14 INTRODUCTION. 



improvement of the soil that there will be no need in any of our ordinary farm 

 cropping for the use of what is called a complete fertilizer at any time, and 

 seldom any need for an application directly to the sale crop. Used in this way, 

 there is no doubt that the fertility of the soil can be restored and maintained 

 more cheaply and more rapidly by the use of commercial fertilizers than in any 

 other way, though no farmer should wholly ignore the foundation of all rational 

 farm improvement, the keeping and feeding of live stock in the best manner, and 

 the making and saving in the most careful manner all the domestic manures. The 

 deplorable condition of much of the cotton land in the South is due, not only to 

 the injudicious use of commercial fertilizers as a means of getting sale crops, but 

 to the entire abandonment of stock feeding by the cotton farmers. The annual 

 cultivation of the soil in the one clean cultivated crop has used up the humus and 

 none goes there, because there are no animals fed to make manure and no renovat- 

 ing crops between the cotton crops, and when a dry season comes, the fertilizers 

 applied are not dissolved and the crops are poor. The season of 1900 was remark- 

 able as the hottest and dryest on record in the South Atlantic States, and the 

 lands without fertilizer did as well or better than those directly fertilized. But 

 recently, meeting a farmer whom I knew was farming in a short rotation with 

 legumes, I asked him about his cotton crop. "I expected to get 40 bales on 35 

 acres. The drought has affected me some, and I will have hardly more than 35 

 bales." All around this man's farm there are those who will hardly get a bale 

 on five acres, and they spent more for fertilizers on their crop than he did, who 

 gets a bale per acre. It is, therefore, with the earnest hope that we can induce 

 farmers North and South, to understand the true use of commercial fertilizers 

 that this book has been prepared. We have written it from the standpoint of the 

 practical farmer, and have prepared it for practical farmers. 



While living in the South, a native of the South, and striving with all my 

 energy to aid in the building up of the agricultural and horticultural interests 

 of the southern cultivators of the soil, the writer has had a wide experience in the 

 growing of plants and crops in various sections, and has traveled and studied the 

 practices of growers in all parts of the country. He therefore feels that he is 

 prepared to help farmers in various sections, and to contribute something, at 

 least, to the general advancement. The great interest that has been awakened in 

 regard to agricultural education is well shown by the great increase of books on 

 agricultural topics. Formerly the effort was to treat of the whole subject of agri- 

 culture and farm economy in a single small volume, and our libraries still contain 

 some of those little books. In the organization of our Colleges of Agriculture and 

 Mechanic Arts the greatest difficulty that beset the faculty in these institutions was 

 the total absence of books on agriculture and horticulture that could be used 

 as text books with the college classes. The result was that every professor was 

 compelled to prepare his own lectures and to conduct the instruction along lines 

 devised from time to time to meet the emergency. Out of this work there have 

 grown up books in which various parts of scientific cropping are treated, and there 

 is no longer any effort made to combine in one small volume all the matters that 

 relate to cropping, stock breeding and feeding, farm drainage and soil manipula- 

 tion; but the soil and its treatment and cropping have come to be considered as 

 something separate and distinct from the animal husbandry of the farm. While 



