100 CROP GROWING AND CROP FEEDING 



turers have grown rich. They therefore jump to the conclusion that cotton and 

 fertilizers are bad things, and are wrong in both conclusions. Tho warm 

 coast plain of the South could have no better money crop than cotton, and 

 the commercial fertilizers, while bringing disaster to the farm and the farmer 

 when used in the wasteful way in which they have been used, can be made, 

 in the hands of a good farmer, the most potent means for building up the 

 fertility of the soil. For a man to go into the cotton belt and engage in 

 general farming and ignore cotton would be a great mistake, for no farmer, 

 as a rule, can afford to ignore the money crop of his section, unless he has 

 some specialty which takes him out of the list of general farmers. It is 

 true that there are large sections of the Southern uplands where cotton is 

 grown and where it should never have been grown, and there, with the growth 

 of knowledge in regard to farm methods, the farmers will soon learn that 

 their lands are better adapted to grain, grass and stock than to cotton; and 

 in other parts of the country the methods are undergoing a gradual change 

 so that each particular section is finding out what it can best do, and what 

 it should let alone. Specialization, with a properly arranged rotation, is the 

 road to success. The growing of a single crop year after year on the same 

 land, no matter how much commercial fertilizer you may buy, leads finally to 

 poverty of soil and of the farmer, too. 



No matter what the crop the result is pretty sure to be the same. In 

 the great peach growing section of Maryland and Delaware, the men who 

 have been, as a rule, most successful in the long run, have not been the men 

 who put their entire land into peaches; but rather those who recognized the 

 adaptability of their soil and climate to peach culture, who made the short- 

 lived peach trees simply a part of their farming and gave them the best at- 

 tention, knowing that in a few years the orchard must go back to crops of a 

 different nature, and must be kept up in its fertility to correspond with the 

 other fields when one of these was taken for the orchard. Prof. Roberts in 

 his book, "The Farmstead," says, "Many farms in Western N. Y. have been 

 almost exclusively devoted to the raising of grapes, which, when abundant, or 

 moderately so, sold at ruinous prices. It is noticed that where only an 

 eighth or fourth of a farm was devoted to vines, the yield was not only pro- 

 portionately larger, but the quality better than where nearly all the land was 

 used as a vineyard. Where diversified agriculture was carried on to a limited 

 extent and plantations were restricted, the low price of grapes made no serious 

 inroads on the income. Where all the land was given to grapes, work was 

 intermittent, the farmer being overtasked at one season of the year and idle 

 at another. The demoralizing effect on the farmers and their families of this 

 army of unrestrained youths and loungers of the city, which, for a brief 



