Rotation of crops for central Kansas

Abstract

Introduction: So fertile is the virgin soil of Kansas that the farmers of the past have been able with but scanty tillage to reap bountiful harvests. Nature has stored up vast supplies of plant food and humus, and this together with even scant tillage making an ideal seed bed, capable of retaining such moisture as fell. With these ideal conditions the farmers have raised year after year those crops that would bring in surest and quickest returns. The farmers of Central Kansas have continuously cropped their ground to wheat, with total disregard to the effects of such a system upon the soil. As a result the yield in many places has gradually dropped from twenty-five to fifteen bushels per acre, and if this system is long continued it will become possible to raise paying crops, only by the addition of costly fertilizers. If proper methods were adopted at once, the maintainance of soil fertility, and a continuation of good crop yields, would be a comparatively easy proposition, but if we wait till we have nothing but a worn out soil to work with the task is a far more difficult one, and the business of farming will become much less profitable than at present.