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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 12. New Blows to Southern Agriculture During the ’Thirties: Trends and Policies - 11. Constructive Measures
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272 An American Dilemma
dependent on the good-will of their landlords. The latter have often
objected to Negro farm and home demonstration agents approaching
families on their holdings—sometimes even to any direct contact between
the Extension Service and the tenants. ‘^The Negro tenant farmers and
croppers might best receive aid on the agricultural side principally through
the white agents working with the landlords and managers,” says the
Extension Service of the Department of Agriculture,®^ and this admission
confirms statements that we have received when interviewing Negro agents
in the South about actual conditions in many localities. We have also been
told, on the other hand, that nowadays an increasing number of plantation
owners do want their tenants to have the benefits of this educational work.
The cuts in cotton acreage and the decline in income during the depression
made many landlords see the need of more home-use production on the
tenants’ plots.
Still, it does not seem as if the particularly urgent need for extension
work among Negroes has been met to the same extent as has the corre-
sponding need of the white farm population. Even though white agents
may give some part of their time to work among the Negro farmers and
croppers, they cannot be expected, as a rule, to be as intensively interested in
the welfare of the colored people, as are the Negro agents; nor are they as
likely to gain the confidence of the Negro farmers. By January i, 1942,
there were altogether 558 Negro extension workers in the South, or about
1.2 per 10,000 Negro persons on the rural farms.®® The corresponding
figure for the total rural farm population in the South by mid-1939 was
more than twice as high or 2.7.®®
Our previous discussion of the practice of “advancing” credit for neces-
sities to croppers and tenants has suggested an unsatisfactory organization
of credit. But planters and other landowners, as well as croppers and
tenants, have suffered in the same respect. They still have to pay exorbitant
interest when borrowing money. But a reform of the credit market is under
way. The financial collapse during the depression, which hit both land-
owners and financial institutions, finally made the federal government
intensify its efforts to reform the credit market.®*^
The accomplishments have been particularly noteworthy in the field of
mortgage credit. Of the total amount of farm mbrtgage loans held on
January i, 1939, not less than 39 per cent were Federal Land Bank or Land
Bank Commissioner loans; the corresponding proportion for the South was
even higher (45 per cent).®® In the much more difficult sphere of produc-
tion credit, on the other hand, there has been less success.®® The average
interest rates for all short-term loans, as a consequence of this development,
have decreased substantially. Yet it is still very high. The real expense
even for government loans, in Woofter’s sample study of 1937, was no less
than 1 1.9 per cent. This is not a satisfactory situation.*^® Conditions may
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