Washington introduced crop rotation and imported an Arabian stallion to improve the breed.

He raised mules but neglect won out and his efforts were unsuccessful

Jefferson improved plw design and his son in law introduced contour plowing

The Napolieonic wars created demand for wheat which was less demanding on the soil that tobacco By 1820 lime was introduced to counteract soil acidity. By 1830 many of these practices began ot catch on. Marl (or marlstone) was introduced and this lime rich mud did a great deal for the soil of the upper south increasing yields by a factor of four Contour plowing and terracing became common After 1845 guano was imported from coastal Peruvian islands. The low prices of depleted farmland proved to be a magnet for Northern farmers from New Hampshire and Connecticut who bought land for $5 an acre and worked it with free white labor. These Northerners were objects of suspicion in the climate of the late antebellum period By 1850, the Piedmont had become a prosperous agricultural region. Census of 1850 and 1860 showed that for every large Virginia plantation, there were three small plantations, four large farms and seven small farms. The average size was less than 200 acres. While a slave could only tend two or three acres of tobacco, he could tend ten times that in wheat and corn. Bright yellow tobacco, a new strain discovered and developed by a slave brought four times the price of ordinary tobacco and grew best on poor soils that were not good for much else. This tobacco eventually became the basis for the Southern cigarette industry. At the end of the antebellum period slavery in the upper South was in a steep decline. Agriculture was becoming more capital intensive and many slave owners sold slaves that were no longer needed for cash. The leading crop of the antebellum South was corn, not cotton although corn fit into the cotton economy by providing food and feed. Deep plowing was an important innovation On the coastal plain, pine sap was drawn and distilled into turpentine. Tar was made by burning pine logs under turf in a kiln and then refined into tar.

Long leaf yellow pine was a prized shipbuilding material until the early part of the twentieth century and is now almost unobtainable. In the bluegrass region of Kentucky, hemp was the principal cash crop. Later to be replaced by burley tobacco By 1850 the upper South was building railroads and canals, slavery had begun a decline and emigration was now pointed to the west not the lower South. Tobacco factories textile mills as well as coal and iron mining was rising.