tant deterioration of land, this gradual
reduction of crops year after year, if kept up for the next fifty years,
will surely prove disastrous to the South.

Practically, all the land in the black belt of the South is cultivated
by Negroes and the farm production has decreased so rapidly during the
last ten or fifteen years that the average Negro farmer hardly makes
sufficient to pay his rent and buy the few necessaries of life. Of
course, here and there where a tenant has been lucky enough to get hold
of some new land, he makes a good crop, but after three or four years of
cultivation, his crop begins to decrease and this decrease is kept up at
a certain ratio as long as he keeps the land. Instead of improving, the
tenant's condition becomes worse each year until he finds it impossible
to support his family on the farm. Farm after farm is being abandoned or
given up to the care of the old men and women. Already, most of these
are too old and feeble to do effective work.

Now, the chief cause of these farms becoming less productive, is the
failure on the part of the farmers to add something to the land after
they have gathered their crops. They seem to think that the land
contains an inexhaustible supply of plant food. Another cause of this
deficiency of the soil is the failure of the farmer to rotate his crop.
There are farms being cultivated in the South today where the same piece
of land has been planted in cotton every year for forty or fifty years.
Forty years ago, I am told by reliable authority, that this same land
would yield from one bale to one and a half per acre. And today it will
take from four to six acres to produce one bale.

Still another cause for the deterioration of the soil is erosion. There
is practically no effort put forth on the tenant's part to prevent his
farm from washing away. The hill-side and other rolling lands are not
terraced and after being in use four or five years, practically all of
these lands are washed away and as farm lands they are entirely
abandoned. Not only are the hillside lands unprotected from the beating
rains and flowing streams, but the bottom or lowlands are not properly
drained, and the sand washed down from the hill, the chaff and raft from
previous rains soon fill the ditches and creeks and almost any ordinary
rain will cause an overflow of these streams.

Under these conditions an average crop is impossible even in the best of
years. At present, the South does