Arizona republican., 1920-02-20
CROP ROTATION SHOULD NUT bE FORGOTTEN HERE
By M. E. Bemis


 The crops and revenue from the livestock of Maricopa county this year will amount in round figures to .ap proximately S30,000,000. Large. as this sum is, 1t represents gross revenue Of only about s100 acre. With land values as high as they are now with labor costs, with taxes and other expenses incidental to producing crop do not believe that $100 an acre gross will return good farm laborers' wages to the man that produces an average crop. saying nothing about profit.
 There are plenty of men that are making money. That is evidenced every day by the improvements that we see being made the farms. by tke sales of the dealers in automobiles, farm tractors, and last and most i'm portant, by increased bank deposits.
 The men that are making money are not producing average crops. They are producing above the average, and the production.
 Average yields of cotton for several years have been almost exactly one half bale to the acre, but a number of farmers have produced considerably over a bale to the acre. The average production of alfalfa hay is a little over four tons to the acre. though tkere are plenty of instances O yields Of eight and ten and even larger yields. The average yield of wheat is under twenty bushels, but one far mer has produced 65 bushels to the acre. The average tonnage of silage would probably run about ten tons to the acre, but it is reported that one man near Laveen produced this year twenty tons to the acre.
 We are a long way from producing the maximum, or, in other words, we are not living up to our opportunities or our possibilities.
 Alfalfa the Soil Builder
 For a generation or more some of the farms of the Salt River valley have been growing alfalfa the major crop. Not continuously, to be sure, not in a well-defined rotation perhaps, but all ternating with grain, and grain sorg- huns. Often this alfalfa and other forage has been fed out on the farm to dairy cattle, steers or hogs. The roots of the alfalfa have gone down into the subsoil, aerating and bring ing up stored fertility in the shape of potash and phosphorus, while the nj trogen has been drawn from the inex- haustible reservoirs of the air.
 Could conditions be any more ideal for the growing of cotton? Yet with tEiS splendid preparation which has been going on for years, we are pro- dCcing only an average of half a bale to the acre. If we go on blowing up our alfalfa and planting the alfalfa fields to cotton. increasing the acre age from 90,000 acres, as it is this year, to 150,000, it is said that it will be next year. and if we continue to in- crease the acreage of cotton, year after year what will we be producing? :?
 No one can be blamed for planting to cotton every acre of land that he has, upon which there is a reasonable expectation of producing three fourths Of bale to a bale or more to the acre, but on land that for one req son or another will not produce more than half bale, it would be far bet ter to put it into alfalfa that the land may be built up to a high production standpoint.
 Every acre should be made to pro- duce maximum profit.
 If every farmer in the Salt River