urge is this: that they should discard the 
iron-bedstead rule of doing this or that because everybody else 
does it, and undertake to think for themselves. That before 
