SOIL IMPROVEMENT IOI 



Disadvantages of One-crop System. In nearly all sections, 

 the one-crop system is being abandoned by good farmers. It is bad 

 for the farmer and worse for the farm. 



The farmer risks everything for the year on the success or failure 

 of one crop. On its profits he has to run his farm a whole year. 

 A scanty harvest or a crop failure leaves him without funds for 

 the expense of a second year. One-crop farmers are often poor. 

 In the grain states of the West they mortgage their land, in the 

 cotton states of the South they mortgage their crops, and bear 

 year after year the burden of debt. 



The one-crop farm, like the one-crop farmer, is often poor. 

 Slowly or rapidly its plant food is exhausted and its texture in- 

 jured by the constant drain of the same crop and the same methods 

 of cultivation. 



If lands are to regain, keep, and increase fertility, rotation of 

 crops must be practiced. This means that crops must be changed 

 and must follow one another according to a certain system. Nature 

 practices rotation. We see the place of field grasses gradually 

 taken by pines; when the pines are cut they are followed, not by 

 pines, but by oak and other hardwood trees. 



Let us look into this subject of crop rotation. 



Cotton as the One Crop. Here, for instance, is an upland farm 

 on which cotton has been raised year after year. The land is poor 

 and yields a scanty crop. -The soil is light in color and we find 

 that it is lacking in humus. No wonder. It never receives any 

 vegetable matter except the stalks and leaves of the cotton, or 

 what is left of them by the cattle that ' pick up a living ' in the fields 

 in winter. Cotton is a rather weak-feeding plant, and it uses 

 chiefly the plant food in the upper soil; some plant food is taken 

 away in the cotton seed, and more is removed by air and water 

 from the soil left bare during the winter. Xfl supply these 



Of THE 



UNIVERSITY 



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