16 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



and melting snows from the Appalachians make this re- 

 gion less liable to dry spells. On the other hand, the 

 Piedmont nearer the mountains is more liable to suffer 

 from early frost. 17 



The soils range from grayish sand along the coast to 

 red clay in the Piedmont Plateau. The Atlantic Coast 

 Flatwoods with its gray and mottled sand, poorly drained 

 land, and characteristic vegetation of long-leaf pine and 

 grassy undergrowth has only 3.5 per cent of its land 

 area in cotton. 18 The farms are the smallest in the belt, 

 and 52 per cent of them are operated by white and black 

 owners. 



On the coast of the mainland and on the islands out- 

 side the sounds, in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida 

 was grown the Sea Island crop before its destruction by 

 the boll weevil. 



The Middle Coastal Plain is much more devoted to cot- 

 ton culture, over 13 per cent of the land being in cotton. 19 

 The soil is a grayish sandy loam with yellow clay sub- 

 soils, characterized by pine and wire grass vegetation. 

 With the aid of fertilizers the twenty million acres pro- 

 duce on the average an annual yield of over a million 

 bales, with about 205 pounds of lint to the acre of cotton. 

 Twenty-eight per cent of the land area is in plantations 

 with 44.8 of the farms operated by Negro tenants and 

 16.79 by white renters. 



The Sand Hills, a long narrow strip slanting to the 

 southwest, separate the Middle and Upper Coastal Plains 

 from the Piedmont Plateau. The soil is deep loam sand, 

 the vegetation pine and black jack oak. The crop in the 

 sand areas is most successful during wet years when the 



17 W. H. Hubbard, Cotton and the Cotton Market, p. 2. 



18 Cotton Atlas, pp. 8, 12. 19 Loc. cit. 



