ground to exploit, probably in some new delta or blackland prairie.^16 Here
are the origins of the notoriously benighted South of the s and s,
the subject for perplexed sociologists, economists, nutritionists, and not
least, conservationists.
tYet the plantation system’s postbellum stage was a very long one, from
ca. to about , when croppers and sharecropping had at last faded
away and production of most of the South’s great staples was either thor-
oughly mechanized or abandoned. Within these several generations, and
here and there, a few redeeming, at least ameliorating, practices existed.
One was the persistent practice of intercropping corn with beans of some
sort, usually climbers. (Cotton, like all machine-harvested field crops today,
seems to have been universally a monoculture enterprise.) Even plant-
ers (and ordinary farmers) who were unaware, say, as late as , that
beans are legumes that impart nitrogen, religiously intercropped. Maize
and beans both were picked by hand, for domestic and market use. When
the corn was finished and the bean vines began to wither, hogs or cattle
might be turned into intercropped fields to feast and fatten—and to de-
posit their droppings in preparation for a crop of cotton the following year.
Velvet beans were a favorite of both humans and beasts well into the twen-
tieth century. A twiny climber, velvets (we now understand) contained sig-
nificant amounts— to percent—of L-dopa, a natural compound until
recently used to treat Parkinson’s disease, and parts of the plants probably
contained other toxins, including mild hallucinogens. Precise analysis of
the composition of velvet beans is now impossible because cultivation of
the bean drastically diminished and then disappeared after about World
War II—a casualty, probably, of cheaper inorganic fertilizers, farmers’ mas-
sive switch to soybean monoculture, and machine harvesting of corn.^17
Another conservationist practice (whether intentional or not) was the
long fallow system pursued not only by small landowners but by large
planters, especially in the East. Hardly any landowner had all of his or her
property under cultivation and pasture. As fertility declined, then, owners
cleared sections of their woods by burning—a version of an ancient practice
on the same ground. After an initial blaze among deadened trees, workers
‘‘rolled’’ logs that were not yet completely incinerated and reburned them.
Soil preparation with hoes and shallow-draft ‘‘stump-jumping’’ plows then
took place in knee-deep ashes. These ashes, depending on the sort of wood
burned, contained as much as percent calcium carbonate, as well as
phosphorus and other elements. This source of nitrogen-fixing dissolved