You’ve heard the saying ‘Cotton is King’. Well in America’s Deep South where it originated, the royal crown was most definitely slipping towards the end of the 19th century. Decades of continuous cotton production and soil erosion had dramatically reduced the fertility of the farmland, threatening thousands of jobs and the local economy as a whole.
A solution was needed and it came in the shape of Alabama’s “Old Rotation” experiment, the oldest continuous cotton experiment in the world. Begun in 1896 by Professor J F Duggar of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University), the experiment focused on a one-acre plot of land just south of the college campus. Here, scientists started to look at whether growing crops of legumes and cotton alternately, on the same land, could maintain those all-important soil nutrient levels.
Within just a few years, the results were known. As well as protecting the soil from winter erosion, adding a winter legume crop as a rotation could indeed restore enough nutrients to the soil to maintain a yearly cotton crop indefinitely. Long live the King.
After 121 years of continuous plantings, the “Old Rotation” experiment has gone one better. Compared to the unrotated plots used as a control, crop yields in the rotated plots haven’t just been maintained; they’ve almost tripled. That’s a return worthy of Jumpstart.
