5. (A) First: We have a negro farmer who owns and operates 200 acres of land. He lives on the land. He has always grown his feed crops, seldom buying any feed at all, and produces all the cotton he can after his feed crops are provided for. He has never borrowed any money but has been able to maintain a splendid balance in the bank from year to year.' (B) Second: We know a man in the same community who owns a tract of land consisting of more than 500 acres, who does not live on the land, but lives in town in a good home. He grows some of his feed, makes fairly good crops—in fact we would say about the average crop of both cotton and feed stuffs, but whose living expenses have always been reg ulated entirely out of proportion to his income, and as a result his 500 acres is heavily mortgaged, his home is heavily mortgaged and though a man of high degree of intelligence, of good habits, there is some doubt as to his ability to ever remove the mortgage from his property 6. As an example, we refer to one party in particular whom we shall refer to as Mr. Doe. This particular farmer began some 20 years ago with a limited capital of approxi mately $200.00 which he applied as part payment on 20 acres of land. From time to time he has increased his holdings but has always seen fit to raise his own feed stuffs. Most of his activity is confined to cotton planting and last year he raised and ginned approximately 1500 bales of cotton. Inci dentally, he owns approximately 2,000 acres of land in an adjoining county, and our information is that on this 2,000 acres he only owes approximately 7. Near my old home a farm was purchased some ten or twelve years ago by R. C. Small, who was at that time super intendent of the McCormick plant of the International Har vester Company. It was about as poor a farm as could be found in the county. It was lacerated from erosion. The first year he plowed the land and sowed it to oats, he hardly ob tained more than five bushels per acre. He followed that with peas, which were turned under. Last year he gathered some thing like 80 bushels of oats per acre. The land planted to corn must have yielded 75 bushels per acre. It was not neces sary for him to buy any commercial fertilizer. It was all grown right there on the ground. No more fertile farm can now be found anywhere in the county. He put on some dairy cattle, and is selling about $200 worth of dairy products per month. His farm is handled largely with a Farm-All Tractor. The Farm-All Tractor now will afford opportunities for the cultivation of considerably more land than has ever been cultivated heretofore with the same amount of labor, and the farms above mentioned could be easily doubled by the use of a Farm-All Tractor, though the Farm-All Tractor would be justified if only 20 acres were under intensive cultivation, and the other 60 put to other crops, oats and cover crops.' An unusual cotton farmer was Sam McCall, age 75, an ex-slave of Alabama. He afforded a significant contrast to John Blake (see page 258). His method of diver sification and rotation was made the subject of a bul by the United States Department of Agriculture : Sam McCall decided to remain as a tenant on the planta tion of his former owner in Alabama. Being thrifty, a hard worker, and a good manager he saved what he earned and was soon able to make a payment on 40 acres of land. He thus started farming for himself, and later added to his purchase until he owned 163 acres. He became a one-horse farmer in a section where the land was so grown up with brush and cut with gullies that the exhausted soils had been abandoned by the so-called better class farmers.
After growing cotton and corn for 15 years by the ac cepted methods on as much of his land as was tillable, McCall decided to intensify and diversify his farming. He se lected his two most fertile acres and worked out the following method of farming: Oats were grown, harvested, and the stubble plowed under. Immediately afterwards he planted corn, and in April he planted cotton between the corn rows.
Cowpeas were then planted between the hills of corn. As soon as the ears of corn were established he cut off the tops above the ears to let light in on the cotton. As soon as the corn was matured he removed the stalks, thus giving the cot ton full possession of the ground during the latter part of the summer. In one year one of these acres yielded 75 bushels of winter oats and three bales of cotton. The other acre yielded three crops, one bale of cotton, 50 bushels of corn, and 50 bushels of oats. He increased the fertility of the soil without the use of fertilizer by plowing under cowpeas, oat stubble, and corn stalks.
By selecting the seed from the best plants he developed a high yielding strain of cotton, known locally as the Sam McCall cotton which he sold at fancy prices. He soon found that his best plants were producing a pound or more of lint apiece, and he figured that with a perfect stand of plants he could produce nine bales of cotton on one acre. He has secured at one time as high as seven bales on the two acres. One year he succeeded in growing a 500 pound bale on a measured one-eighth acre which produced a perfect stand of 612 plants. Sam McCall, a naïve Negro farmer, had become something of a creative artist working with the soil.
For the last 15 years of his farming he received an annual money income of from $200 to $350 from two acres, more than his tenant neighbors who cultivated 20 acres. With his living from the farm, he had, J. Russell Smith suggests, a better income than the average farm hand or city worker of the same territory and time, and his work left him in better condition and with more leisure time than the average fac tory worker.
The effect of the boll weevil invasion on the effort of a southern farmer to pay for his land is recounted in a case from South Carolina: Herbert Rawlings, my father, bought a forty-two acre farm in southern South Carolina for $5,000, paying $2,000 in cash with the balance in yearly payments. Of the six chil dren the four eldest boys were able to work on the farm. The family improved the place the first year, raised some hogs, kept a cow, and grew food and feedstuff. But we de pended on cotton to pay for the farm. That year we made a big cotton crop, but a storm came and blew bales of cotton out of the bolls on the ground. Cotton brought a low price that year, and we did not make very much more than living expenses.
The next year we planted about twelve acres of cotton. That year the boll weevil hit South Carolina. We found the cotton squares turning yellow and falling to the ground in great numbers. We picked up squares and burned them, we poisoned the cotton; but our cotton squares continued to fall. That year we made almost no cotton and had no other money crop. It was impossible to make a payment on the farm.
The next year we again planted cotton. What else could we plant? We also planted some truck but there was no aid in marketing it, and so we lost on the produce. We put kero sene on sacks and dragged these sacks across the cotton every week or two to keep the boll weevils away. I remember very well having often found as many as twenty-four boll weevils in one cotton blossom. We were in despair. What could we do? Nothing we tried did any good.
We made no crop to speak of. The creditor offered my father the choice of share cropping or finding some money somewhere. My father was closed out. The next year we lived in poverty, selling everything we could to live on. The next year my father moved to North Carolina and at the age of fifty started life over again at a salary of $60 a month and with six children. My mother cannot bear the idea of a farm since we had so miserably failed, but father wants to try again and is looking for a little farm where he can start the game once more. I like to grow cotton, but I have little faith in it as a money crop.'