Cooperation 183 



the season at the store. To meet these credit demands 

 he is obliged to turn his cotton over to the storekeeper 

 at the gin as soon as it is harvested ; and to protect him- 

 self the storekeeper has to charge the cotton grower a 

 high price for everything he purchases. The farmer may 

 borrow money from a cotton factor in which case he ships 

 the ginned cotton to him to be sold on commission. 



The small tenant farmer is in an even more helpless 

 condition than the small farm owner. The stock, the 

 feed, and the tools are furnished by the land-owner. He 

 has a still smaller security to offer for credit. The local 

 merchant gives him store credit and takes a lien on his 

 share of the crop for security, placing the tenant farmer be- 

 tween two millstones the owner, on the one hand, who is 

 interested in large crops, and the storekeeper, on the other, 

 from whom he secures credit at a high rate of interest. 



Since the advent of the boll weevil, the Southern farmer, 

 through the efforts of the United States Department of 

 Agriculture, has introduced a more diversified crop sys- 

 tem, including corn, alfalfa, peanuts, and stock-raising, 

 and, to some extent, this has relieved the distressing finan- 

 cial condition by giving the cotton farmer something 

 besides cotton to fall back on. Taken as a whole, the 

 Southern farming system has compelled the farmer to 

 sell his crop as soon as it is harvested at such prices as 

 the local merchant is obliged to pay. It results in the 

 almost complete separation of the producer from any part 

 in the marketing of the crop. It depresses the prices of 

 cotton in the fall by forcing it all on the market at one 

 time, and the subsequent advances in prices are absorbed 

 by the various middlemen through whose hands it passes 



