PRACTICAL PAPERS—MIXED HUSBANDRY. 135 
tation of crops. Any other method of farming must be based 
upon a random availability or caprice; having no reference to 
the actual conditions or necessities of the soil, devoid of all 
system and dependent upon the more or less accurately formed 
estimates of the prospective values of agricultural products in 
the markets. A farm thus conducted would exhibit no good 
management, but much of its opposite. Therefore, while a 
regular rotation of crops may be said to be only one branch of 
the management of a farm, it is certainly by far the most im¬ 
portant and inseparable. 
We prefer to break up our corn ground in the spring, our 
experience having satisfied us that the crop is more easily kept 
free from weeds in this way. We have tried fall plowing for 
corn with less satisfactory results ; when the time for planting 
arrived we generally found, when the land had been broken in 
the fall, that it was covered with grass and weeds thickly 
started, which have proved troublesome and expensive to de¬ 
stroy ; the ground, in spite of the action of the frost upon it, 
has not been so mellow, and has been more inclined to bake ; 
the corn has not come up so readily or evenly and, strange as 
the statement may appear, the sod has resisted the process of 
decomposition and assimilation much longer than when broken 
up in the spring. The reason of the latter fact we are unable 
to give; but that it is a fact, we are well assured. We pre¬ 
sume that fall breaking might be preferable in more southern 
locations, where the process of fermentation and decomposition 
would go on uninterruptedly during the winter months, which 
is never the case in our latitude. So well satisfied are we that 
spring breaking is better for corn, that were it in our power to 
do so and at the same time to have our corn planted in straight 
rows both ways, we would plant it immediately behind the 
breaking plow; but this cannot be done. We have not found 
that fall breaking destroyed the cut worm; yet, we think it 
has, in this respect, some advantage over spring breaking ; the 
cut and wire worms are the greatest enemies to the corn crop ; 
they probably destroy more corn, one year with another, than 
the frost. We have tried lime, plaster, ashes, with poor sue- 
