106 [Senate 



.not only loses this mutual aid, but is in itself attended with a constant 

 exhaustion and running down of the soil. As an almost universal 

 rule, a crop of wheat, a crop of oats, or a crop of corn, raised year 

 after year on the same piece of ground, yields less each successive 

 year, till little or nothing is finally produced. Hence the practice of 

 dividing the farm into permanent meadows, permanent pastures, and 

 permanently cultivated fields, is highly detrimental. The soil, as a 

 consequence, deteriorates in every part ; meadows run out, and moss 

 and weeds come in — the soil not only becoming less productive, but 

 often so compact from want of stirring, as to yield but little ; the til- 

 lage grounds, by continued cropping, wear down till they fail to pro- 

 duce the materials for making manure ; and even the pastures often 

 become gradually filled with bushes and weeds. A few very rare and 

 apparent exceptions, exist in case of some soils of extraordinary fer- 

 tility, or naturally wet ground yielding grass, or grass land annually 

 enriched by the process d'f flooding, or manuring by irrigation. 



A want of the knowledge of this fact, and of a corresponding prac- 

 tice, has been the means of a loss of millions, not only in the eastern 

 continent, but in our own country. The same process which has re- 

 duced to sterility many of the once fertile portions of Europe, has di- 

 minished the products, and in some cases totally unfitted for the growth 

 of some crops, many parts of the United States. Even in western 

 New-York, so eminent for its fertility, the diminished or else uncer- 

 tain crop of wheat in many districts, tells too plainly to be mistaken, 

 the barrenness which is hastening upon us, unless a new system is 

 adopted more generally. It was this practice, which Buel correctly 

 asserted " had impoverished, and is still impoverishing the soil of our 

 Atlantic border, and which is already causing indications of prema- 

 ture exhaustion and poverty in some portions of the New West." 



Farmers are sometimes driven, as they suppose, in cases of neces- 

 sity, to crop hard to raise money to pay their debts. But in thus en- 

 deavoring to get a little increased interest on their capital, they are 

 making a tremendous draft on the principal. A little additional in- 

 formation — a little planning and proper arrangement — would preserve 

 the fertility of the land, and the crops would soon be increased more 

 than by hundreds of dollars worth of labor without. Where experi- 

 ments have been made with different courses of crops — some of them 

 bringing very often into the course wheat, and other such cash produ- 

 cing but soil exhausting crops ; and others bringing in such crops at 



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