Crop Rotation — Its Purpose and Practice 163 



are showing the value of a rotation of crops that is designed 

 for the improvement of the soil for the money crop. When 

 one farmer at least, to our knowledge, has succeeded in 

 an average season in producing two bales of lint-cotton 

 per acre in a section where the average crop is less than a 

 fourth of a bale, and has done it with less use of the com- 

 mercial fertihzers than his neighbors who make the 

 smaller crops, it must finally dawn on the Southern cotton 

 grower that his crop, as much as any other crop, is adapted 

 to a diversified farming system. 



It is important in devising a rotation for a cotton farm 

 to consider the situation and the soil. In the upper or 

 Piedmont country, the land of the red clay hills, wheat 

 should be the small-grain crop mainly, though a portion 

 of the small-grain area can well be used for the production 

 of fall-sown oats, which are often very productive. In 

 the more level and sandy sections nearer the coast, the 

 true cotton soils, the small-grain crop should be oats 

 entirely, since in these lands the winter oats will soon de- 

 velop into great productiveness, while the sandy lands are 

 not well suited to wheat. Enthusiastic but inexperienced 

 advisers of Southern farmers in the Southern press often 

 tell the farmers that they should grow everything they 

 need that can be produced in the cHmate. The effort to 

 do this would not be systematic farming, but merely a 

 heterogeneous collection of many things. What is needed 

 in the development of a cotton farm is a system of few 

 crops all tending to develop the capacity of the land for 

 the production of cotton, while of themselves yielding the 

 farmer a profit. The rotation would vary hardly at all 

 whether in the rolling upper country or on the coastal 



