472 
WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
table to raise a class of horses so poorly qualified for farm labor as these 
slender, wee things are, merely to able to drive to town at a two-forty gait. 
As I have before intimated, sheep raising is at a discount with our farmers 
now, and very little is said or thought of big fleeces: Sheep have lost their 
dominating position of interest with our farmers, to be regained only when 
the price of wool returns to seventy-five cents a pound, or the price of other 
farm products are proportionately lower. But the wool growing mania 
worked a very great benefit to our farmers, as it checked grain growing, 
and gave our tilled fields rest and manure. Fortunately the rapidly in¬ 
creasing interest in dairying is taking its place, giving our fields still more 
rest and manure. The advantage of this was seen in a marked degree last 
year, in the superior crops produced in that section of the county where 
sheep and cows were most numerous. And it, most assuredly, will be a 
fortunate day for our farms and farmers when wheat is no longer king. 
No very marked change in methods of tilth has obtained with our 
farmers from the old-time custom; no system of rotation is practiced to any 
extent. Chance, and seeming fitness, guiding our farmer mainly, except in 
such isolated cases where necessity commands, though the same variety of 
crops is not as frequently grown in succession as in years past. But while 
our farmers are without any fixed system of rotation, all our best far¬ 
mers pursue methods looking in some degree to an improvement of the 
soil, seeding with clover and timothy after a few years in grain, laying them 
by in pasture or meadow from two to four or more years, to be broken up in 
September or October, followed by oats, wheat or corn in the spring, and 
kept in tilth from three to five years, succeeded by a similar length of time 
in grass is the most common custom. Very little winter grain is grown in 
the county, and of that little, fully three fourths is rye. A few of our far. 
mers have of late years tried rye as forage crop and grain crop combined 
and think very favorable of it. The method practiced is to seed with rye 
early in the fall—August or early in September—giving, if not wet, pas¬ 
ture for your cows through October and until winter sets in, and again in 
early spring up to May 10th or June first, then laid by for a grain crop. 
This, in most cases, gives a full crop of grain, the fall and spring pasturing 
not seeming to injure or diminish the yield of grain, but giving in most cases 
a shorter straw. Even if the grain yield is diminished by a sixth or eighth, 
the superior character of the pasture for butter making will amply repay all 
losses in that direction. 
little, and but very little progress has been made in beautifying our 
streets and highways by tree-planting, owing to the prevalent habit of 
pasturing the public thoroughfares by both cattle and horses. There are a 
few localities where this is not permitted, but in most of the county the 
highways are treated as commons, free to all who choose to use them as 
pasture,—not that our laws are without preventative enactments, but cus¬ 
tom rules. 
