The Southeast

The Central Basin

For almost 200 years of American settlement, the only way to make a new farm was by clearing the forest. It was a long, hard job. Many of the trees were giants. At best, a farmer could hope to clea; only about 2.5 acres each year. But after years of such effort — with a little more land cleared each season — a good-sized farm finally emerged among the tall trees. When new settlers arrived in great numbers, this cleared land became very valuable. The first frontier farmers, those with true pioneer zeal, would then sell the farm, buy better cattle and equipment, and move on again westward. In this way, the farmer's labor created capital for an expanding agriculture.

The prairie soil of the Central Basin was much richer than most of the forest land. The part of it where corn is grown is called the Corn Belt. On hot, still midsummer nights in the Corn Belt, the farmers insist they can hear the corn growing. The crop grows fast, sometimes a few inches during a night.

Corn is the most important of all American crops, as basic to American agriculture as iron is to American industry. Probably one of the United States' greatest resources is its ability to grow great quantities of corn. Most of the yield — some three-fourths of it — is used to feed livestock. Corn also has proven to be an astonishingly versatile industrial material. From a corn distilling process manufacturers extract alco­hol-fuel, or gasohol, used in many farm vehicles and growing numbers of cars.

Until recently, most of the farmers in the Central Basin practiced "general farming", that is, the family produced as much of its own food and equipment as possible, and sold whatever remained to buy things it could not raise or make. Today, however, nearly all the farm families in the Central Basin do "commercial farming"; they grow crops exclusively for sale and not for their own consumption. This change from general farming to commercial farming represents another kind of agricultural revolution typified by a decline in the number of farm families and an increase in the size of farms.

The economy of the Southeast was predominantly agricultural for a longer period than in the Northeast, as its rich soil and ideal climate allowed to make great wealth with such crops as, predominantly, cotton and also tobacco, rice and indigo. Cotton was a crop supremely suited for the South. Until 1861 many farmers grew this single crop mainly with the help of slave labor. At first this labor was supplied by the slave trade from Africa. After the slave trade was abolished in 1808, the natural population increase of slaves continued to provide workers for the cotton fields.

Land might wear out and decline in value, the price of cotton might be low, as it was in the five years preceding the Civil War of 1861—65, but the value of slaves kept climbing as a profit could be made only with slave labor. When cotton kingdom ceased to expand, slavery was doomed.

When the war ended and the slaves were freed, the economic pattern was not really changed for either blacks or whites. The people could only turn to the resources they knew best. And so the mining of the soil continued until the land was producing only one fourth of what the fresh land had given.

Then the crops were affected by an insect and the people of the area had to switch to dairying⁷ and to raising peanuts, oranges, and melons. The new farming turned out to be more profitable than even cotton. In this way diversification of the Southern economy began. The government often programmed farming activities to avoid ex­hausting the soil and to apply conservation programs for the area. Besides, industry was added to agriculture, and all this considerably changed the character of the economy there.

People themselves also tried to assume a rational attitude to the area's resources. In Alabama three brothers acquired a lumber mill that had already depleted most of the surrounding forest. The remaining trees were enough to keep the mill busy only eight years longer. But the brothers had new ideas, and today the mill is cutting more wood than it ever did in the old days. The supply may continue forever because the forest has become a carefully managed "tree farm". Not only have the brothers grown new trees to replace the old ones, but they have also been instrumental in spreading "tree farming" to land that could no longer grow cotton.

Although cotton is still the principal crop of the South, cotton picking has become mechanical. In addition to the steel industry there are farm machinery and toolmaking plants in the South.

An important project was the development of the Tennessee Valley which is adjacent to the Tennessee River, part of the Mississippi drainage system. Thirty-six major dams were built to control the waters of the main stream and its five principal branches. It helped to control floods, improve river shipping, develop electric power, improve the use of the land along the shores, and improve the economic and social conditions of the people living in the basin.

Дата добавления: 2015-04-24