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The repetition of crops in long succession, without manure and with 
superficial culture, finds numerous illustrations in different parts of the 
State. In Princess Anne, corn has been grown for fifty years with an oe- 
casional crop of weeds as arest. Near towns and cities this treatment 
is rendered more tolerable by the amount of stable-manure accessible 4 
but in many places it has told severely upon the soil, as is thus stated 
by our correspondent in Cumberland County: 
' The best land is selected for tobacco and corn, following the tobacco with wheat, 
and some may suw a few clover seed to afford a scanty pasturage for their poor stock 
the next year. Others seed their corn-land year after year in oats, until they bring 
it to broom-straw, then go to their wood land for a fresh tobacco crop. 
In North Carolina the majority of the counties reported indicate an 
entire absence of crop rotation. In other counties a partial and varying 
routine is noticed in rather dubious terms. The following is a specimen 
of the more systematic and intelligent but isolated efforts at rotation: 
About half my cultivated land is not adapted for the growing of cotton; this half I 
reserve for corn and oats, not planting the whole of it to either crop, but a part to rest. 
every year, and always following the rest with corn, and the corn with oats. I have 
divided the other half into two equal parts, one of which I plant to cotton, manuring 
with home-made compost or commercial fertilizer; on the other part I put a few acres 
in sweet potatoes, and remainder of the field in pease. The potatoes and pease are fed 
off on the land to hogs and beef cattle. The next year this part goes to cotton and the 
other to potatoes and pease. 
Thus, in the cotton land the course is two years; 1. potatoes and 
pease; 2. cotton; in the remaining portion the course is three years: 1. 
corn; 2. oats; 3. rest. 
The repetition of crops is pursued to an astonishing degree. In Ca- 
tawba and Caldwell Counties, for instance, low lands have been planted 
in corn from seventy-five to one hundred years; in Pasquotank, fifty 
years; in many others from ten to forty years. In river-bottoms, where 
the soil is annually renewed and fertilized by overfiow, this process 
seems capable of repetition ad infinitum. In some counties every agri- 
cultural interest is subordinated to cotton, which is grown year after 
year till the land refuses to yield apayingcrop. In some instances cot- 
ton-fields are liberally manured, but in others very little effort is made 
to supply plant-food. Our correspondent in Stanly says: 
The absence of market facilities, and the lack of cheap and improved implements of 
husbandry, prevent the poorer class of farmers from following a systematic rotation ; 
and if the plan should be adopted by the wealthier class, it necessitates the farming 
out of their lands to colored laborers ; who, though very industrious and well-behaved, 
cannot be brought to a perfected system in anything. Exhaustive cropping on the 
old plan is therefore the rule, and any attempt at a systematic course the exception. 
In South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas, and in all the Gulf States, 
systematic rotation is very little thought of. Our correspondent in 
Columbia County, Georgia, thus reflects a leading phase of popular 
opinion in the South: 
Although the benefits following rotation are acknowledged by the majority of 
farmers in this section, yet it is practiced by comparatively few. Many think the 
extensive use of “ commercial fertilizers ” does away with the necessity for this annual 
change of crops, and the fertilizer used is selected with direct reference to the crop to 
be produced, and the crop is thus fed and grows by this outside help, thus preventing 
too great a drain upon the soil itself. This creates an idea in the minds of those who 
practice this system that the outlay of money is a salve to the soils, and to this extent 
not only preserves but increases its fertility ; others maintain that this extensive and 
general use of stimulating manures, while they may and do increase the production, 
do it at the expense and the ultimate deterioration of the soil, in other words they 
“kill the land,” and the old, worn-out lands of Virginia are cited in vindication of 
this theory. 
Cotton, corn, small grain, sugar-cane, sweet-potatoes, and a few 
other crops are grown according to prospective localor general demand, 
