172 THE CHIEF SOUTHERN AGRICULTURAL CROPS 



Cotton (^Crossypium sp.') 



For a large part of the region which this book is 

 intended to cover, cotton is the one preeminently 

 important commercial crop. Its preeminence, in fact, 

 has long been so great as to be a misfortune, for it 

 has been planted so exclusively as to prevent the 

 production of home-grown food supplies and to make 

 a carefully thought out crop rotation impossible. 

 Theoretically, cotton should not be an exhaustive 

 crop to the soil, especially where the seed or cotton- 

 seed meal is returned as a fertilizer. It requires, 

 however, clean cultivation throughout the summer, 

 and the average cotton field is left bare and un- 

 protected from the washing and leaching of the heavy- 

 winter rainfall of the cotton belt. The existing system 

 of planting cotton after cotton, year after year, can 

 only end in impoverishing the richest and deepest 

 soils. On the thin, hillside lands so characteristic of 

 large areas in the cotton states, this impoverishment 

 comes very quickly. Countless thousands of acres 

 of these hill lands have been cleared, cultivated to 

 cotton for a few years, until worn and gullied, and 

 then have been abandoned. These abandoned gullied 

 fields give the whole region a most desolate and unin- 

 viting appearance to the passing traveler, and this fact 

 has doubtless done much to prevent Northern immigra- 

 tion and to retard the agricultural development of this 

 region, which really presents so many magnificent 

 agricultural possibilities. Thanks largely to the per- 

 sistent efforts of the Southern experiment stations, 

 the possibilities of mixed husbandry and of better 

 agricultural methods are becoming somewhat widely 



