it washes also the surface and carries away with it plant food and a great deal of soil. It should be your aim to keep the soil loose and mellow on the surface, so that water may be absorbed freely and abundantly, and then

It does good work as a roller, and leaves the surface of the soil in such a way that the water is prevented from escaping. This sort of roller must be run crosswise the slope and not with it

there will be enough to supply plants when the hot, dry part of summer comes.

The practical bearing is this: the surface of the soil must be kept loose and open so that as rapidly as rain falls it may be admitted into the upper soil, from whence it can work gradually down to the great storehouse beneath, to be held and preserved until later called into use.

Surface breaking a help. This explains one helpful side of fall plowing: the stiff, hardened crust is broken

and water freely enters, the ridges and hollows occasioned by the plowing operation, acting together, serve as tiny basins for catching and holding all little excesses, until the greater part of the contribution can be got into the soil. The entire turned portion of the soil further serves as a sponge for the time being, until the water just received can be given to the interspaces of the soil below. In North Carolina a test showed 142 tons per acre of water more in a fall-plowed soil, than for similar soil plowed late in the spring.

The importance of this increase is readily seen more water is stored in the soil and more is available for the crop later in the season at a time when the demands will be great and urgent. Similar results were obtained in New Hampshire. Out of fourteen determinations made, fall plowings showed larger water content in every case, the range being from 72 to 264 tons per acre above like soils that were plowed during the latter part of May.

A most frequent and conspicuous observation, especially during periods of drought, is this: Corn or cotton or other cultivated crop, day after day, week after week, contends against extreme heat and drought, without rain or prospect of rain; despairs not, though the soil is dry and hot; grows on and increases in size and strength, although but little, to pass at last beyond danger because rain has come, because the period of trial is over, because the earth is replenished again. Why is this so, when all about are fields of similar crops starved, ruined, if not dead? Simply because many months before water found admission into the soil, and there remained until the crucial test was made-water was demanded-the call was given, which, heeded, preserved the crop, and added fresh laurels to the crop and to its keeper.

It is stated that often if but a half inch more of water

were in the soil, a destroyed, withered crop might have been saved.

These facts point to a general conclusion: fall plowing, because it offers an uneven, broken, open surface to the rain, enables water to enter the soil, and increases, in a marked degree, its water content.

DISKING THE GROUND BEFORE PLOWING

A good practise, but not generally followed. It helps to make a fine seedbed, saves moisture, makes plowing easier and increases the crop

This same conclusion applies to early spring plowing and to disking, and for the same reason.

Lands that often suffer for water later in the season, may be helped much by running the disk before plowing time (as a part of land preparation for the seed). Old corn lands, pea stubble, and worn-out pastures and meadows, especially, are helped by this practice. When these are plowed a few weeks later, the soil will pulverize more readily, and it will be fitted for seeding with less effort

and expense. I have come to appreciate the disk harrow most highly for this work. The labor and expense incidental to disking before plowing is more than met by the lessened amount of both at the time of preparation. And then the work is better done. A corn crop has been known to show its appreciation by yielding 8.6 bushels more per acre in favor of this sort of treatment.

Saving water by cultivation. The work of the farmer is to induce water to enter the soil both in summer and winter. But it is more than this. He must save it, once it is secured. And now we come back to our original proposition: cultivation checks the water loss. Until you grasp this idea, until you come to a full realization of its force and importance, you will never be able to compel your soils to expend their fullest powers toward the production of maximum crops.

The principle of moisture-saving, briefly stated, is this: Water is carried from the water storehouse of the lower depths of the soil by capillarity. It rises in the soil from soil particle to soil particle, just as oil creeps up in the lamp-wick. It moves sidewise and diagonally and upward; it goes in the direction of the hardest pull.

But always, in the end, unless prevented by some obstacle-a dry mulch so acts-it finds the surface of the soil, at which point it passes into vapor and leaps into the atmosphere.

You have no reason to doubt this principle, for you have seen its evidence a thousand times. You have picked a board from the ground, or kicked a stone from its snug pocket, or taken leaves or grass or straw from the bed made, and you found that beneath either there was wetness; even a great deal, although on every side the surrounding soil was dry and hot.

There was but one way by which this could happen: by

capillarity being at work, by water leaving the lower stores and rising upwards to the surface. Not to escape in this case, however, because the stone, or board, or vegetable matter, by acting as a blanket, kept the moving

water from rising higher and higher and up to the surface; and now no wind can come and take away the water just brought up.

This principle is now well established, and from it has been developed the practice of moisture-saving by providing a layer of loose, dry soil or mulch, from two to four inches deep, at the surface to serve as the blanket that shall prevent active moisture-loss: in other words, to check the loss by evaporation.