Soil Exhaustion

Editors of The Genesee Farmer estimated that, as of 1850, about four-fifths of US farmland was losing fertility, whether rapidly or so slowly “as hardly to be observed by the cultivators themselves” (“A General View” 131). By this point soil exhaustion had been discussed in its pages for years, whether owing to poor crop rotation, failure to plant cover crops, loss of potash due to removal of hay from the fields, depletion of phosphates, or many other suspected causes. “Every man accustomed to reason admits,” the editors wrote in frustration, “that it takes 100 lbs. of something to make 100 lbs. of wheat. Will he not also admit that the producer of this bread-forming grain should know how much of this ‘something’ he has in his soil?” (“Renovation” 154). A big problem was that most farmers still adhered to “the colonial practice of extracting from the virgin soil all it will yield,” leaving behind impoverished farms—soil without nutrients, communities without income, and laborers without jobs. Alluding to the 1849 Gold Rush, the editors implicated the newly constructed canals of New York: “just as a railroad to California would aid in extracting gold dust from its now unwashed sands,” so too were agricultural exports removing “precious atoms” without replenishment (“A General View” 132).

Soil exhaustion was a manifestation of farmers' underlying premises, as suggested by an address to the Monroe County Agricultural society in 1842: “The end of agriculture is to render the earth productive. The perfection of this art is when the earth is made to produce all that it is capable of producing, at the least expense, and without irreparably exhausting its productive powers” (6). The speaker, Henry Coleman, had been a Unitarian minister whose interest in farming led him to the position of Agricultural Commissioner in Massachusetts and then in Monroe County; for several years he also edited the Genesee Farmer. Coleman criticized both the farmers’ business interests--for “exhausting the principal” of valuable soil--and their Christian morals for ignoring the “beneficent constitution of Divine Providence,” which had created the earth to support man and beast, “designed to become more productive, or to keep up its richness from its own activity” (6, 7). Yet this continued premise of a farmer’s dominion over land assumed that productivity was a matter of better knowledge and practices; nor did it consider mutual obligations with laborers. The mandate of production enabled a different farmer to condemn farmhands drinking alcohol or even “glutinous and saccharine preparations” in the fields. “Drink cold water,” he declaimed, “and if from exhaustion, the men need stimulus, give them food, and a drink of tea or coffee” (“Hints” 167). An ecology embracing stewardship of farm labor clearly was lacking.