60 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



KENOVATING WORN-OUT SOILS. 



The hour for miscellaneous business having expired, the chairman called 

 up the regular question of the day, and asked Solon Ptobinson to give his 

 views upon the subject. 



Solon Robinson. — The southern planters, particularly of cotton and 

 tobacco, are the greatest destroyers of one of earth's best gifts to man, the 

 power of reproduction and tenfold multiplication of all food-producing 

 seeds that man may plant. They have rendered millions of acres, once 

 fertile, so utterly unproductive that they have been abandoned as worthless 

 and forsaken by the owners, and afterward, in changing owners, have been 

 counted at a mere nominal value. Within ten years, the lands of some of 

 the old Virginia plantations, within two days' easy water carriage of New 

 York, have been, as it were, begging purchasers like a hawker's wares, at 

 one to four dollars an acre ; lands, too, that were once considered garden- 

 spots of America, the surroundings of palatial residences of princely 

 owners. Rich acres of light sandy loam, -worn down to such utter barren- 

 ness that a whole acre, aye, a whole field, would not produce, as an old 

 negro truly said to me once, " poverty grass enough to make dis chile's ole 

 hen a nest." Yet that very field, so utterly barren, so cropped when newly 

 cleared of its oak forest with tobacco, that it would no longer pay for crop- 

 ping ; then planted with Indian corn till Indian corn would not produce 

 enough to pay the labor ; then sowed with rye until its largest crop of 

 three bushels an acre often failed, and then given up to grow old field pines 

 and poverty grass, the last effort of exhausted fertility to produce vegeta- 

 tion. Yet such lands as these have been reclaimed. It was upon just 

 such a field as this that the old negro stretched his hand over when he 

 illustrated its former barrenness by the fact that he had tried in vain to 

 gather grass enough to make a hen's nest. 



"Now look at him !" said he, proudly. "See de clover and de wheat. 

 Seventeen bushel to de acre, first time trying ; and de clover — oh, you see 

 him! A'nt he big? But I did tink my massa done gone crazy, sure,, 

 when he tell dis nigga dat he goin' sow wheat on dat field. I never 'spec 

 to see the end again in dis world." 



Faithless at the first, the old fellow was now exultantly jubilant to see 

 the waving crop upon this abandoned old field — to see its remembered fer- 

 tility, almost a hundred years before, again restored. 



This pleasant scene was at the home of the Hon, Willoughby Newton, 

 Westmoreland county, Virginia, one of the pioneers in the renovation of 

 worn-out lands. Now, what Willoughby Newton and his compeers have 

 done there may be done here, and there again, and everywhere where old 

 fields abound that have been exhausted of their productiveness. 



There has been no miracle wrought, no magic wand waved over the land ; 

 no costl}' application, and there is no mystery in the process ; it is simply 

 this : Sow 200 pounds of guano per acre, lightly plowed in, or well har- 

 rowed in with the seed, one bushel of wheat and sis to eight quarts of 



