 Although this decreased the demand and forced a change to crops such as corn, and wheat thereby restoring soil health, the new crops did not bring in enough wealth or traffic to the growers, merchant class, and railroad.Still, the growers experimented with multi-crop rotation, schemes at sharecropping and tenant farming, and eventually earned valuable income from tobacco in later decades.The number of plantations never recovered, yet, ironically several of the sharecroppers and tenant farmers managed to evolve into a yeoman farmers.