oats spring cropping turnip winter feed and clover increasing nitrogen nutrients using nitrogenfixing bacteria by cultivating forage legumes on fallow ground were grown to provide feed for draught animals and animalpowered tillage supplying barnyard manure etc this new system required close cooperative work by farm families transforming formerly dispersed rural hamlets into centralized villages one of the benefits of this threefield system was that during the fallow stage the use of ploughs to perform deep ploughing and overturn the soil removed weeds fallowperiod weeding work