In industry the inefficient processes tend to die with the failure of firms which practice them. The differential costs mean profits to the technically alert firm; to the back ward concern, losses. Cotton producers, like steel pro ducers, fail because of differential costs of production ; but unlike steel mills they continue to produce and with the same inefficient methods. How can this be? If the cotton grower fails to produce a crop sufficient to pay his store bill, the bill is transferred to the next year's account. The merchant does not expect improved meth ods to enable his debtor to settle ; instead, he hopes for the price of cotton to go up. If the tenant gets snowed under with debts, he moves and cancels them. If too many cotton farmers fail to pay up their accounts with the supply merchant, he goes bankrupt and thus shifts the load of inefficient cotton farmers back to the wholesaler. The landlord and the large planter are in a similar situa tion. Tenants in debt are turnips without blood. A debt hanging over a tenant may prove his greatest incentive to mobility. Rather than take the chance of securing poorer tenants, landlords sometimes forget part of the unpaid bills. Poor cotton farmers are thus protected by the semi-benevolent despotism of the cotton system. After a fashion, in good crops and in bad, they continue to survive. And with them their inefficient practices continue. They do not diversify, they are subject to all the fluctua tions of the market, and they fail, but they continue to exist as cotton producers.
It must be said that to make the southern farmer merely an efficient cotton producer will not solve the prob lem. T. N. Jones rightly says, "There are those in this country who wish to establish a system of commercial farming." Among those economic historians who favor large scale plantation agriculture because its system of supervision increases efficiency of production are R. P. Brooks and E. M. Banks.' Their economic fallacy, in the writer's view, is that the plantation is fitted only to the production of cotton, and that efficient cotton production, by increasing the supply breaks the market and ruins the plantation. The sociological objection is that for farming to survive in America it must be a satisfying way of life as well as an economic adjustment. Thus it is highly pos sible that a somewhat inefficient diversified farmer, living under his own vine and fig tree, might make a better member of agricultural society than a highly efficient cog in a corporation plantation. The efficiency of the planta
tion offers but little protection against the cycles of cot ton prices.
The future of the small cotton farmer is precarious at best. It may be said to hang by two threads : extension of cotton culture in the 'Western Belt and the possible inven tion of a mechanical picker. Professor R. H. Montgomery of the University of Texas predicts the virtual break down of cotton cultivation in the old Cotton Belt.
West Texas and Oklahoma with their millions of acres of virgin soil and their large scale methods of cultivation can produce cotton so cheaply that the older states cannot com pete wibh them. All that is needed to put an end to "ten acres, a nigger, and a mule" in the Old South is a mechanical cot ton picker. When it is perfected—and it will be within two or three years unless all information about present experi ments by the International Harvester Company and other concerns is quite incorrect—cotton production in Texas will jump unbelievably, prices will fall sharply, and the tenant farmers of the old cotton states will have to go out of busi In the meanwhile the poverty of the inefficient one horse cotton farmer group has not operated against its survival in the succeeding generations. Exclusion from urban culture patterns has left the farmers of lower economic levels with less knowledge of contraceptive prac tices. For the same reasons his attitudes toward the re striction of families partake more of the old, the traditional, and the conservative. Moreover, children are less of an economic handicap in that he is not expected to do as much for them. They are more of an advantage because they furnish unskilled farm labor. After having aided in cultivating the family crop, many sons of farm owners as well of renters enter the ranks of cotton crop pers and tenants. The exhaustion of free land and the differential birth rate in favor of the farmer, accounts in part for increasing tenancy rates. Cotton culture, it may be said, after rendering some of its producers inefficient, makes for their survival both in the economic and biologi cal sense. They are the marginal farmers, for they exist on the outer margin of culture. "They constitute a more or less disturbing factor—a miserable support for them selves and a disturbing menace to the success of others that must always be counted in the estimate of produc tion and consumption and in any proposed legislation." 27