In return for the exertions of Young and Sinclair in his behalf Washington sent over some American products and also took pains to collect information for them as to the state of American agriculture.  His letters show an almost pathetic eagerness to please these good friends and it is evident that in his farming operations he regarded himself as one of Young’s disciples.  He was no egotist who believed that because he had been a successful soldier and was now President of the United States he could not learn anything from a specialist.  The trait was most commendable and one that is sadly lacking in many of his countrymen, some of whom take pride in declaring that “these here scientific fellers caint tell me nothin’ about raisin’ corn!”

Young and Sir John Sinclair were by no means his only agricultural correspondents.  Even Noah Webster dropped his legal and philological work long enough in 1790 to propound a theory so startlingly modern in its viewpoint that it is worthy of reproduction.  Said he: 

“While therefore I allow, in its full extent, the value of stable manure, marl, plaster of Paris, lime, ashes, sea-weed, sea-shells & salt, in enriching land, I believe none of them are absolutely necessary, but that nature has provided an inexhaustible store of manure, which is equally accessible to the rich and the poor, & which may be collected & applied to land with very little labor and expense.  This store is the atmosphere, & the process by which the fertilizing substance may be obtained is vegetation.”

He added that such crops as oats, peas, beans and buckwheat should be raised and plowed under to rot and that land should never be left bare.  As one peruses the letter he recalls that scientists of to-day tell us that the air is largely made up of nitrogen, that plants are able to “fix it,” and he half expects to find Webster advocating “soil innoculation” and speaking of “nodules” and “bacteria.”

Throughout the period after the Revolution our Farmer’s one greatest concern was to conserve and restore his land.  When looking for a new manager he once wrote that the man must be, “above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation toward gold; in a word, one who can bring worn-out and gullied lands into good tilth in the shortest time.”  He saved manure as if it were already so much gold and hoped with its use and with judicious rotation of crops to accomplish his object.  “Unless some such practice as this prevails,” he wrote in 1794, “my fields will be growing worse and worse every year, until the Crops will not defray the expense of the culture of them.”