CHAPTER XVI. 

 WHERE TOBACCO IS THE MONEY CROP. 



The traveler from the North, passing through the upper country of Vir- 

 ginia and North Carolina, and seeing everywhere the- old, worn fields growing 

 up in pines, is apt to jump to the conclusion that tobacco is responsible for 

 all this waste of fertility. Indirectly, of course, it is, but there is no more 

 reason why tobacco should result in soil exhaustion from its growing than 

 any other crop. But Northern farmers coming South rarely want to engage 

 in the culture of either tobacco or cotton, as they charge the poverty of the 

 Southern soils to these crops, and overlook the fact that bad farming and not 

 the particular crop, is responsible for the waste lands and the old fields. 

 Tobacco, more than than any other crop grown, is affected by the soil and 

 climate in which it is grown, and tobacco growers in all parts of the country 

 have learned what sorts of tobacco are best adapted to their soils and cli- 

 mates. These differences in the varieties of tobacco grown have been the 

 result of long experience and study, by cultivators, of the capacities of the 

 various soils, and no one can afford to ignore the results, or to try to grow a 

 variety on a certain soil that has not been found suited to it. The growers 

 of the Zimmer Spanish, in Ohio, are too wise to try to grow the gold leaf 

 tobacco which the North Carolina farmers use, and the North Carolina farm- 

 ers are too wise to waste time on the White Burley of Kentucky or the black 

 tobacco of the Virginia Peidmont country. The growers of Connecticut 

 seed leaf would only lose money by endeavoring to grow plug manufacturing 

 tobacco. In some sections of the tobacco growing parts of the country the 

 growers insist that a systematic course of improvement of the soil would be 

 disastrous to the quality of the tobacco they grow. This is largely the case 

 in the bright, cigarette tobacco section of North Carolina, and the growers 

 generally adhere to the practice of growing tobacco solely by the use of a 



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