162 Practical Farming 



easily cultivated, and were retentive of moisture. But 

 year after year the soil was exposed to the sun in the 

 cleanest of cultivation which the crop of cotton demands, 

 till the vegetable decay was used up and the soil began 

 to crust and bake, became harder to cultivate till the plow 

 became a necessity for working the hard soil. 



The remedy is to restore the new-ground conditions 

 through getting back the wasted humus by a systematic 

 use of a short rotation aided by the growing of forage crops 

 and the feeding of Hve stock. It is hard to get the South- 

 em farmers to realize that the subsidiary crops used in a 

 rotation can of themselves be a source of profit while in- 

 creasing the capacity of the land for the production of the 

 staple money crop. They have so long been accustomed 

 to look to the cotton for all the money they want and im- 

 agining that they cannot afford to grow other crops needed 

 for the stock, that there has been in many sections an 

 entire abandonment of cattle-feeding, and no animals are 

 kept but the mules that cultivate the crop, and the cotton 

 is expected to pay for all, to buy the mules themselves, 

 pay for hay and grain to feed them with, pay the fertilizer 

 manufacturer a long price for credit on the fertilizers used, 

 while the farmer, with all depending on the single crop 

 is at the mercy of the whole. For generations the' South- 

 em farmers were taught that their money crop was not 

 adapted to rotative farming as practiced by good farmers 

 in other sections, and they have gone on in the blind faith 

 that cotton was the only thing that could be made to pay 

 in the South. 



But a change is gradually coming, and here and there 

 farmers who are studying and endeavoring to improve, 



