Crop Rotation — Its Purpose and Practice 161 



low plowing the terrace banks erected to stop the washing 

 have been generally ineffective when extra rainfalls occur, 

 since they often fill and cause a heavier washing by the 

 accumulated head of water in them. Terracing is only a 

 partial preventive to the washing, and the only real and 

 permanent preventive to the tendency of the land to wash 

 is deep breaking and a restoration of the vegetable matter 

 which the long clean culture in cotton has used up. 



In no section of the country will deep subsoiling work 

 greater benefit than on the red clay hills of the Southern 

 cotton country. The summer rains come in great floods 

 and cloudbursts, and the soil being plowed but three or 

 four inches deep, with a hard clay subsoil right below, 

 the shallow plowed surface gets into a creamy state and 

 must run down hill, since there is nowhere else for it to 

 go. But if the land is plowed more deeply and the sub- 

 soil plow follows in the same furrow so as to loosen the 

 whole surface to a depth of 12 to 15 inches, it will take an 

 enormous rainfall to move the mass. And more than this, 

 the deeply broken mass will retain the water that would 

 otherwise be washed down hill, and by shallow and level 

 cultivation can be retained in the soil to carry the crops 

 through the long droughts that are about as common as 

 the floods of rain. Deep plowing and shallow and level 

 culture to form no furrows to gather a head of water, will 

 be far more effectual in preventing washing and gully for- 

 mation on the Southern uplands than any terraces that 

 can be contrived with the shallow plowing that has been 

 the rule. When these lands were first cleared from the 

 forest they did not wash, because they were full of humus 

 and fibrous vegetable matter. They were mellow and 



