Why was new England hard to farm in?

Answer 1

The early colonists had difficulty farming in New England due to the poor quality of the soil. Several thousand years earlier, glaciers had scraped all the soil from the surface of the ground and left bare rock. Then as the glaciers retreated, they dropped rocks all over the place. Nature had only just begun the process of building up soil when the colonists came. In order to plant crops, the colonists had to clear the forest, remove the rocks, and deal with the thin infertile soil.