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legume is its unequaled capacity for, and its unapproachable 

 merit as an intervening crop, (being both a renovating 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 ve- 

 getable renovator? It is more valuable than the English 

 turnip crop, and this crop, by those enlightened and emi- 

 nently practical farmers, is estimated annually at millions 

 of pounds sterling. It is doubtful if England could tide it 

 over the next two years, if deprived 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 

 go-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 

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

 of tillage of injudicious, ruinous tillage. Where hus- 

 bandry predominates over tillage, there is but little leaking 

 out of the elements of fertility in a soil, and there is no es- 

 timating how long they will remain to supply the food 

 necessary to a vigorous plant growth. The grasses, includ- 

 ing 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 land is under a judi- 

 cious system of rotation. Now, tillage, or the simple culti- 

 yation of land, puts nothing of any value in it, but is, of 

 ftself, 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 land from the destruc- 

 tion of its humus, and from the greatest of all destructives, 

 teaching. The injury is augmented as the land is rolfing 

 and broken. Hence cotton and tobacco (the first of which. 



