EVIDENCE OF HISTORY 253 



Two thousand years ago the Romans be- 

 lieved their soils so near depletion that they 

 adopted a system of alternate fallow and 

 cropping. The acres of the Campania dis- 

 trict were the wonder of all students of those 

 times because of their ability to produce 

 crops every season without fallow. Fallow 

 is considered a necessary practice in European 

 Russia to-day. The Black Earth Regions of 

 Russia, producing as much wheat as the 

 United States under a most primitive form 

 of agriculture, are cropped only two out of 

 every three years. That is, one-third of the 

 land lies idle every year. It is the belief 

 among the peasants, handed down for hun- 

 dreds of years, that fallow is necessary to 

 retain the "strength" of the land. 



Single-cropping, the evil of an extensive 

 system of farming, such as has been practiced 

 in the United States for the last fifty years, 

 was early recognized as one of the quickest 

 ways of "taking the heart out of the land." 

 Adam Dickson (The Husbandry of the An- 

 cients, Edinburgh, 1788) quotes liberally 

 from Pliny, Virgil, Cato and others, to show 

 that rotation of crops had, even in those times, 

 come to be recognized as a necessity if they 



