PRACTICAL PAPERS—FARM MANAGEMENT. 
341 
GENERAL FARM MANAGEMENT. 
HY ELI STILSON, OSHKOSH. 
An Address delivered before the Agricultural Convention at Madison. 
The question how to manage a farm successfully, is one so 
broad and so deep, that it underlies the whole science of 
agriculture. The questions what to do? and what not to do ? 
how to do, and when to do ? are great questions to the practical 
farmer. In short his good or ill success in life will be largely 
influenced by the conclusions he arrives at on these questions. 
The practical farmer should regard his farm like the book of 
Nature spread out before him, inviting the closest study, and 
the most careful observation of all the facts pertaining to 
character of soil, climate, variety of production to which it is 
best adapted, and market for the same; what would be the 
best rotation of crops, and the relative exhaustion of each of 
those crops on his soil, and what element each of those crops 
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would be a great exhauster of, and how quickest and cheapest 
to supply that exhaustion and add to the productive power of 
his farm and at the same time to increase his own revenues. 
The available productive power of the soil is the measure of a 
large share of the productive capital of the farmer, and the 
farmer who pursues any system of farming or rotation of 
crops which exhausts the fertility of his own soil may be 
likened to a joint stock company which pays out its capital 
in dividends and ends in poverty and bankruptcy. 
Many will ask, can a farm be so managed as not to, slowly 
at least, exhaust the soil ? We have but to point such to Eng¬ 
land, as one of those countries whose system of agriculture dur¬ 
ing the present century has not only kept up the fertility of 
her soil, but has also nearly doubled its capacity for production. 
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