232 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE Off. DoC. 



character of his soil, and the maintenance, in an economical and 

 business-like way of this productiveness and fertility. In all the 

 older sections of the country there is no phrase more commonly used 

 in speaking of a depleted soil, than to say it is "worn out." The 

 real fact is that we have no really worn-out soils. We have soils in 

 many localities which were originally fertile and productive, but 

 which, through a long course of injudicious treatment and cropping, 

 have gotten into a very unproductive condition. We have other 

 lands that never had any store of fertility to be worn out — deep 

 sands, which are naturally barren. 



The ''old fields" of the South are good examples of what men call 

 worn out soils. They were cropped year after year in the old one- 

 crop system till no longer producing a paying crop by the shallow 

 plowing and methods of cultivation to which they were subjected, 

 and have been turned out as perfectly worthless and utterly worn 

 out. What then takes place? The ever-present broomsedge soon 

 covers the land, and sods it over with its strong roots. Down among 

 the broomsedge the pine seed, borne on the wind, find a congenial 

 shelter, and a thicket of old field pines grows up. The pine tree has 

 a wonderful subsoiler in its deep tap root, and it strikes down into 

 the soil which the little one horse plow of the past never touched 

 and year after year brings up food from below, and covers the 

 earth with its fallen leaves making humus to replace that which 

 had been used up in the careless cultivation of the past. After a 

 while the forest is cut down for firewood and the owner finds that 

 he has a new and fresh soil, which will make as much cotton or 

 tobacco as it ever did. Nature has made this fertile soil by pro- 

 cesses of her own, and with no help from the fertilizer manu- 

 facturer. But for the broomsedge and the pine tree a large part 

 of the Southern uplands would to-day be a howling wilderness. If 

 the man Avho clears the pines away goes on again to reduce the fer- 

 tility of the soil, and finally turns it out again. Nature will renew 

 the process, and will show that there is in all of our soils which are 

 of a good mechanical composition, and originally productive, a prac- 

 tically inexhaustible sui>ply of plant foods with any sort of proper 

 management. What is it that Nature does for the restoration of 

 the soil through the long years she takes to cure man's improvi- 

 dence? Merely getting deeper into the unused store of mineral mat- 

 ter that had not been touched, and putting the accumulated vege- 

 table matter on the surface soil to decay and restore the humus 

 content to the soil which the constant cultivation of the past had 

 used up. It takes unaided Nature long years to accomplish this, 

 while all that she does the wise farmer can do in a few short years 

 if he learns what is needed and the method of getting it. 



One of the chief deficiencies in our old cultivated soils is organic 

 decay making what we call humus. We are but just getting to 

 realize the importance of this humus. It is valuable, not altogether 

 for the amount of plant food it contains, though it does furnish a 

 large part of the nitrogen, which is so hard to keep in good supply. 

 but by reason of other effects which it has in the soil. It darkens 

 the color of the soil, and hence makes it more retentive of heat. It 

 prevents a clay soil from running together and baking hard in 

 dry weather. Through the acids it contains it has a great solvent 

 effect on matters of plant food otherwise insoluble, or very slowly 



