The Place of the Negro Farmer in the Changing Economy of the Cotton South.

The Old South is in the midst of a revolution which, in the past twenty years, has been characterized by a decline in farm tenancy and the overthrow of King Cotton. Changes taking place in southern agriculture are reorganizing farms in the Cotton South into six major functional types. As new patterns of adjustment of labor to land had to be developed following the Civil War, so another pattern is evolving due to recent economic changes. Considered functionally, farms in the Cotton South may be classified as: subsistence, tenant or multi-farm, small independent commercial, part-time, large mechanized, and livestock. Functional classification, regardless of crop grown, has value for the planner in making people the center of interest. The Negro farmer is being seriously affected by the changes taking place, not because he is a Negro, but in experiencing the effects of change on that class of farmers in which a disproportionate number of Negroes are found. The Negro and other farmers made useless in agriculture must find new niches in the total economy or eke out an existence on the fringe of the New Order. That fraction of tenants required as laborers in mechanized cotton production and in livestock production must be trained in the skills these operations require. The small farm owner whose units are too small to operate machines or graze livestock profitably, may find the solution of his problem in performing service functions in the developing agricultural economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]