SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



true picture, although both color heavily a lot of our 

 thinking about the whole Cotton Belt, its people, its 

 crops, and the problems of both. 



This Southeastern section labors today under excep- 

 tional economic and agricultural difficulties. Much of its 

 soil is outworn and it requires heavy applications of 

 fertilizer to raise more than half a bale to the acre. It 

 is a land of small fields, making mechanical cultivation 

 difficult, if not impossible. It has a big population of 

 white and colored tenants, mostly poor sharecroppers 

 who find it exceedingly difficult to raise substitute crops. 

 Here is the tough taproot of the cotton problem, the 

 region where costs are so hard to reduce that in any- 

 thing like free competition with the Delta and West 

 Texas it must be forced out of the crop. 



Nevertheless, it is upon the needs of this most needy 

 section that the whole Government cotton program has 

 been predicated. As a human problem of relief this is 

 right; but it is wrong as an attempted solution of one 

 of the nation's grave economic problems. Government 

 measures have all tended to keep poor land and in- 

 competent farmers in production, and this is as true of 

 corn or wheat or hogs as it is of cotton in every state 

 of the Cotton Kingdom. 



Compared with the Southeastern section, the Delta 

 is lush with agricultural opportunity. Level fields of 

 rich soil as black as licorice stretch to the horizon, 

 dotted with the tiny shacks of sharecroppers whose fate 



42 



