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.[1] 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
- ↑ When John Kerler settled near Milwaukee in 1848, he bought a farm on which was no provision for sheltering livestock other than work animals. He built a barn at once, refusing to permit, for a single winter, the cruel American practice of leaving cattle out in the cold. His case is typical.
