When looking for a new manager he once wrote that the man must be, "above all, Midas like, one who can convert everything he touches into manure, as the first transmutation toward gold; in a word, one who can bring worn-out and gullied lands into good tilth in the shortest time." He saved manure as if it were already so much gold and hoped with its use and with judicious rotation of crops to accomplish his object.

"Unless some such practice as this prevails," he wrote in 1794, "my fields will be growing worse and worse every year, until the Crops will not defray the expense of the culture of them." He drew up elaborate plans for the rotation of crops on his different farms.

Not content with one plan, he often drew up several alternatives; calculated the probable financial returns from each, allowing for the cost of seed, cultivation and other expenses, and commented upon the respective advantages from every point of view of the various plans.

The labor involved in such work was very great, but Washington was no shirker.

He was always up before sunrise, both in winter and summer, and seems to have been so constituted that he was most contented when he had something to do.