The Story of the Soil; from the Basis of Absolute Science and Real Life

by Cyril G. Hopkins

Sixth year—Clover, or clover and timothy.

This plan may be a grain system where wheat is grown the fifth year, only clover seed being harvested the fourth and sixth years, or it may be changed to a live-stock system by having clover and timothy for pasture and meadow the last three years, which may be best for a time, perhaps, if we find it too hard to care for eighty acres of wheat on poorly drained land.

In somewhat greater detail the system may be developed we hope about as follows:

First year: Corn, with mixed legumes, seeded at the time of the last cultivation, on perhaps one-half of the field. These legumes may include some cowpeas and soy beans and some sweet clover, but that is not yet fully decided upon.

Second year: Oats (part barley, perhaps) on twenty acres, cowpeas on ten acres, and soy beans on ten acres. The peas and beans are to be seeded on the twenty acres where the catch crop of legumes is to be plowed under as late in the spring as practicable.

Third year: Wheat with alsike on twenty acres and red clover on the other twenty, seeded in the early spring. If necessary to prevent the clover or weeds from seeding, the field will be clipped about the last of August.

Fourth year: Harvest the red clover for hay and the alsike for seed, and apply limestone after plowing early for wheat.

Fifth year: Wheat, with alsike and red clover seeded and clipped as before.

Sixth year: Pasture in early summer, then clip if necessary to secure uniformity, and later harvest the red clover for seed. Manure may be applied to any part of this field from the time of wheat harvest the previous year until the close of the pasture period. Then it may be applied to the alsike only until the red clover seed crop is removed, and then again to any part of the field, which may also be used for fall pasture. To this field the threshed clover straw and all other straw not needed for feed and bedding will be applied. The application of raw phosphate will be made to this field, and all of this material plowed under for corn.

The second six years is to be a repetition of the first, except that the alsike and red clover will be interchanged, so as to avoid the development of clover sickness if possible; and to keep the soil uniform we may interchange the oats with the peas and beans.