168 Practical Farming 



different types of tobacco, while over a large part of the 

 Southern States the cotton crop is the natural money crop, 

 a crop in which that section has the advantage of all the 

 rest of the world. Hence, it would be a mistake for any 

 one going to a new section to assume that the farming 

 there is entirely wrong, and that he should abandon the 

 crops that he considers responsible for the depleted con- 

 dition of the soil. Such a notion is superficial. It is not 

 the fault of the tobacco or of the cotton that the lands 

 have become unproductive, but it is the result of long- 

 practiced and erroneous methods of cultivating these 

 crops. The true policy, therefore, for a comer into a 

 new district is to accept what nature and long experience 

 has established as the money crop of the section, and then 

 undertake to grow it better by improved methods of 

 farming. 



While in the greater part of the cotton belt, for instance, 

 the practice of depending on the one crop, and cultivating 

 the land year after year in cotton, has reduced the pro- 

 ductivity of the soil to a very low ebb, there is no more 

 profitable money crop grown on the farms of America 

 than the cotton crop when used in an improving rotation 

 designed for the restoration of the wasted humus that long 

 clean cultivation has burnt out of the land. 



Another error that farmers make is moving southward 

 or eastward from the fertile lands of the West, as many are 

 now doing. This is to charge the waste to the use of com- 

 mercial fertilizers and declaring that these are only stimu- 

 lants. Commercial fertilizers have been very wastefuUy 

 and injudiciously used in the South, especially by the 

 cotton farmers. But we must not jump to the conclusion 



