Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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Essays on Field Husbandry, and think the public may be much benefited
by them; but, if the farmers in your neighborhood are as unwilling to leave
the beaten road of their ancestors as they are near me, it will be difficult to
persuade them to attempt any improvement.” 6 Eliot likened farmers who
did not return manure and crop wastes to the fields to a man who withdrew
money from the bank without ever making a deposit. I imagine that
Franklin concurred.
Commentary on the depleted state of colonial soils was routine by the
end of the eighteenth century. Writing during the Revolutionary War,
Alexander Hewatt described farmers in the Carolinas as focused on shortterm
yields and paying little attention to the condition of their land.
Like farmers often moving from place to place, the principal study with
the planters is the art of making the largest profit for the present time,
and if this end is obtained, it gives them little concern how much the
land may be exhausted. ...The richness of the soil, and the vast quantity
of lands, have deceived many. ...This will not be the case much
longer, for lands will become scarce, and time and experience, by
unfolding the nature of the soil ...will teach them ...to alter [their]
careless manner of cultivation. 7
Hewatt was not alone in his bleak assessment of American agriculture.
Many Europeans who traveled through the southern states in the late
1700s expressed surprise at the general failure to use manure as a soil
amendment. Exiled French revolutionary Jacques-Pierre Brissot de
Warville toured the newly independent United States in 1788 and wondered
at the ruinous style of agriculture. “Though tobacco exhausts the
land to a prodigious degree, the proprietors take no pains to restore its
vigour; they take what the soil will give, and abandon it when it gives no
longer. They like better to clear new lands, than to regenerate old. Yet these
abandoned lands would still be fertile, if they were properly manured and
cultivated.” 8 Careless waste of good land perplexed European observers
accustomed to cheap labor and a shortage of fertile land.
At the close of the eighteenth century, newly arrived settler John Craven
found Virginia’s Albemarle County so degraded by poor farming practices
that the inhabitants faced the simple choice of emigrating or improving
the soil. Writing to the Farmer’s Register years later, Craven recalled the sad
state of the land. “At that time the whole face of the country presented a
scene of desolation that baffles description—farm after farm had been
w estward hoe