52 
BULLETIN 1269, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
capital. Tenants who own property are usually more stable in occu- 
pancy than others. Some planters help their tenants to become 
landowners. Tenants so helped frequently remain tenants on the 
landlord's farm until their own land is practically paid for. Occa- 
sionally plantation operators extend loans to reliable negro tenants 
for the purchase of land. Even though some finally leave the planta- 
tion to become owners, the reliability of such tenants while on the 
plantation compensates for the final loss. 
Many of these suggestions may seem trivial, but plantation tenants 
are often plastic and more or less childlike in their ways of thinking. 
The larger and more economic phases of their business are frequently 
considered of less consequence than temporary pleasures and accom- 
modations. Hence a measure of diplomacy and efforts to satisfy the 
laborers are likely to result in greater prosperity for the plantation 
business. 
SELECTION OF FARM ENTERPRISES AND DIVERSIFICATION 
The development of the plantation system has been toward 
specialization. Usually a single money crop is produced, the other 
Percentage of Plantation Land Improved, 1909 
: 
PER CENT 
20 30 40 50 60 
~: 
90 100 
CROPPER AND 
TENANT 
ALL OTH ER 
LAND 
UNI M PROVED 
FlG. 14. — This chart shows that practically all the land assigned to croppers and tenants is improved, 
while the unimproved land in plantations is held by the landlord to be operated by the use o f wage labor 
when operated at all. (These data include 6,351 plantations in 75 selected counties, 1909.) 
crops and auxiliary enterprises serving the purpose of furnishing 
supplies for plantation use or for preparing the cash crop for the 
market. In a few localities two cash crops may be crrown, such as 
cane and rice or cotton and tobacco, but these furnish no exception 
to the cropping system except in the sense of involving two types 
of plantations. Data showing the • utilization of the land and the 
cropping system in general will reveal the extent to which the tend- 
ency toward a one-crop system prevails in the plantation region. 
Of all land in the 6,351 plantations in 75 selected counties in 1910. 
more than half (.")."> per cent) was improved. At the same time the 
percentage of plantation improved land in 325 plantation counties 
was 19.8 per cent. Only J7.4 per cent of the land on the plantation 
not operated by croppers and tenant- was improved, as compared 
with 89.8 per cenl oi improved land in cropper and tenant farms on 
plantation- (fig. 14). Therefore it i- apparent that plantation crop- 
per- and tenant- hold a very -mall percentage of the unimproved 
