1F484 1 , 484 2 , 485, 486, 487, 488] rotation of crops. 241 



same soil, will so diminish the available quantity some ingredients, that for the 

 same plant there is not, henceforth, an adequate supply of these ; while yet there 

 may be enough left of these same ingredients to supply a crop of another plant, 

 which requires them in smaller quantities and different proportions. The same 

 may happen with the second crop ; while still, a third one, different in its 

 nature, may succeed well. Finally the atmospheric influences may, during 

 the several years that the soil has been occupied by different crops, have restored 

 productiveness for the first crop of the series ; which series may thus be repeated 

 many times over. 



484 1 But not ad infinitum. The time during which any system of rotation 

 can be successful, by itself alone, depends altogether upon the native resource* 

 of the soil ; the best will at length become exhausted. The great advantage of a 

 judicious system of rotation, however, consists in this : that while we d« 

 exhaust the soil, we do so to the best advantage, extracting from it all that is 

 really nutritive ; whereas, if we exhaust it by continual repetition of one and 

 the same crop, the land becomes sterile while still containing a large, perhaps 

 the greatest part of its nutritive ingredients, but in proportions unsuitable to 

 any useful crop. Rotation may, therefore, double, triple, quintuple the duration 

 of. land, as compared with that which uniform cropping allows to it. The 

 latter method is really, therefore, a wanton spoiling of the soil, and a sin against 

 our children, if not ourselves. 



484 2 There is still another effect exercised by some crops, such as clover 

 for instance, viz : that their deep roots draw up, as it were, the nutrive ingredi- 

 ents of the sM&soil, so that when the clover is afterwards turned under by the 

 plow, a real addition is made to the fertility of the surface soil. This process, 

 therefore, is somewhat of the same effect as subsoiling, or turning up the sub- 

 soil ; with this difference, however, that the ingredients yielded to the soil by 

 the clover are in an available condition, while the subsoil, when turned up itself, 

 requires the action of the atmosphere, or of stimulants, before it will produce. 



485. At the North, where farming rather than planting is the system of 

 agriculture, a great variety of successive crops is open to the farmer, and rota- 

 tion may be made very perfect. In the South, on the contrary, the one great 

 object is, or has been, to raise the one staple, Cotton. Of late years, the dis- 

 advantage of importing all our provisions from other States having become too 

 manifest, corn has been planted more plentifully. Beyond these, field-peas, 

 oats and sweet potatoes, with some wheat, completes the list of crops which it 

 is usual to plant on the large scale in Mississippi. Nor do we often find on the 

 large scale any other regular rotation than between corn and cotton ; to which 

 wheat and oats are now coming to be more and more frequently added. 



486. Order of Rotation. — As for the most proper order of succession of these 

 several crops (l[394), the analyses we possess of the two principal ones are still too 

 few and defective to allow of settling the question definitely a priori. It is my 

 intention to investigate this point particularly in the course of the Agricultural 

 Survey ; not only with reference to the (now) principal crops, but also all others 

 which are of any serious importance to Mississippi agriculture, and which havo 

 not thus far been satisfactorily investigated. 



487. Rotation in Manured Lands — It is not, of course, in unmanured lands 

 only that rotation is profitable in practice. It helps us, also, to use up, as it 

 were, the whole of our manure. It would be a mere matter of accident, if any 

 manure we apply should happen to be completely consumed by one crop. Tha 

 quantity we have applied may not be capable of supplying more than one crop 

 of one and the same kind with its proper food; but it may be abundantly able 

 to cause several other different kinds of crops to thrive, before it is all consumed. 



488. Rotation not Intrinsically Desirable. — Important and beneficial as rota- 

 tion is in practice, it is, nevertheless, an unpleasant necessity in a planting 

 commonwealth, whose interest it is to produce year after year on the same land, 

 the same staple products. We ought, therefore, to use all the means in our 



R— lb 



