I hope the God of truth and a long-suffering, misguided people will forgive you for that false teaching.  If there is any one practice the value of which is fully understood by the farmers and landowners in the Eastern states and in all old agricultural countries, it is the practice of crop rotation.  Indeed, the rotation of crops is much more common and much better understood and much more fully appreciated in the East than it is in the corn belt.  Practically all we know of crop rotation we have learned from the East.  Every old depleted agricultural country has worn out the soil by good systems of crop rotation.  I once took a legal option of an “abandoned” farm in Maryland (beautiful location, two miles from a railroad station, gently undulating upland loam, at $10 per acre) that had been worn out under a four-year rotation of corn, wheat, meadow and pasture.  A few acres of tobacco were usually grown in one corner of the corn field, and clover and timothy were regularly used for meadow and pasture.  Wheat, tobacco and livestock were sold, and manure was applied for tobacco and so far as possible for corn also.  In the later years of the system the ordinary commercial fertilizer was also applied for the wheat at the usual rate of two hundred pounds per acre, this having become a “necessity” toward the end of this slow but sure system of land ruin.

The “simple principles” of your “new method” were understood and practiced in Roman agriculture two thousand years ago; and they included not only thorough tillage, careful seed selection, regular crop rotation, and the use of farm manure, but also the use of green manures.  Thus Cato wrote: 

“Take care to have your wheat weeded twice—­with the hoe, and also by hand.”

And again Cato wrote: 

“Wherein does a good system of agriculture consist?  In the first place, in thorough plowing; in the second place, in thorough plowing; and, in the third place, in manuring.”

Varro, who lived at the same time as Cato, wrote as follows: 

“The land must rest every second year, or be sown with lighter kinds of seeds, which prove less exhausting to the soil.  A field is not sown entirely for the crop which is to be obtained the same year, but partly for the effect to be produced in the following; because there are many plants which, when cut down and left on the land, improve the soil.  Thus lupines, for instance, are plowed into a poor soil in lieu of manure.  Horse manure is about the best suited for meadow land, and so in general is that of beasts of burden fed on barley; for manure made from this cereal makes the grass grow luxuriantly.”

Virgil wrote in his Georgics:

“Still will the seeds, tho chosen with toilsome pains, Degenerate, if man’s industrious hand Cull not each year the largest and the best.”

It was in 1859 that Baron von Liebig wrote as follows, regarding these and similar ancient teachings: