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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IV. Economics - 11. The Southern Plantation Economy and the Negro Farmer - 3. Tenancy, Credit and Cotton
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Chapter ii. Southern Plantation Economy 233
circle has become loaded downward through some of its own major effects:
poverty for most, economic insecurity for all, widespread ignorance, low
health standards, relative lack o‘f an enterprising spirit, high birth rates and
large families.
The extent to which Southern cash-crop production is based on tenancy
is indicated by the following figures. Almost three-fourths of all Southern
cotton farms and more than half of the crop-specialty farms (tobacco,
potatoes, peanuts, and so on)® were, in 1929, operated by tenants. About
two-thirds of all tenants in the South, and almost three-fourths of the
croppers, worked on cotton farms. Of the full owners, on the other hand,
less than one-third had farms where cotton accounted for 40 per cent or
more of the gross income. Most of the other two-thirds owned farms
which were characterized as crop-specialty, general or self-sufficing.^®
Negro farmers have always been dependent on the cotton economy to
a much greater extent than have been the white farmers in the South. By
1929 three out of four Negro farm operators, as against two out of five
white farmers, received at least 40 per cent of their gross income from
cotton. Although not more than about one-tenth of the Southern farm land
was cultivated by Negro owners, tenants and croppers, almost one-third of
the total output in cotton was produced on this Negro-operated land.^^
In addition, an unknown, but probably considerable, quantity of cotton was
produced by Negro wage labor on holdings operated by white farmers.
The importance of cotton growing for the Negro farmer can thus hardly
be over-estimated.
In the main, cotton is cultivated by means of a primitive and labor-
consuming agricultural technique which has not changed much since slavery.
Cotton is largely responsible for the fact that the Southeast alone had to
pay more than half of the national bill for commercial fertilizers.^* One-
third of the national total for all kinds of fertilizer was expended on cotton
tarms.^® Cotton growing, as any one-sided agriculture—if it is not lifted up
by high techniques to a level where intelligence is constantly used and
prosperity secured—^has aljo psychological effects: it ‘limits interests . . .
limits spiritual growth, makes people narrow, single-grooved, helpless.”^^
It invites child labor and causes retardation in schools. It favors large
families.
The wide fluctuations of the price of cotton^®—^which seem to have
*The type of farm classification in the 1930 Census of Agriculture is based on gross
income. Farms for which 40 per cent or more of the gross income was derived from cotton
were characterized as cotton farms. By the same token, farms for which 40 per cent or more
of the income came from one or several of certain specified crops (tobacco, peanuts, potatoes,
soybeans, cowpeas, and so on) were classified as crop-specialty farms. ’When no product
accounted for as much as 40 per cent of the gross income, the farm was “general.” Self-
sufficing farms were defined as those for which 50 per cent or more of the value production
was consumed by the farm family.
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