86 
THE CULTIVATOR 
March 
General Principles oi Agriculture. 
Messrs. Editors — In looking over the Country 
Gentlemen for the past year, I find among its many 
able and instructive correspondents few who write from 
the extensive cotton growing districts of the South. 
As your journal is in no respect sectional in its char¬ 
acter, and the principles of agriculture much the same 
in all climates and places, the cultivators of the soil 
may learn something from the experience and obser¬ 
vations of each other, no matter where they till the 
earth or practice farm economy. With us, land is 
cheap and abundant, and labor both scarce and exceed¬ 
ingly high. These two facts operate almost irresisti¬ 
bly to prevent the adoption of any general system of 
husbandry which will save our cheap virgin soils 
from speedy impoverishment. If they cost from $50 
to $75 per acre, the owners could not afford to render 
them nearly valueless by a few years’ cropping ; and 
the production and saving of manures in a large way 
would be indispensable to successful planting. 
But since the general government has given away 
to soldiers and their heirs, railroad companies, new 
states and territories, so many million acres of its pub¬ 
lic domain, and reduced the price of rich planting and 
farming land in the market to a mere nominal sum, it 
is far cheaper to purchase the raw materials of cotton, 
corn and wheat by the section , or mile square, than to 
buy them or obtain them in any other way. If Con¬ 
gress designed to overwhelm the older states, by cre¬ 
ating a double drain on their population, wealth, arated 
and depastured fields, it is not easily conceived how 
they could have attained that unpatriotic object more 
fully, or more injuriously, than has been done. 
To demonstrate the soundness of my views on this 
important subject, I trust that neither you nor my old 
and highly esteemed friend John Johnston, will ob¬ 
ject to my showing that even his good farming has not 
a basis broad enough to meet all the exigencies of 
American agriculture. He fertilizes his underdrained 
farm by the liberal purchase of oilcake, corn, hay and 
other food for his bought sheep and cattle to eat and 
yield rich manure. The sale of these fattened animals 
pays for all they consume, beside their first cost, and 
something over, giving him a clear profit of the precise 
things required by nature to .produce maximum crops 
of wheaton every field that he cultivates. His system 
is plain and simple; but suppose every farmer in the 
State of New-York were to follow his practice 7 Pray, 
tell me where they could all find the tons of oil cake 
or any equivalent, for the equal production of beef, 
mutton and manure 7 Could all the farmers of any 
State, or all in the United States, buy flax seed, cot¬ 
ton seed, grain, hay or manure, taken most obviously 
from the soil, without going abroad for the same 7 
Apply Mr. Johnston’s system to an agricultural State 
filled with tobacco or cotton planters, who export their 
staple. Who is to supply their millions of acres of old 
fields with an adequate quantity of either domestic or 
imported manure 7 Clearly, it will utterly fail to 
meet their wants and circumstances. How to meet 
them and the condition of those large grain farms from 
which so much of breadstuffs is annually taken, is the 
question of all agricultural questions, that Congress 
ought to solve, if its seventy millions dollars import 
duties derived indirectly, but exclusively, from the el¬ 
ements of fertility exported from American soil, are to 
be regarded as a perpetual income. In place of ta¬ 
king measures to foster the critical study of the Prin¬ 
ciples of tillage and husbandry in all parts of the 
Union, the Federal government pursues a policy with 
its vast public lands that will compel the impoverish¬ 
ment, ultimately, of the whole continent. 
After 35 years’ observation in the most fertile'part 
of Western New-York, Mr. Johnson informs the public 
in your paper of April 2d, 1857, that 
“ The truth is, the land is exhausted by over-crop¬ 
ping, and it must either have rest or high manuring.” 
A more pregnant truth was never uttered. Having 
I trust satisfied the intelligent reader that his system 
is impracticable for the million, and more especially, 
by southern planters, it is easy to understand why the 
latter turn out so much of their badly worn tobacco 
and cotton lands to rest, and slowly recuperate by the 
benevolent efforts of nature in that behalf. 
In New-York and New England, where the popula¬ 
tion is much denser than it is in the planting States, 
you can not well afford to rest three-fourths of your 
arable lands for twenty or thirty years in succession. 
Hence, the food of agricultural plants has become with 
you a matter of the highest moment. In the Patent 
Office Report for 1849, page 26,1 remarked : “ Fully to 
renovate the eight million acres of partially exhausted 
lands in the State of New-York, will cost at least an 
average of. twelve dollars and fifty cents per acre, or 
an aggregate of one hundred million dollars. It is not 
an easy task to replace all the bone-earth, potash, sul¬ 
phur, magnesia, and organized nitrogen in mould, con¬ 
sumed in a field which has been unwisely cultivated 
fifty or seventy-five years.” 
I am well aware that the owners and cultivators of 
American soil are not yet prepared to study the phi¬ 
losophy of agriculture, nor to instruct their representa¬ 
tives at Washington to pass Mr. Morrill’s excellent bill, 
giving public land to each of the States and Territories 
to endow agricultural and mechanical schools. Time, 
however, will make them feel as well as see the folly of 
refusing to cultivate useful knowledge in a nation of 
farmers. Sound principles are indispensable to lasting 
prosperity; and these are rarely learned, and under¬ 
stood, without the aid of long and patient study of the 
natural sciences most intimately connected with the 
mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. Every pro¬ 
duct of the farm, garden and orchard, is an organized 
substance governed by fixed and unerring laws ; a-nd it 
requires highly cultivated common sense to grasp the 
true meaning of those natural laws which silently work 
the increase and decrease of fruitfulness in all soils. 
All experience goes to prove that fertility is neither 
equally distributed in farming lands, nor a constant 
quantity. In the Transactions of the New-York State 
Agricultural Society for 1848, there is paper on “ The 
Philosophy of Tillage,” in which I endeavored to de¬ 
velop the laws mainly concerned in regulating the na¬ 
tural productiveness of the earth. Since that time, I 
have devoted ten years to the careful investigation of 
agricultural phenomena, and had occasion to know that 
most men have very confused notions in reference to 
the several sources of fertility and causes of infertility 
in the land which they seek to improve. In every 
thing there is a fondness for the marvelous, as in the 
supposed transmutation of wheat into chess, and an 
unwillingness to apply the inductive system of reason¬ 
ing to facts in agriculture and stock-husbandry, that 
