Certainly the land should always be well tilled, but tillage makes the soil poorer, not richer. Tillage liberates plant food but adds none. "A little farm well tilled" is all right if well manured, but it should not be forgotten that the men who consider "Ten Acres Enough" are market gardeners, or truck farmers, who are not satisfied until in the course of six or eight years they have applied to their land about two hundred tons of manure per acre, all made from crops grown on other lands. All the manure produced in all the states would provide only thirty tons per acre for the farm lands of Illinois. In round numbers there are eighty million cattle and horses in the United States, and our annual corn crop is harvested from one hundred million acres. All the manure produced by all domestic animals would barely fertilize the corn lands with ten tons per acre if none whatever were lost or wasted; and, if all farm animals were figured on the basis of cattle, there is only one head for each ten acres of farm land in the United States. Your _second principle _is, that "a proper three or five-year rotation of crops actually enriches the land." I hope the God of truth and a long-suffering, misguided people will forgive you for that false teaching. If there is any one practice the value of which is fully understood by the farmers and landowners in the Eastern states and in all old agricultural countries, it is the practice of crop rotation. Indeed, the rotation of crops is much more common and much better understood and much more fully appreciated in the East than it is in the corn belt. Practically all we know of crop rotation we have learned from the East. Every old depleted agricultural country has worn out the soil by good systems of crop rotation. I once took a legal option of an "abandoned" farm in Maryland (beautiful location, two miles from a railroad station, gently undulating upland loam, at $10 per acre) that had been worn out under a four-year rotation of corn, wheat, meadow and pasture. A few acres of tobacco were usually grown in one corner of the corn field, and clover and timothy were regularly used for meadow and pasture. Wheat, tobacco and livestock were sold, and manure was applied for tobacco and so far as possible for corn also. In the later years of the system the ordinary commercial fertilizer was also applied for the wheat at the usual rate of two hundred pounds per acre, this having become a "necessity" toward the end of this slow but sure system of land ruin. The "simple principles" of your "new method" were understood and practiced in Roman agriculture two thousand years ago; and they included not only thorough tillage, careful seed selection, regular crop rotation, and the use of farm manure, but also the use of green manures. Thus Cato wrote: "Take care to have your wheat weeded twice--with the hoe, and also by hand." And again Cato wrote: