Staple crop

“ In growing such dry land crops as barley, beans, buckwheat or dry land rice the soil of the field is at first fitted by plowing or spading, then furrowed deeply where the rows are to be planted. Into these furrows fertilizer is placed and covered with a layer of earth upon which the seed is planted. When the crop is up, if a second fertilization is desired, a furrow may be made alongside each row, into which the fertilizer is sowed and then covered. ”

“ These results go to demonstrate, that the entire roots are essential to the vigor of the crops, and to enable them to perform their functions as nature designed, must be near the surface. If the roots are severed with the plow, in dressing the crop, the plants are deprived of a portion of their nourishment; and if they are buried deep by hilling, the plant is partially exhausted in throwing out a new set near the surface, where alone they can perform all their offices. There is another material advantage in this mode of cultivating the corn crop—it saves a vast deal of manual labor. ”

“ More attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn-crop also became very meagre. At last it was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed under and planted with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a complete change in farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs. ”

“ In ordinary farming, “larger crops per acre” means fewer acres planted or sown with grain. It means more summer fallow, more grass, clover, peas, mustard, coleseed, roots, and other crops that are consumed on the farm. It means more thorough cultivation. It means clean and rich land. It means husbanding the ammonia and nitric acid, which is brought to the soil, as well as that which is developed from the soil, or which the soil attracts from the atmosphere, and using it to grow a crop every second, third, or fourth year, instead of every year. ”

“ Good Soil Conditions.—When the grasses and clovers desired for a sod are sown with small grain, there is competition between them and the grain crop for fertility, moisture, and light. The grain crop is the one that will produce the income the following summer, and naturally is given right of way. The amount of seed is used that experience teaches is best for a maximum yield of grain. Usually this gives a thicker stand of plants than is best for the tiny grass and clover plants that often are struggling for existence down under the taller grain. ”

“ And yet, by the aid of these stimulating commercial fertilizers, the poorest and thinnest soil can be made to produce fine strawberries, if sufficient moisture can be maintained. Just as a physician can rally an exhausted man to a condition in which he can take and be strengthened by food, so land, too poor and light to sprout a pea, can be stimulated into producing a meagre green crop of some kind, which, plowed under, will enable the land to produce a second and heavier burden. ”

“ We must conclude that the wheat can not get food enough from the soil to yield a maximum crop, not because there is not food enough in the field, but the roots of the wheat are so constituted that they can not gather it up; while clover-roots, foraging in the same soil, can find all they want. ”

“ We grow too many weeds. Mr. Lawes plowed the land twice every year; and the crop was hoed once or twice in the spring to kill the weeds.
2d. We do not half work our heavy land. We do not plow it enough—do not cultivate, harrow, and roll enough. I have put wheat in on my own farm, and have seen others do the same thing, when the drill on the clay-spots could not deposit the seed an inch deep. There is “plant-food” enough in these “clay-spots” to give 17 bushels of wheat per acre—or perhaps 40 bushels—but we shall not get ten bushels. ”

“ Cut when the grain is fairly out of the milk, and cure it like hay. Four tons is a fair yield—two tons is a small crop.
Indian Corn should be sown broadcast at the rate of four to five bushels to the acre. Corn belongs to the tribe of grasses. Cultivating it for the grain, in rows, with every stimulant of air, light, and manure, develops the stalk almost to a tree form. When sown for fodder, the object should be to produce it, as nearly as possible, like a grass. Thick sowing will tend to do it, and each stalk being small and tender, the crop will be easily masticated by cattle. ”

“ To grow wheat every year in crops of 15 bushels per acre, would impoverish the soil just as much as to summer-fallow and get 30 bushels of wheat every other year. It is the same thing in either case. But in summer-fallowing, we clean the land, and the profits from a crop of 30 bushels per acre every other year, are much more than from two crops of 15 bushels every year. You know that Mr. Lawes has a field of about thirteen acres that he sows with wheat every year. On the plot that receives no manure of any kind, the crop, for twenty years, averaged 161⁄4 bushels per acre. ”

“ Every year furnishes some organic matter for the soil in roots and stubble, and all the produce of four years out of the five may be fed on the farm. There is one cash crop, or two if the price of the clear timothy hay justifies sale.
The manure may be hauled upon the sod when other work does not press, and it goes where the crop is one that prefers fresh manure, be that the grass or the corn. There is plenty of time after the corn to prepare for oats, and after the oats to prepare for wheat. The preparation for the wheat is sufficient for the clover and timothy. ”

“ Indian bands hunted, dug roots, and pastured their ponies. Quick to recognize the productivity of the soil, the newcomers staked claims, strung miles of barbed-wire fences, and set to work breaking the sod, in the meantime turning their cattle out on the range to fatten. Within a few years, thousands of acres had been planted to wheat and were producing exceptional yields. Wheat continues to be the chief crop of the region. In the spring the entire countryside, seen from an eminence, is a checkerboard of green fields and dark brown squares of fallow land. ”

“ But if the grain is removed, and nothing resupplies the drain of phosphates which it makes from the soil, the soil will in due time, according to the original quantities in the soil, cease to yield grain, although the straw may be admirable. But if both straw and kernel were every year burned upon the [Pg 150] field, as grass and its seed is upon the prairies, wheat would grow for a thousand years in succession. The same is true of corn, of potatoes, and of any annual crop. When the annual growth is restored to the soil, it is repossessed of all its treasure which had been loaned for a season. ”

“ The planting may be made soon after the usual time of planting corn, or whenever the ground has become warm. The preparation of the soil should be more thorough than that often given the cowpea. Solid drilling of five pecks of seed per acre is satisfactory when the crop is for fertilizing purposes only, and gives an excellent hay on land free of weeds. When the crop is wanted for hay, however, wheat usually will follow, and it is much better to plant in rows and to give two or three cultivations so that the ground may be easily prepared for the wheat.
A seed crop should be grown in rows. ”

“ Good herbage will grow on bog thus treated, but as much as possible should at once be put into root-crops, with farmyard manure for potatoes and turnips. The more lime you give the better will be your crop, and, treated thus, there is no doubt that even during the first year, land so reclaimed will yield remunerative crops. People ask, ‘But will not the whole thing go back to bog?’ Of course it will if not kept under proper rotation, which we find to be one of five years—namely, roots followed by oats, laid down with clover and grass seed, which remains for two years. ”

“ A given amount of plant-food is put upon the land, which is under a four-years' rotation. One half of it is applied every second year. The corn gets one half because it can use it to advantage. The oat crop that follows finds enough fertility because the soil is good. Next in the rotation is the wheat, and the wheat and timothy and clover plants can use fertilizer with profit. There is no change in its character because it is the soil that is getting the assistance, and not primarily just one crop in a rotation. ”

“ It is true that, if the [Pg 153] crop is sold, and it is desired to maintain the fertility of the soil, the full amount of the ash must be applied, either before or after the crop is grown; but, in the ordinary use of crops for feeding purposes, a large part of the ash will exist in the excrements of the animals; so that the judicious farmer will be able to manure his land with more economy than if he had to apply to each crop the whole amount and variety required for its ash. ”

“ Mr Prout’s system was to cultivate the land by steam power, to manure on the lines suggested by the Rothamsted experiments, and to sell both grain and straw. Wheat was grown continuously year after year until the soil became infested with weeds, when 8 some kind of root crop was grown to give an opportunity to clean the land. A root crop is not sown until June so that the land is bare for cleaning all the spring and early summer. ”

“ First, the orchard should not be located on land that is fitted to produce the best farm crops, but it [Pg 83] must not be too steep and hilly to be cultivated. A sunny sloping hillside is best suited to orchard crops.
In most cases little fertilization is needed except the planting of clover or some other leguminous crop. If corn be planted in young orchards, as is often the case, potash should be used as a fertilizer after the crop is gathered, since both corn and fruit trees draw very heavily on the potash in the soil. ”

“ As my land is divided almost equally each year between corn and oats, which follow each other, it gets a cover crop turned under every two years over the whole of it. Great quantities of manure are hauled upon the oat stubble in the early spring, and these fields are planted to corn, while the corn stubble is fertilized by the cover crop, and oats are sown. The land is taxed heavily every year, but it increases in fertility and crop-making capacity. For the past two years my oats have averaged forty-seven bushels and my corn nearly sixty-eight bushels per acre. ”

“ The portion of the farm reduced in productive power for the moment goes to grass, while the labor and fertilizers are concentrated upon the fields that are broken for grain and vegetables. The removal of all the crop at harvest, and probably the pasturing of after-math, are the only matters of interest that the fields, depleted by cultivation and seeded down to grass, have for the owner until the poor hay yield and the need of a sod for corn draw attention again to them. ”

“ Possibly at the time of purchase the acre may be covered with coarse grass, weeds, or undergrowth of some kind. In this case, after the initial plowing, the cultivation for a season of some such crop as corn or potatoes may be of great advantage in clearing the land, and the proceeds of the crop would partially meet expenses. If the aim is merely to subdue and clean the land as quickly as possible, nothing is better than buckwheat, sown thickly and plowed under just as it comes into blossom. ”

“ Economic necessity may also soon increase the cultivation of this valuable plant as an alternate crop on, and restorative for, the exhausted soil of many districts where wheat has been grown on wheat since, one might almost say, time immemorial. ”

“ Three years ago, in a midland county, a field of good land, in good cultivation, and richly manured, produced a heavy crop of cabbages. In November of that year we saw that field broken into in several places, and at the depth of four feet the soil (a tenacious marl, fully stiff enough for brick-earth) was occupied by the roots of cabbage, not sparingly—not mere capillæ—but fibres of the size of small pack-thread. A farmer manures a field of four or five inches of free soil reposing on a retentive clay, and sows it with wheat. ”

“ No intelligent farmer removes all the potatoes and tops, all the wheat, straw, and chaff, or all the corn and stalks from his farm. According to Dr. Salisbury, a crop of corn of 75 bushels per acre removes from the soil 600 lbs. ”

“ Now, the whole matter which forms the stems, leaves, roots, cobs, and seeds of corn, where the crop is 100 bushels per acre, is not part and parcel of the soil. A harvest equal to fifty bushels per acre can be obtained without consuming over ten per cent, of earth, as compared with the weight of the crop. No plant can imbibe more of the substance of the soil in which it grows, than is dissolved in water, or rendered gaseous by the decomposition of mould. ”

“ As the growth advances the crop must be earthed up, care being exercised not to earth up too much, for, taking six inches as the best average depth, the crop will be diminished by an increase beyond this depth. One urgent reason for early work between the rows is that a prosperous crop will soon put a stop to it. The moment it becomes likely that the shaws will be bruised by traffic between the rows they must be left to finish their course in their own way, because the formation of tubers below will be in the ratio of the healthy growth above ground. ”

“ This style of cultivation gradually exhausts the fertility of the richest virgin soil, and its cropping capacity falls off. As soon as the crop falls below a certain level it ceases to be profitable. No doubt the fertility of the exhausted soil could be restored by suitable cultivation and manuring, but it is usually the custom to move towards districts which are still unsettled, and to take up more virgin soil. Thus the centre of the area of wheat production in the States has moved nearly 700 miles westward in the last 50 years. ”