PRACTICAL PAPERS. 
MANAGEMENT AND ROTATION OF CROPS OF A 
FARM FOR MIXED HUSBAND ARY. 
Prize Essay. 
BY GUSTAVE DE XEVEU, FOND DU LAC. 
In entering upon our subject we desire to express a want of 
sympathy for that mode of farming which confines itself solely 
to the raising of grain; firmly believing that such a practice 
must eventuate in the impoverishment of the land, if persisted 
in, and that the larger the returns the more rapid the exhaus¬ 
tion that must inevitably follow. A grain farm is generally 
one upon which only the teams required for its working are 
kept, with, perhaps, a few cows sufficient to supply the imme¬ 
diate wants of the farmer, his family and laborers. It is a farm 
from which its owner or occupant, like a cruel task-master, 
constantly exacts the highest cash returns, blind to the fact, 
yearly made more manifest in lessened production, that the 
energies of the soil are becoming more and more reduced and 
shattered. It is such a man that Virgil must have had in his 
e} 7 e when he called the farmer a miser —avarus arcitor. Virgil 
was a great lover of agriculture; his bucolics and georgies are 
imperishable witnesses of this fact. No one has described the 
happiness of rural life with such a poetic hand, and his indig¬ 
nation was aroused to see that those men, whose mission it is 
to beautify the earth and make it more fruitful, were the very 
ones who destroyed its productive powers. 
