e
one hundred bushels of corn every year for 200,000 years, sufficient
calcium to produce one hundred bushels of corn or one bale of cotton
each year for 55,000 years, enough magnesium to produce such a crop
7,000 years, enough sulphur for 10,000 years and potassium for 2,600
years, but only enough phosphorus for 130 years. The nitrogen resting
upon the surface of an acre of ground is sufficient to produce one
hundred bushels of corn or a bale of cotton for 700,000 years; but only
enough in the plowed soil to produce fifty such crops. In other words,
there are enough of eight of the elements of plant food in the ordinary
soil to produce 100 bushels of corn per acre or a bale of cotton per
acre for each year for 2,600 years; but only enough of the other two,
phosphorus and nitrogen, to produce such crops for forty or fifty years.

Let us grant that most of our farm lands in the South have been in
cultivation for fifty or seventy-five years, and in many instances for
one hundred years, it is readily seen that practically all of the
phosphorus and nitrogen in the plowed soil have been exhausted. Is it
any wonder then that we are having such poor crops? The wonder is that
our crops have kept up so well. Unless a radical change is made in our
mode of farming, we must expect less and less crops each year until we
have no crops, or such little that we can hardly pay the rent.

To improve and again make fertile our soils, we must restore to them the
phosphorus and nitrogen which have been used up in the seventy-five or
more crops that we have gathered from them. This is a herculean task but
this is what confronts us and I for one, believe we can accomplish it.
By the proper rotation of crops, including oats, clover, cowpeas, as
well as cotton and corn, and a liberal use of barn-yard manure and
cotton seed fertilizer, all of the necessary elements of plant food can
be restored to our worn out soil. But the proper use of these require
much painstaken study.

The black as well as the white should give this matter serious
consideration. The landlords and the tenants should co-operate in this
great work. The merchants and bankers must lend their aid and influence,
preachers and teachers should be pioneers in this movement to save our
common country. Our agricultural colleges should imprint their courses
of study in something more than their annual catalogues. They should be
imprinted in the minds and hearts of their students, and