PROFIT OF REST TO LAND", 241 



gram or other crops for market in a five-years rotation; tlie other 

 two years being given to rest, self-manuring by the vegetable 

 growth remaining, or part of the land being in pasture. With 

 such respite, the three-fifths of the land will very soon surpass the 

 previous product of the whole, and continue long to increase still 

 more in product. In the other case, of continual annual cropping, 

 and even with much care given to applying prepared manures, the 

 land may perhaps bear such treatment for twenty, thirty, or in rare 

 cases forty years, before being so reduced as to be no longer worth 

 cultivating. It is then " turned out/ 7 and left useless and profit- 

 less for some thirty years, until, under a new growth of trees, it is 

 brought back partially to a state fit for a second and expensive 

 clearing, and renewed cultivation. Nature will not permit the soil 

 to be utterly robbed of its due claim "for rest and resuscitation. 

 And if the cultivator will not of his own accord grant one or two 

 years in four or five, he will be compelled to lose a much larger 

 proportion of time, after longer delay. In the one case, the rest 

 is accompanied by increasing fertility ; in the other it is the result 

 of exhaustion, and is followed by long-continued and total unpro- 

 ductiveness. 



The amount of rest for land required for its progressive improve- 

 ment after being marled, after all, is inconsiderable, and is, usually, 

 fully compensated in the greater product of the two next succeeding 

 crops of grain. In lower Virginia, the system of continual tillage 

 formerly was as prevalent as now in South Carolina. Yet there 

 are very few of even the most improvident and exhausting cultiva- 

 tors who do not now know that more grain and more profit are to 

 be obtained in a three-years course (for example), including one 

 year of rest, than if taking a crop every year. And on calxed and 

 well conducted farms, making regular advances in production, 

 three grain-crops and one of clover are taken off in a five-years' 

 rotation, leaving but one year of the term in which the land is un- 

 productive of profit for that time though not unproductive in 

 preparing for future returns. 



Whether the question be considered and tested by facts and ex- 

 perience, or by reasoning, there cannot be a shadow of reason or 

 excuse for the custom of continual tillage, except in a newly settled 

 and uncleared country, of great fertility, and where labour is very 

 costly, and land priced very lew. Not one of these conditions now 

 exists in lower South Carolina to justify the general system of till- 

 age. And that so intelligent, well educated, and withal so indus- 

 trious a class as is found in the planters generally of that state, 

 should so strangely persist in such a system, and, for its preservation, 

 reject the means of doubling their products and their wealth by 

 marling, is not the result of the teachings cither of reasoning or 

 of experience, but of the supremacy of habits long established, 

 and in almost universal use. 

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