134 RESOURCES OF SOUTHERN ALABAMA. 



coast (partly because the late summer rains there interfere 

 with picking the crop), rice in Baldwin County, cowpeas 

 in the western red hills, beans in Mobile County, peanuts in 

 the eastern red hills and lime-sink region, Irish and sweet 

 potatoes in the pine hills, other vegetables in Mobile County 

 (for details see page 83), sugar-cane in the pine hills, sor- 

 ghum in the western red hills (but still more so farther 

 north), and pecans and all kinds of fruits in the pine hills. 

 (Strawberries may be an exception to the last statement, 

 for the great strawberry center of southern Alabama is 

 Castleberry, at the southern edge of the lime hills, in a 

 county which has not been used in the statistics because it 

 is nearly equally divided between three regions.) Radishes, 

 which the census does not mention, are said to be shipped 

 mostly from Greenville, in the western red hills. 



Average yields. 



In the regional descriptions and in Table 37 the average 

 yield of cotton and corn per acre for white and colored 

 farmers in 1909 has been given. Table 39 shows the yield 

 at the same period, for all farmers combined, in each region 

 large enough to get statistics for, of all crops for which the 

 census gives both acreage and yield by counties, omitting 

 the less important crops as before. As compared with Table 

 38 this leaves out "vegetables," because they cannot all be 

 measured in the same units, and tree crops, because the 

 census gives for them the number of trees instead of the 

 acreage. Where the acreage of a given crop is very small 

 in some regions the corresponding yield is omitted because 

 the chances of error in enumeration are too great. The 

 computed yield of cowpeas, velvet beans, peanuts and sor- 

 ghum syrup of course does not fairly represent the possi- 

 bilities, on account of a considerable part of those crops 

 being used for forage. 



One who had not looked into the matter might suppose 

 that the yield per unit area of any crop would depend large- 

 ly on soil fertility; and although that may have been the 

 case in the early days, it is hard to discover any such rela- 

 tion in the above table. The yield varies much less from 

 one region to another than does the soil fertility, percentage 

 of improved land, etc., and sometimes the variation is in the 

 opposite direction. It is easy to understand why no region 



