John Binns was born in 1761 in Loudoun County, Virginia, United States, the son of Charles and Ann (Alexander) Binns. His father was evidently a man of means, for in 1782 he presented his son with a farm of 220 acres upon which to begin his career.
Enlarged yields encouraged further trials and in the years that followed Binns experimented with gypsum on clover, grass, and grains (some-times applied to the soil, sometimes to the seed before planting, and sometimes to the growing plant), recording his findings with such care and detail as to warrant their acceptance even today, "as legitimate fertilizer experiments" (Rodney H. True, "John Binns of Loudoun, " William and Mary College Quarterly, January 1922, pp. 20-39).
Agriculture at that time in Virginia and Maryland labored under serious difficulties. The separation from England had closed valuable markets, and "soil exhaustion" threatened to force the abandonment of large portions of the older sections. If agriculture was to be maintained and disaster avoided, fundamental changes were necessary. To this task young Binns set himself. His first step toward improvement was taken in 1784 when he purchased a small quantity of gypsum from a ship captain at Alexandria and applied it as a fertilizer to his crops. Enlarged yields encouraged further trials and in the years that followed Binns experimented with gypsum on clover, grass, and grains, recording his findings with such care and detail as to warrant their acceptance even today.
The results which Binns obtained were startling. His timothy and corn crops doubled, his oats yielded twice as much as his neighbor's, and fields once as barren "as the main roads" were by 1803 producing forty bushels of corn to the acre. In the course of time, doubters were convinced and before long the granaries of the county were glutted and threshing was being delayed because of heavy yields of grain. All this just at the time when the Napoleonic Wars were opening markets for grain in Europe and in the West Indies.
In 1803 Binns incorporated his ideas on agricultural improvement through gypsum, clover, deep plowing, etc. , in a pamphlet called A Treatise on Practical Farming. In this way the "Loudoun System" became widely known and practised in Virginia and Maryland. Thomas Jefferson sent copies to his English friends, Sir John Sinclair and William Strickland, recommending them as the means whereby lands once "exhausted and wasted" had become the most productive in the state. As Jefferson said, "These facts speak more strongly than polished phrases. "
John Binns was famous for inventing the "Loudoun System, " which helped to improve exhausted soil through gypsum, clover, and deep plowing, applied as a fertilizer. It was not the first time in America that this had been done, but it was the first trial by a common farmer and the first to give wide practical results.
