To the American, who was content to plow around his stumps every year for a decade, to cultivate around them, cradle or reap around them, it seemed that his German neighbor was using some kind of magic to exorcise his stumps. The magic was merely human muscle, motivated by a psychology which inhibited rest so long as a single stump remained in the field. The German not only used the heaps of farm yard fertilizer which, on buying out the original entryman, he commonly found on the premises, but he conserved all that his livestock produced, and frequently, if not too distant from town or village, became a purchaser of the commodity of which liverymen, stock yard keepers, and private owners of cow or horse were anxious to be relieved. The manufacture of fertilizer was a prime reason for stabling his livestock. The other was his fixed habit of affording animals such care. Not all Germans built barns at once, but the majority always tried to provide warm sheds, at least, whereas Yankee and Southwesterner alike were very prone to allow their animals to huddle, humped and shivering, all winter on the leeward side of house or granary, or in clumps of sheltering brush or trees.[21] The German was willing to occupy his log house longer, if necessary, in order to gain the means for constructing adequate barns and sheds. Germans were not one-crop farmers. The lands they occupied, usually forested, could not be cleared fast enough at best to enable them to raise wheat on a grand scale, as the Yankees did in the open lands of the southeast and west. Their arable was extended only a few acres per year, and while that was being done the German farmers grew a little of everything--wheat, rye, corn, oats, barley, potatoes, roots. Clover was to them a favorite forage, hay, and green manure crop. In growing it, they used gypsum freely. This policy of clover growing, adopted gradually by all farmers, was one of the means finally relied on by the wheat farmers to restore the productivity of their abused soils. In ways such as the above, German farmers helped to save Wisconsin agriculture in the period of stress when wheat growing failed and before coöperative dairying entered. They were not the chief influence in popularizing improved livestock. Credit for that innovation must be awarded to the Yankees. They had resumed in the eastern states the English tradition of breeding, and brought it into Wisconsin where, by means of state and county fairs and an active agricultural press, it was ultimately borne in upon the minds of all farmers, Germans among the rest.[22]