4 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



It is useless to deny that out of these different regions 

 with the different products come varying patterns of 

 rural life. Economic backgrounds, habits of life, and cul- 

 tural routine form significant contrasts. 11 The Kansas 

 wheat farmer uses casual labor and tills broad and pro- 

 ductive acres with the most modern of farm machinery. 

 The hog and beef producer of the Corn Belt, slave to his 

 plow, drill, and cultivator until the corn is laid by, rushed 

 for a spell at harvest, spends most of his year in pretty 

 leisurely fashion, watching his live stock turn corn and 

 roughage into good sound meat. The wheat farmer of 

 the Great Plains, the apple producer of the Northwest, 

 the orange grower, and the raisin producer each spends 

 one period of the year in throbbing effort followed by 

 long stretches with nothing special to do. The poultry- 

 man, the dairyman and butter fat producer, faced with a 

 steady round of daily duties, fewer lulls, and fewer 

 periods of intensity, has a life and a diet both full and 

 varied with something new for almost every day in the 

 year. The truck farmer of the South Atlantic coast, a 

 hand and knee farmer on small patches, keeps in close 

 touch with a sophisticated urban market and suffers no 

 lack of vitamins in his diet. The southern cotton tenant, 

 with his one mule and single plow, living on salt pork and 

 corn bread, has cotton to plant, chop, and pick, and 

 nothing to do until next year. Provided due considera- 

 tion is given to America's common institutions and her 

 ubiquitous industrial culture with its standardized prod- 

 ucts, it may be helpful to regard these natural regions 

 in terms of the culture areas of the anthropologist. 



11 See Mordecai Ezekiel in Farm Income and Farm Life, ed. San- 

 derson, pp. 82-83. The present writer, unable to improve upon many 

 of Mr. Ezekiel's apt phrases, has adopted them outright. 



