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.
Bibliographical Essay
A bibliography of post-Civil War southern agriculture must begin with the failure of federal policy during the Civil War to permanently topple the planter elite and confiscate and redistribute plantations. Although peripheral to reconstruction historiography, the story of the plantation’s survival resides within that tradition. It insured that the major sector of southern agriculture remained tied to monocrop agriculture, a new unfree labor system, and a failure to adopt mechanization. It took more than a half century and a Great Depression to move toward modern agricultural practices.
Willie Lee Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction (1964) laid the historiographical groundwork for understanding the failure of federal policy during the war in terms of
