58 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



any range above fifty yards. One was leaning over at an angle 

 of twenty degrees from the vertical and was kept from falling 

 over by two thick timber'props." 56 , 



Even though they live on farms, the sharecroppers rarely 

 grow vegetables or keep a cow or chickens. Frequently cotton 

 must be planted right up to the doorsteps of their shacks. 

 Every inch of land must be used for the cash crop. The result 

 of this is that they must live on a diet so poor that a really 

 healthy sharecropper is rare. The usual food consists of what 

 the croppers call "3M," meat, meal, and molasses. Only rarely 

 is the meat other than salt pork. 



On the one hand, many of the planters claim that the crop' 

 pers are unfit for a better existence. They say that the average 

 cropper is shiftless, ignorant, and unable to take the responsi' 

 bility of owning land. On the other side, the sharecroppers and 

 their spokesmen say that many of the planters, who depend 

 on their labor, cheat them out of their earnings, take away 

 their civil liberties, and stand in the way to block any of the 

 education and organisation which might make it possible for 

 them to become secure landowning farmers. 



If tenant farming is bad for the farmer, it is worse for the 

 land. A tenant farmer must get everything he can out of the 

 soil to pay his living and make a profit for the owner. He usually 

 cannot afford to spend time and money to make the soil per' 

 manently fertile. He must take what he can get. After all, he 

 reasons, it is not his land. His job is to create money every 

 year, not a fertile farm which would be a permanent home for 

 a family for generations. And since the tenant farmer cannot 

 be primarily interested in building up the soil, it is frequently 

 on tenant farms that the greatest soil erosion and exhaustion 

 are found. 



The owners of tenant farms are also too frequently indiffer' 

 ent to the fate of the land. They may be retired farmers or 



56 Dixie Detour by Cedric Belfrage, Harpers Magazine, Sept., 1937, p. 377. 



