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lip broomsedge fields, and there, whilst the land is being fertilized, 

 one of the best provision crops for stock, and the best of hay for 

 milk cows in winter, is produced. And a still further advantage 

 possessed by this valuable legume is its unequaled capacity for, and 

 its unapproachable merit as an intervening crop, (being both a ren- 

 ovating and a food crop), between small grain or root crop in the 

 spring and a grain crop in the fall. Do you ask more of any vege- 

 table renovator? It is more valuable than the English turnip crop, 

 and this crop, by those enlightened and eminently practical farm- 

 ers, is estimated annually at millions of pounds sterling. It is 

 doubtful if England could tide it over the next two years, if de- 

 prived of her turnip crop. It is the foundation of her stock and 

 manure production. In contrasting the Southern field pea with 

 the English turnip crop, we begin to perceive its immense value to 

 Southern agriculture, and realize that too often, in reaching after 

 the so-called money crops, we have neglected the best fertilizers (as 

 well as food crop), ever given to the agricultural world. 



In considering the present impoverished condition of the lands 

 of the South, we are forced to confess it is the work of tillage of 

 injudicious, ruinous tillage. Where husbandry predominates over 

 tillage, there is but little leaking out of the elements of fertility in 

 a soil, and there is no estimating how long they will remain to sup- 

 ply the food necessary to a vigorous plant growth. The grasses, 

 including clover and peas, are the grand elements for preserving 

 and augmenting these elements in the soil. Hence we see all 

 countries where husbandry prevails grow rich in soil, particularly 

 if the tilled portion of the laud is under a judicious system of rota- 

 tion. Now, tillage, or the simple cultivation of land, puts nothing 

 of any value in it, but is, of itself, a necessary evil; evil because of 

 exposing the soil to a scorching sun, often reducing it to a mass of 

 lifeless clods, and exposing it to an exhausting leaching process, 

 which takes out its very life blood. The cleaner and long continued 

 the culture, the more the injury to the laud from the destruction of 

 its humus, and from the greatest of all destructives, leaching. The 

 injury is augmented as the land is rolling and broken. Hence cot- 

 ton and tobacco (the first of which is not an exhauster of land, per 

 se), have brought ruin to the best acres of the South, whilst srnadl 

 grain and the grasses have husbanded and increased the natural 

 ^fertility of the lands of our Northern neighbors. Lands in which 



