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ceases to be profitable. Then, too, our farmers are too much in the 

 habit of considering all lands as &quot; poor,&quot; that will not produce profita 

 ble crops of cotton or corn. 



&quot;COTTON OR NOTHING!&quot; 



&quot; A cotton raiser has no time to plow under peas.&quot; That is the doc 

 trine promulgated, not many months ago, in one of our agricultural 

 journals, by a disconsolate owner of poor sandy land ; who found he 

 could make nothing at raising cotton, yet evidently was determined to 

 raise nothing else &quot;let justice be done, though the heavens fall.&quot; 



Fellow-citizens, this &quot; cotton r nothing&quot; idea has been the bane of 

 our system of agriculture. It has aggravated beyond measure those 

 evil effects on the soil which seem everywhere to have attended the 

 labor system to which we were committed before the war. The unceas 

 ing repetition of cotton cropping on the same soil, without rotation, 

 return or rest, has exhausted in the course of twenty years, lands that 

 with anything like a rational system of culture, and without any pur 

 chase of manure, should have lasted a century. 



When I say exhausted, I do not mean to say that no crop could be 

 profitably raised on the soil. By no means. Clover, the grasses and 

 Other forage, bread and market crops, will still flourish on many a soil, 

 that will refuse to yield even a fifth of a bale of cotton per acre. But 

 these did not enter into our calculations. It had become traditional 

 that the Northwest was to feed us, the Northeast to supply almost 

 everything else and it was only when these supplies were forcibly cut 

 off, that we began to realize the folly of the system, and found our 

 selves somewhat like King Midas before his golden viands: with lots of 

 cotton but nothing to eat ! 



WHAT IS TO BE DONE? 



What then must we do to avoid all these evils ? We cannot all go 

 to the &quot;bottom&quot; if we would we do not want to move West. We 

 have but little capital to invest. How shall we invest what we have? 



Well, there is no royal road to the solution of the question, and quack 

 medicines will not help us here. 



Keep up your land I That is really tlw great problem, before whose 

 importance all questions of detail sink into comparative insignificance. 

 A generous soil will produce almost anywhere, any crop adapted to the 

 climate. It will repay your labor bountifully even when not bestowed 

 to the best advantage, because of the wide margin it leaves for profit 

 and loss. It will carry your crops safely over a spell of drouth that 



