The planter too frequently takes his seed from public gins, regard less of whether it is suited to his soil and climatic conditions, or whether it has been bred up to a high degree of productiveness. Outside of the Agricultural Department, seed selection and seed breeding are seldom practised, the application of manure is imper fectly understood, and the due rotation of crops is often neglected. The small farmer, who has in many cases succeeded the slave-owning cultivator, works by primitive methods, and uses antiquated machinery ; and when he is a negro working without direction, as is frequently the case, the yield per acre is below the average. But, although it would appear to be possible by more intelligent cultivation to increase the productivity of the land, two further facts have to be borne in mind. The first is that as farming in the south becomes more intelligent it will become more diversified. It is significant that in those parts, which are at present most back ward, cotton alone is produced. Its cultivation only takes up part of the farmer's time, and wherever there is a progressive population other crops are also grown. The second fact is that the domestic consumption of cotton is steadily increasing. During the five years 1883-7, 31 per cent. of the production was retained for home manufacture, but during the five years 1906-10, 36 per cent. of the crop was used in the country itself. For these reasons it would seem that the American export is unlikely to increase very rapidly.
The production of rice in the United States has undergone great changes within the last half-century. Fifty years ago, the three South Atlantic States of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia produced 90 per cent. of the total output, chiefly on the delta lands along the coast. To-day the same proportion, but of an output nearly four times as great, is grown in Louisiana and Texas, chiefly on the wide level prairies in the south-west of the former and the south-east of the latter state. There, the temperature is sufficiently high, and water for purposes of irrigation can be ob tained, partly from rivers, and partly by artesian wells from a stratum of gravel between 125 and 200 feet below the surface. The drift soils on which the rice is planted are underlain, moreover, by an impervious clay which retains moisture as long as it is wanted, but facilitates drainage and allows of the use of heavy harvesting machinery instead of the sickle, which can alone be used where the soil is not dry and firm at the time of harvest. The yield has also,
within the last ten years, been greatly improved by the importation of better milling varieties from Kiushiu. It now amounts to 670,000,000 lbs., or considerably more than thrice the amount which has to be imported.
Sugar-cane is raised largely in the river bottoms of the alluvial plains of the Mississippi, Louisiana, the leading state, producing 300,000 out of the 311,000 tons of cane sugar grown in the United States in 1910. In 1906 for the first time the production of beet sugar surpassed that of cane sugar, and the north and west now outstrip the south in the manufacture of this commodity.
The mineral wealth of this region is of much less importance. Within the prairie section of it there lies a part of the south-western coalfield of Arkansas, Oklahoma, and North Texas. It has now an output of about 8,000,000 tons, some of which goes north ward, where it comes into competition with the product of the Western field, but the greater part of which finds its market in the south. Petroleum is also obtained in the plains of Louisiana and Texas, and considerable quantities of it are shipped from the various Gulf ports.
The Atlantic and Gulf Plains, and that part of the southern prairie associated with them, are therefore chiefly devoted to agricultural pursuits. Climatic conditions, while not so unfavourable to the white man as was at one time believed, account for the introduction into the south of an alien race unfitted by nature to develop the resources of the country to their fullest extent. On the open prairie lands of Texas, where the negro has never settled in large numbers, economic progress has within recent years been very great. But the whole region is likely to remain agricultural rather than to become manufacturing, and the chief towns will always be the ports which serve not only the region itself, but, in a greater or less degree, the whole of the Mississippi basin. Of these, New Orleans, on the delta of the Mississippi, is the most important. Galveston, Mobile, and Savannah are mainly engaged in the export of raw cotton.