Читать книгу A Companion to American Agricultural History - Группа авторов - Страница 39

Jeannie Whayne

The survival of the plantation system and the emergence of sharecropping are the most important economic factors effecting the South’s agricultural sector in the post-Civil War period. Not only did the continuance of plantation agriculture impact African American freedmen, but it also proved detrimental to the economic future of South as a whole. As the national Republican Party turned its attention away from the process of Reconstruction in the South and toward its second industrial revolution, they left freedmen at the mercy of the very southern elite that had taken the South into rebellion and controlled the region’s Democratic Party apparatus. It also failed to promote the interests of non-plantation sector white farmers and hobbled planters with an institution—the plantation—that remained locked in the past. Three important and consistent themes run through the history of southern agriculture after the Civil War: race and the transformation of the labor system, from slavery to sharecropping to wage labor; environmental concerns, some of them of the South’s own making; and the growing role of the federal government, especially through the activities of the Cooperative Extension Service.

The return of the Confederate elite to power and the restoration of plantation agriculture had their origins in federal policies implemented in captured southern territory during the Civil War. Federal policies were designed to accomplish two things: put self-freed people to work and salvage the cotton economy. Although the idea of furnishing freedmen with “40 acres and a mule” resonated with a few abolitionists and military commanders, northern financiers with an interest in the cotton market feared that an independent yeomanry of freed African Americans would not sustain the cotton economy, and the federal government balked at the notion that property could be seized from citizens. Thus, the federal government sponsored a contract labor system during and immediately following the war, and a new agency created in 1865, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—better known as the Freedmen’s Bureau—attempted to represent their interests by monitoring contracts. But Freedmen’s Bureau officials represented the interests of freedmen at their own peril, and many were complicit in practices that returned freedmen to another kind of slavery (Rose 1964; Daniel 1972; Foner 1988 ; Hahn 2003).

However, neither planters nor freedmen were satisfied with the contract labor system. After a spike in the market price of cotton right after the war, the prices declined, leaving planters with too little cash to pay wages. Freed-people, moreover, understandably resented the necessity of working gang labor, which was too reminiscent of slavery. The sharecropping system allowed them to move away from the old slave quarters and onto 25–30-acre parcels. Historians Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch argue that the arrangement might have been beneficial to freed-people but for the emergence of the commissary system (Ransom and Sutch 1977). Sharecroppers, paid only when the crop was harvested, needed to feed and clothe themselves in the period between harvests and thus found it necessary to secure “advances” from a merchant and, increasingly, from plantation commissaries. Southern legislatures enacted a series of laws that circumscribed black mobility by making it illegal to leave the employment of a planter to whom a sharecropper owed money (Daniel 1972; Mandle 1978; Woodman 1995). A system of debt peonage developed and by the early twentieth century the federal government—albeit briefly—pursued prosecutions of some planters for violation of an 1867 law against debt peonage. That law implicitly recognized the insufficiency of the 13th Amendment in New Mexico where debt peonage involving Native Americans and Hispanics continued to exist (Kiser 2016). It is ironic, then, that a law passed in 1867 to free Native Americans and Hispanics of peonage in the territory of New Mexico was not used on behalf of African Americans until the early twentieth century.

Although debt peonage was a significant problem, African Americans were not fully immobilized by various strategies used by planters to keep them in place (Wright 1986). Despite legislative statutes and extralegal attempts to limit the options of African Americans, certain factors mitigated against fully immobilizing black farm labor: the size of the farm or plantation and the environmental health of the operation. Large operators with a strict managerial system could better dominate their workers than smaller farmers. And planters and farmers on lands that were exhausted by overuse might take lands out of production and lessen their labor needs. In the Georgia piedmont, for example, as land gave way to gullies, plantations and farms reduced cultivated acreage, and sharecroppers there were enticed by agents to the newly opened cotton areas along the Mississippi River Valley. Some found success there, but they were increasingly faced with the same constraints they faced in the southeastern cotton growing areas (Whayne 1996, 2011; Woodruff 2003; Sutter 2015). Some moved further west to Kansas in the hope of homesteading and others “back to Africa” in the late nineteenth century (Barnes 2004).

Aside from creating another kind of slavery on southern plantations, the survival of the plantation insured that planters would continue to intensively cultivate tobacco, rice, and cotton. Cotton in particular was highly profitable in the late antebellum period and one of the primary reasons plantations spread westward, but new international competitors arose during the war and prices never fully recovered their prewar levels. Lacking 20-20 foresight, planters became locked into the cotton market not only by their belief that better days would return but also by the way they financed the crop. Usually operating on a thin margin of profit—though one that did not inhibit the purchase of luxuries—cotton planters became indebted to cotton factors who, of course, required they grow cotton. Everything worked together to encourage the continuation of this labor-intensive and environmentally destructive practice: federal policy, state legislation, the financial system, and an abundance of black labor.

Falling soil fertility rates and other environmental issues made life for southern farmers and planters difficult in the late nineteenth century. Southern agriculture had long been plagued by over-intensive cultivation, particularly in tobacco and cotton areas. Wartime destruction exacerbated the damage caused by certain unsustainable practices engaged in by those growing staple crops for a global market. Although a small number of antebellum southern agriculturalists promoted crop rotation and careful stewardship of plantation lands, few planters followed their advice, particularly in years when the price of cotton was high. Many planters kept up to a third of their land in reserve with the intention of moving into it once their agricultural acreage was depleted by intensive cultivation. They counted on putting their enslaved laborers to work cutting forests, removing stumps, and breaking new ground when necessary (Mauldin 2018). As Mart Stewart has argued, the abolition of slavery demonstrated the vulnerability of the system of southern plantation agriculture (Stewart 1996; Mauldin 2018).

Although planters were able to use both violence and legislation to ensure the emergence of another kind of unfree labor system, they found it impossible to coerce sharecroppers into the additional labor necessary to maintain levees in the rice areas or to engage in the laborious and often dangerous work of clearing forested lands elsewhere. Rice fields fell into disuse as levees went unrepaired. The Georgia Piedmont became pockmarked with gullies, a telltale sign of erosion and overfarming (Sutter 2015). In the Old South cotton belt, declining soil fertility led to a mass exodus of freed-people to new lands opening in the Mississippi River Valley but even there, planters were unable to force them to labor without recompense to maintain levees. Planters along the lower Mississippi River Valley had no choice but to pressure the Corps of Engineers to erect levees to protect them from flooding. As always, the South’s leaders were only too willing to demand federal intervention when it suited their own needs. They also used state statutes and local government to drain backwater swamps.

Even as these environmental issues intensified in the late nineteenth century, small farmers suffered under the crop lien system, which required them to pledge to grow certain marketable crops in return for advances to finance planting. While planters found themselves locked into growing certain staple crops for a global market, yeoman farmers were increasingly growing corn and wheat for a regional or national market. Some yeomen grew cotton or tobacco, but they typically farmed less fertile land than did planters and both those crops were hard on the thin soils of the backcountry or mountain areas. Given the falling price of agricultural commodities, many small farmers who had become indebted to merchants faced bankruptcy, lost their farms, and some became tenants, a status similar to sharecropping. Tenant farmers typically brought more to the bargaining table as they had mules and implements. Thus, they secured a higher share of the crop, up to half of the annual crop as opposed to the third sharecroppers received. Whether black sharecropper or white tenant farmers, they dreamed of climbing the agricultural ladder, but few of them were successful.

As discontent grew among southern farmers in the late nineteenth century, they voiced concerns about a range of issues. Chief among their grievances were the practices of railroad corporations then building various lines into the South to take advantage of the expanding market in crops, livestock, timber, and mining (Hahn 1983). Yeomen concerns about railroads were many, but most important was the practice of charging higher rates in the South and the West in order, so they argued, to meet the cost of the expansion of the railroads into new areas. In fact, railroads charged farmers more because they could get away with it. Farmers and planters also objected to the fact that railroads continued to hold land that had been awarded to them in exchange for extending rail lines across the South. Even after construction was complete, millions of acres of land remained in the hands of railroad promoters and other speculators. Given the ongoing problem with soil exhaustion and declining prices for agricultural products, southern farmers and planters demanded the seizure of such lands and the opportunity to purchase or homestead them.

The Farmers’ Alliance, founded in Texas in 1875, proved adept at articulating farmer grievances in the South. Within a decade of its founding, it boasted approximately five million members, including one million black southerners, two million white southerners, and two million midwesterners. White Alliance members in the South tended to be smaller farmers in the non-plantation areas rather than planters, and the membership included many nonlandowners. African American members were also drawn from the ranks of farm owners but included a greater percentage of sharecroppers. Initially, the Alliance avoided politics and attempted to address their economic concerns by establishing cooperative warehouses to provide a place where farmers could deposit their crops for up to 80 percent of the fair market value. Once the market corrected after the harvest, they could theoretically secure the remaining 20 percent. But the cooperatives were underfunded and thus largely unable to front the 80 percent (Woodward 1951; McMath 1992; Lester 2006).

In the mid-1880s, the Alliance began to step tentatively into politics. Alliance candidates in the South ran for local and state offices on the Democratic Party ticket, but too few of them secured election. The decision to create its own party in 1889 –the Populist Party (aka People’s Party)—seemed for a time to offer real promise as it appealed to farmers across the South and West. Included in the party platform was the subtreasury plan, an idea modeled on the cooperative warehouses. It called for the creation of government warehouses where farmers could deposit crops until the market corrected and, of course, included an 80 percent advance on the fair market value. In the 1896 election in which William Jennings Bryan ran on both the Populist and the Democratic Party tickets, the issue that consumed the populists, however, was the desire to inflate the money supply by monetizing silver. Better prices on western and farm products and dissension within the ranks of southern populists doomed Bryan’s run for the presidency. While southern farmers voted for Bryan—as a Democrat—a hard money Republican from Ohio won the election.

Populism remained alive after 1896, but by that time the southern branch of the Democratic Party had embraced a strategy designed to eliminate the threat of a white yeomen farmer/black sharecropper alliance. Beginning in the early 1890s, the rhetoric of racism appealed to many southern white yeomen, and the passage of disfranchisement and segregation statutes in the southern states in the 1890s shored up the Democratic party’s control and further increased planter power over African American farm labor. Disfranchised, segregated, and burdened by debt peonage, black sharecroppers faced severe constraints.

By the end of the century, farmers across the nation faced declining production levels, but these problems were particularly acute in the South. The promise of help to southern white farmers and planters in the late nineteenth century came from an unlikely, and largely unwelcome, source: the federal government. The Morrill Land-Grant Act, passed during the Civil War, granted federal lands to states to found agricultural, engineering, and mechanical colleges. The opportunity was not immediately embraced by southerners and even after the colleges were created in the early 1870s, southern legislatures were often hostile to them and starved them of funds. Nevertheless, augmented by the 1887 Hatch Act that funded the creation of experiment stations to work directly with farmers, the land-grant institutions slowly developed a following among some southern farmers and planters (Scott 1970).

Black farmers—whether sharecroppers or farm owners—were not served by the original land-grant institutions, even though they represented the largest number of farm laborers in the South. Although the overwhelming number of black farmers were sharecroppers, the number of black farm owners had increased in the late nineteenth century. They held small parcels on typically poorer land, and they struggled to survive in an uneven playing field. By 1890, it had become clear that the 1862 land-grant institutions were not serving black farmers and a second Morrill Act was passed. The second Morrill Act provided funds—rather than a land-grant—to create black agricultural and mechanical institutions. Unlike the grant of land awarded to states in the 1862 act, which, if used wisely, provided for continued funding, the meager funds allotted to the black schools were quickly exhausted. To add insult to injury, southern state governments were hostile and unwilling to provide sufficient ongoing funding for the black colleges. Tuskegee Institute, founded in 1881, became Alabama’s 1890 Morrill Act institution and was able to secure donors to augment its operations under the leadership of Booker T. Washington. Washington emphasized the practical application of farming principles and launched extension work with black farmers in 1892 at a conference in Tuskegee attended by approximately 500 black farmers. The gathering of farmers at Tuskegee became an annual affair and included satellite conferences, all of which offered advice on production of farm products and animal husbandry and provided opportunities for farmers to present “products from their own farms” (Crosby 1977, 1983, 1986).

Washington organized a Department of Agriculture at Tuskegee in the mid-1890s and hired George Washington Carver away from Iowa State College to run it. Carver’s scientific accomplishments are well known, but he also proved to be an excellent educator and convinced talented young men, like his protégé, Thomas Monroe Campbell, to become promoters of agricultural education. Campbell and his cohort took the movable school to farmers in Alabama, meeting black farmers on their own ground. Once the Cooperative Extension Service’s program was created in 1914, Campbell supervised extension activities directed at African Americans in several southern states. Carver himself traveled the South, promoting self-sufficiency through the cultivation of crops like peanuts and potatoes. In 1906, he launched the Jessup Agricultural Wagon which traveled Alabama with information, tools, and seeds. Carver, Campbell, and their cohort struggled to reach sharecroppers on southern plantations, however, because of the reluctance of planters to allow any outside influence on their labor force. This began to change with the appearance of the most devastating agricultural pest to ever face southern cotton farmers (Crosby 1977).

The boll weevil beetle probably entered south Texas cotton fields from Mexico in the late nineteenth century. Farmers and planters—and thus the agricultural bureaucracy—became alarmed, but despite the use of arsenic-based poisons, the weevil reached into all areas of the South by the 1920s and constituted a monumental threat to cotton growers. Its march across the South had the effect of driving planters—and thus their sharecroppers—into the arms of the land-grant institutions which offered solutions. Over time, the boll weevil became a powerful symbol of the region’s plight and, unfortunately, obscured the more fundamental problems such as white supremacy, soil infertility, and the destructive credit system that inhibited experimentation with other crops (Giesen 2011).

The passage of the Smith-Lever Act in 1914 created the Cooperative Extension Service and outlined an ambitious program for aiding farmers in an era when movement from farm to city was beginning to alarm policy-makers. Farming areas across the country faced this problem, but it was also in the very decade the Cooperative Extension Service was founded that the Great Migration of African Americans began to threaten the labor needs of southern planters. The new extension service provided matching funds for hiring farm extension agents in agricultural counties across the country but recognized the power and influence of the most powerful landowners—whether planters in plantation areas or the biggest farmers in non-plantation areas. As a World War I boom in agriculture was followed by a severe agricultural recession, the initial reluctance of county quorum courts in the South to provide the matching funds for extension agents gave way to a recognition that farm agents offered some opportunities for struggling farmers and planters. The appearance of the boll weevil just as the federal agricultural bureaucracy was taking shape in a new way worked to the advantage of planters in cotton counties. Through their influence with—or control of—quorum courts, they made certain that county funds were dedicated to the promotion of a program that served their interests.

The Cooperative Extension Service understood most land in the South was farmed by African Americans, whether sharecropper or small landowner, thus it created a separate black farm agent system. Black farm agents worked with black sharecroppers as long as white landowners were assured that the program they offered did not violate planter control over their labor force. Thus, the program outlined by the extension service for black farmers was not oriented toward helping black sharecroppers climb the agricultural ladder from landless laborer to farm owner. Black farm agents, however, also worked with a small but important cadre of African American farmers who held small parcels of less desirable lands (Reid and Bennett 2012). Black agents, moreover, followed the principles laid out by Carver and Campbell and focused on attaining self-sufficiency rather than the market-oriented program outlined by white farm agents.

The white extension service agents served as the face of the state land-grant institutions and the information they provided, but they also provided access to federal programs. The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 was designed to provide credit to farmers across the country. The program was underfunded, however, and in 1923, the Agricultural Credit Act offered short-term loans, usually designed to fund planting. It, too, was underfunded and little in the way of a long-term remedy for the problems confronting farmers. Nevertheless, the romance between farm agents and southern farmers and planters deepened in the 1920s as farm agents introduced these and other programs in attempts to come to the aid of struggling farmers.

White farm agents faced a fundamental dilemma in the 1920s, however. Even as they proposed diversification and a turn away from cotton monoculture, they provided planters and farmers with information about how to better grow their monocrop of choice: cotton, tobacco, or rice. Farm agent annual reports from Arkansas, for example, reveal their attempts to convince farmers to rotate cotton with soybeans, a crop that restored nitrogen to the soil (Whayne 1996). This made imminent sense, but planters and farmers were reluctant to embrace a crop that had no viable existing market and, more importantly, their long-standing association with cotton factors as their principal lenders acted as a powerful barrier to diversification of any kind. Cotton factors, who had contracts or relationships with textile mills, demanded that cotton be grown in exchange for advances. Diversification would have been anathema to them. Farm agents recognized the financial exigencies facing the farmers they served, and with federal programs providing too few funds for loan, and with an eye on quorum court funding and the reality of the power of the cotton economy, farm agents capitulated and offered farmers information they needed to grow better cotton and achieve higher yields. Even though higher yields in an era of overproduction only led to lower prices, farm agents had little choice but to give planters what they wanted. Through accommodating farmers’ demands, farm agents became an indispensable part of the agricultural community. By the end of the 1920s, however, efforts to pull agriculture out of the postwar recession had all but failed. Although Congress had passed legislation designed to boost the agriculture twice in the 1920s, Republican presidents had vetoed the bills. In fact, the legislation supported by the farm bloc—the National Farmers Union, the National Grange, and the American Farm Bureau Federation—was conservative. The farm bloc could not unite over issues like a protective tariff, something southerners stridently opposed, or production control measures (Whayne 1996).

Even as the depression in agriculture worsened in the late 1920s, a new environmental challenge arose: two natural disasters struck the South within the space of 3 years. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 brought devastation to farmers, and the drought of 1930–1931 led to crop failure across the entire South. Planters, however, learned they could co-opt an outside agency to serve their purposes. Their ability to manipulate the Red Cross during the flood and the drought, prepared them to accept a considerable expansion of the federal government’s role in their operations during the New Deal. The Red Cross served as a nonprofit relief agency independent of the government, but in the 1920s it typically included a high-ranking official of the federal government. Herbert Hoover, who was Commerce Secretary under President Calvin Coolidge, was that man, and he essentially directed relief efforts. Subsequently, as president in 1930–1931, Hoover used the power of the federal government to mount an unprecedented drought relief and recovery effort. During both disasters, the Red Cross worked closely with community leaders and planters to make certain that their needs were met, particularly with regard to labor. During the Flood of 1927, Red Cross officials erected camps for those left homeless by the flood, but that included a sizeable number of tenants and sharecroppers. Fearing their labor force would not return to their plantations, planters secured an agreement with Red Cross officials to only release tenants and sharecroppers when their planters signed them out. During the drought, a controversy arose over the dispersal of Red Cross supplies when it became known that planters were distributing them to tenants and sharecroppers as part of their furnish. In other words, planters exercised control over the relief supplies and used them to keep their labor force in place. Given that the national office of the Red Cross worked with local Red Cross committees selected by the communities they served, the structure itself predestined a local bias. When it became public knowledge, the Red Cross, responding to criticism and fearing a reduction in donations, issued a directive forbidding the practice. Planters expressed anger not at the Red Cross, however, but at the sharecroppers and justified the practice by declaring that tenants and sharecroppers were lazy and shiftless and that they would not work if given the rations without being compelled to return to their plantations to receive them (Daniel 1977; Whayne 1996; Barry 1997).

By the time Franklin Roosevelt was elected president in the fall of 1932, planters and farmers had been struggling with an economic recession for more than a decade. Many had become accustomed to that relatively new agency—the Cooperative Extension Service—and prominent farmers and planters had become adept at influencing the local farm agents to respond to their needs. The agents cultivated relationships with prominent farmers, business leaders, bankers, and their organizations and were positioned to be an important intermediary for any federal government programs implemented when Roosevelt took office in 1933. The new president appointed Henry A. Wallace, a prominent Iowa farmer and newspaperman, as secretary of agriculture. Wallace played a leading role in fashioning the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), operating on the principle that controlling production of certain overproduced crops would raise the price of those commodities, including the three crops most important in the South: cotton, tobacco, and rice. When Cully A. Cobb, an influential extension official in Mississippi, became director of the cotton division of the AAA, it signaled the importance of both the Extension Service and prominent planters. Closely affiliated with Oscar Johnston who directed the Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi, one of the largest cotton producers in the world, Cobb fashioned a program that addressed the needs of the South’s biggest cotton planters. Under the AAA, planters “rented” their cotton acres to the federal government but retained possession of those rented acres and cultivated crops not designated as overproduced. They received a rental payment, typically referred to as a crop subsidy, and an additional “parity” payment if the price they received for their crop failed to provide a sufficient profit compared to the cost of production. County farm agents urged their planters and farmers in the cotton belt to grow soybeans in place of cotton on acres previously devoted to cotton. By 1960, soybean production rivaled that of cotton (Whayne 1996; Daniel 1986).

The AAA’s cotton program might have gone down in history as a resounding success, but for the emergence of a controversy resulting from the actions of some planters. For the first time in the history of US cotton production, planters no longer endured a labor shortage. One of the inherent weaknesses of the post-Civil War labor system was the necessity of maintaining sharecroppers and tenants from spring to fall. In fact, there were only three periods of significant farming activity on cotton plantations: planting in the spring; hoeing weeds and thinning the crop to maximize growth in the summer; and harvesting in the fall. Wage labor utilized only during these busy periods would have made more sense, but planters could not be sure they would have sufficient labor in those crunch times. The sharecropping and tenancy system allowed planters to keep their laborers from the time they prepared the ground to plant the seeds until the crop was harvested, but the transition to soybean production introduced a destabilizing element in the labor system. Although they achieved the long-held dreams of extension agents to restore nitrogen to the soil, soybeans required less maintenance and could be harvested with machinery. Under these circumstances, some planters began evicting tenants they no longer needed, and others often refused to share crop subsidy and parity payments with those who remained (Grubbs 1971; Whayne 1996 ; Fite 1984; Daniel 1986).

Even before the crisis over evictions and the failure to share crop subsidy payments arose, sharecroppers in Alabama organized to protest Depression-era practices that exacerbated their deteriorating situation. Planters, suffering from declining prices and escalating debts, were squeezing what profits could be had from crop production from their sharecroppers. The Sharecroppers Union, founded in Alabama in 1931, attracted national attention, some of it negative, because of its association with the Communist Party (Kelley 1990). Planters attacked the all-black union using racist rhetoric. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), founded in Arkansas 1934 in response to evictions and a refusal of planters to share crop subsidy payments, took a different path in terms of membership makeup. Although it left the decision of whether to accept black members to local affiliates, the STFU promoted interracial solidarity against the planters (Grubbs 1971; Daniel 1986; Whayne 1996). The integrated STFU had little success in halting evictions or forcing planters to share AAA payments, but it had success with two cotton pickers’ strikes and, in 1936, it garnered publicity after revealing that three entities—all of whom had evicted tenants and thus contributed to unemployment—had received the largest AAA payments: Delta Pine & Land Company in Mississippi and two Arkansas mega-plantations, Lee Wilson & Company and Chapman and Dewey Company. At least one of them faced the cessation of AAA payments for several years. After the United States entered World War II, however, the congressional and AAA appetite for punishing these planters abruptly ceased, and the payments to Lee Wilson not only resumed but the company also received back payments to 1936 (Whayne 2011).

Despite the efforts of the STFU, a discernable trend toward a labor surplus and wage-labor in areas previously dominated by sharecropping was taking shape by the end of the 1930s. Yet planters had barely become accustomed to the luxury of an abundance of labor when World War II struck. Once the United States joined the Allies in late 1941, farmers were enjoined to produce more than ever with less available labor (Rasmussen 1951). Officials with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began devising plans to deal with the shortfall, particularly in late 1941. In 1942 they marshaled every available source of labor they could find. On southern plantations, that meant hill and townspeople, but it was clearly insufficient. The federal government negotiated an agreement with Mexico to provide braceros to work on farms and plantations. The first braceros reached southern fields in 1943 and were soon augmented by German prisoners of war, fresh from the Allied victory at the Battle of El Alamein. Italian prisoners of war soon followed. Meanwhile, the Women’s Land Army was revived, modeled on its World War I counterpart, and provided women, girls, and teenage boys, mostly from cities, to augment farm labor needs. Most of this labor—braceros, prisoners of war, and the Women’s Land Army—was distributed through coordination with the county farm agents and in some areas of the South needing an abundance of labor, special labor agents were hired solely for the purpose of working with farmers and planters to address their labor needs. In the end, all of these sources together with an odd assortment of workers from the Caribbean and Canada as well as a small contingent of Japanese internees who were housed in Arkansas, enabled southern farmers and planters to secure requisite labor (Rasmussen 1951).

Just as wartime labor needs increased, the tendency toward mechanization that had begun during the New Deal expanded. As one historian has argued, the adoption of the mechanical cotton picker was revolutionary (Holley 2000). However, production of tractors and combines was not the highest priority of the war industrial complex, and it was only after the war that the turn away from mule-power to engine-power truly accelerated. In 1943, International Harvester developed a mechanical cotton picker, but production levels of the new pickers were low during the war, and the transition to mechanical cotton picking occurred in the postwar period and, even then, certain structural impediments slowed the process. The mule breeding and marketing industry was substantial, and planters and farmers had long-standing relationships with both the beasts and those who sold them. They had capital tied up in barns, harnesses, tillers, and plows, all of which could be adapted to machines, but the desire to do so took time to develop. In some cases, adaptation was not as easy as one might expect. Cotton gins, for example, were an essential component of the cotton production process, but the existing gins were suited to hand-picked cotton. Machine-picked cotton came with a load of debris that the old cotton gins could not easily process. While the immediate adoption of cotton pickers, tractors, and combines in the cotton belt seems slow if examining it on the ground in the 1940s, it was, in fact, remarkably fast in the long view. By 1960, mules were rare on most large plantations. Another important element in the adoption of mechanical cotton pickers and other such machines was the cost involved. Investing in machines required a capital outlay that demanded a certain production level, and larger farmers and planters would be the ones who found it expedient to make this transition (Raper 1946; Street 1957; Aiken 1998; Daniel 2005).

One final factor in the postwar production of cotton had to fall into place before the era of “scientific agriculture” could take shape: the use of new kinds of chemicals. Chopping away weeds and thinning the crop, something that occurred in the hottest months of the summer, was typically done by hand hoe and gang labor. Agriculturalists had experimented with the use of chemicals as weed control since the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, innovations, including the use of synthetic chemicals were pioneered, but the technology exploded in the post-World War II era as products like 2,4-D and other peroxyacetic acid herbicides became available. It was more commonly used in conjunction with the cultivation of corn, oats, and other cereals, as cotton was extremely vulnerable to its misapplication. The transition away from cotton, however, contributed to the growing use of these chemicals in the South and, eventually, chemicals friendlier to cotton were developed (Fite 1984; Daniel 2005).

The use of new chemicals, the adoption of machinery, and return to the trend toward wage labor marked the era of scientific agriculture and the rise of the neo-plantation. Although the transformation favored larger operators as smaller producers could ill afford chemicals and machinery, some small farmers found a way to survive. For most of the twentieth century, farm owners as a category typically owned the vast majority of the acreage they tilled. In the postwar period, the percentage of land “rented” by farm owners increased from the low single digits to over 50 percent by 1960. It became commonplace for them to own 40–50 percent of the land they farmed. They rented the remainder. This had the advantage of providing the economies of scale necessary to pay for the machinery and chemicals (Whayne 1996).

Another telling statistic in the transformation to scientific agriculture in the South was revealed in the 1960 agricultural census: the disappearance of the sharecropper category. In 1940, despite a New Deal era tendency toward wage labor, sharecroppers made up the majority of farmers in the cotton producing areas. Their virtual disappearance in a 20-year period is nothing short of remarkable. One of the unintended consequences was a demographic revolution that struck a blow to farm towns, businesses, schools, and churches. While the departed moved to southern and northern cities in search of industrial work, those who remained were left to live with the detritus of depopulation: shuttered downtown businesses, boarded-up country churches, abandoned tenant shacks, and underfunded schools. Civic organizations attempted to attract small factories that could employ unskilled laborers. Enticed by generous tax breaks, these factories moved into many areas of the South and hired the wives of farm laborers whose husbands worked seasonal jobs in farming and picked up whatever other employment they could find when farm work was not available. The factories, however, remained only long enough to turn a profit and, having invested so little in locating in these southern towns, moved further South within a decade or two. The costs to rural southerners are similar to those experienced by indigenous populations in countries where the so-called Green Revolution was employed. Meant to modernize and enable them to produce certain crops in greater abundance, the Green Revolution undermined local institutions and sustainable farming practices. The latter was not a part of the South’s experience with the rise of agribusiness but the other similarities beg comparison (Cobb 1984; Whayne 1996; Aiken 1998; Hurt 2020). Populations thinned to the extent that when the chicken processing industry developed in conjunction with the emergence of industrial chicken production in the postwar era, the processing plants had to resort to recruiting foreign labor as there was too little local labor available and willing to work in that industry.

Non-plantation areas faced their own transition to a different kind of scientific agriculture with the rise of large feed lots for hogs and cattle, but the transformation of the chicken industry was most surprising. It evolved from an enterprise dominated by farm wives and devoted mostly to production of eggs to large-scale agribusiness focused on production of broiler chickens for consumption (Walker 2000; Jones 2002; Gisolfe 2017). Chicken meat, normally considered a luxury on farms, became the new “meat.” The transformation began in the mid-1920s, accelerated during World War II, and had overtaken hill country farms by the 1960s. Small landowners who might have raised cattle or hogs and produced a mix of crops on thin soils in these non-plantation areas became tenders of chicken production facilities and dependent on contracts with entities like the Tyson Company. While small white landowners produced the chickens, however, an immigrant labor force processed them in factories that soon came under attack for violating safety standards. The chicken industry had, in some places, come under scrutiny for polluting streams with runoff from factories and farms (Striffler 2005).

In plantation areas, the move away from reliance on a single crop—cotton, rice, or tobacco—was the realization of a long-held dream of county farm agents. In tobacco and cotton areas, they had long been trying to convince planters and farmers to plant soybeans, a restorative crop, and move toward diversification generally. But the diversification farm agents desired was not quite the diversification that occurred. Instead, the South turned to a two- or three-crop system, especially in the old plantation areas where a mix of cotton, soybeans, and rice were grown on the same farming operations (Whayne 1996). Thus, while cotton, for example, was knocked from its throne, it remained an important auxiliary crop, sharing space on increasingly large neo-plantations of the post-World War II era with soybeans and rice. Tobacco faced a different fate because of the growing association of tobacco use with lung cancer, and large-scale tobacco cultivation became increasingly untenable in the late twentieth century (Hahn 2011; Bennett 2014; Swanson 2014).

The environmental threat posed by agricultural chemicals remains a controversial topic. Even as some chemicals restored nutrients to soils that had been depleted by single-crop agriculture and overcultivation, herbicides to kill weeds and insecticides to kill pests led to a host of concerns. Runoff from agricultural fields played a role in the creation of dead zones at the mouths of rivers, like the Gulf of Mexico. The chemical load in the Gulf has led to algae blooms and the depletion of oxygen that undermined the fishing industry because of the damage to marine life. But, closer to home, concerns have arisen about groundwater pollution as chemicals designed to dissolve before reaching the water table sometimes, in certain soils, contribute to pollution of those water resources. Whether dispersed by crop dusting airplanes or through some other means, these chemicals also pollute the air and impact the health of both workers and the public (Daniel 2005; Whayne 2011).

Meanwhile, black farm owners found themselves at a greater disadvantage in an environment where access to credit through government programs was essential. Black farm agents could provide them only minimal assistance in the 1950s for they were busy negotiating a changing civil rights landscape. Questioning the status quo in race relations was grounds for dismissal. Ironically, the integration of the Extension Service after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 greatly decreased the number of black agents. They had always, of course, functioned at a disadvantage. While the white farm agents were often headquartered in the county courthouse where they had access to the sources of power, black agents were housed elsewhere, paid less, and hampered by inferior office equipment and automobiles. They had provided an important service to black farmers, but with the integration of the service in the late 1960s, the black agent’s role diminished, and black farm owners faced the consequences. The Pigford v. Glickman decision by the Supreme Court in 1999 revealed the extent of the damage done to black farmers. The decision resulted from a suit filed by group of black farmers in 1997 alleging that they had been discriminated against in the allocation of federal farm loans and other kinds of assistance between 1981 and 1996. The court agreed and ordered restitution that has run into the billions (Daniel 2013).

Southern agriculture in the period after the Civil War differed significantly from that practiced in other parts of the country at the time, but by the early twenty-first century, there were greater similarities than differences. The change was slow in developing. While southern yeomen farmers were absorbed into the market economy, planters continued to cultivate the same labor-intensive crops they had always grown until developments during the New Deal and World War II freed them from their antebellum origins. By the early twenty-first century, southern agriculturalists, like their counterparts elsewhere in the United States, had embraced modern agricultural practices, and southern farmers were no longer so labor-dependent. African Americans, like rural populations elsewhere, had departed for cities in industrial states, but those who remained faced new environmental concerns. Meanwhile, the southern plantation turned agribusiness did not promote economic development beneficial to the South as a whole. Just as its antebellum counterpart enriched a few but left the South undeveloped, the agribusiness corporations of the twenty-first century make the owners wealthy but leave many citizens impoverished and living in food deserts. The long transformation of southern agriculture failed to serve all the citizens of the region.