THE FAMILY LIVING FROM THE FARM An evaluation of the family living from the cotton farm is faced with an equal number of perplexities. Its important place cannot be denied. Food, fuel, and shel ter come high to urban dwellers, and it simply adds to, the farmer's standard of living if he can secure them partly as by-products of his occupation. In estimating these services of the farm home the Department analysis placed the value of food and fuel furnished halfway be tween farm valuation and city prices. The rent was esti mated at 10 per cent of the current valuation of the house.
We have here again to deal with the extent of diversi fication. It has already been shown that tenants and croppers not only have a smaller amount of living fur nished by the farm but a smaller per cent than owners. It has also been shown that, in general, owners diversify most and croppers least. To the landlord the tenant's farming operations are a financial not an agricultural venture. He can be expected to exact cash crops. In the Texas survey J. T. Sanders found that owners had about six-tenths of their land in cotton, share tenants over two-thirds, and croppers about four-fifths. In the North Carolina study " it was found in the Coastal Plains that owners had 2.6 per cent, landlords 7.5 per cent, tenants 10.5 per cent, and croppers 20.3 per cent of all their tillable land in cotton.
Accordingly, as heretofore in the study of living stand ards, we shall be unable to strike averages that are gen eral. Instead we shall present the high and low levels of living. An analysis the family living from 1,008 farms in Catawba County, North Carolina, Sumter County, Georgia, in 1918, and Jones County, Mississippi, in 1919 gave interesting results. The value of all items furnished from the farm ranged from $471 for 214 Ne gro families to $690. The values per adult were $80, $110, $121, and $153 per year. The southern farmers in spite of larger families exceed the averages for the county in value of food and fuel but were excelled in value of house rent and total value for each adult.
These are exceptional southern farms in well balanced agricultural areas. The food produced per farm is thus
tabulated and compared with averages for 7,738 farms in selected localities in the United States." Southern farms exceed in the production of corn, po tatoes, sirup, butter, milk, pork, and vegetables. They are exceeded by the United States averages in beef, poultry, and eggs. (See Table XIX.) Table XX. (page 246), represents the average annual food consumption of 255 farm families located in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. It shows many of the characteristics of the southern dietary in the predomi nance of pork over beef, but is rather noticeable in its omission of collards and the use of more flour than corn meal.' There exists plenty of evidence to show that on the vast majority of southern farms such a dietary remains an unattained ideal. Typical of much Cotton Belt farm ing are the conditions found by the Augusta (Georgia) Survey to be true of its county, Richmond. With the In the dietary of families on the lower levels of living, pork comes first in value of all the items of food sup plied directly from the farm, often amounting to 40 per Corn is the staple article of diet throughout the whole Cotton Belt, prepared as roasting ears, hom iny, grits, and meal for corn bread. Molasses, homemade from sorghum and ribbon cane, furnishes the sugar in the diet during the winter months. During the summer, beans, tomatoes, Irish potatoes, cabbage, okra, field peas, and onions are raised in the garden. During the winter months cotton farmers subsist on turnips, collards, sweet potatoes, and fried pork. An observer says of cotton tenants in Oklahoma: "Very few have vegetable gardens of any description. Their supply of meat, milk and butter they must buy or go without—most of the time the lat ter—and a great many of them are actually on the bor der line of starvation. The writer has been in their homes when there was not enough on the table for even a smaller family." " At best the diet is composed of fried foods, heavy in fats and starches with a deficiency in milk, eggs, fruits, and green vegetables.