p for
the next fifty years, will surely prove disastrous to the South.

Practically all the land in the black belt of the South is cultivated by
Negroes and the farm production has decreased so rapidly during the last
ten or fifteen years that the average Negro farmer hardly makes
sufficient to pay his rent and buy the few necessaries of life.

Of course, here and there where a tenant has been lucky enough to get
hold of some new land, he makes a good crop, but after three or four
years of cultivation, his crop begins to decrease and this decrease is
kept up as long as he keeps the land. Instead of improving, the tenant's
condition becomes worse each year until he finds it impossible to
support his family on the farm. Farm after farm is being abandoned or
given up to the care of the old men and women. Already, most of these
are too old and feeble to do effective work.

Now, the chief cause of these farms becoming less productive is the
failure on the part of the farmers to add something to the land after
they have gathered their crops. They seem to think that the land
contains an inexhaustible supply of plant food. Another cause is the
failure of the farmer to rotate his crop. There are farms being
cultivated in the South today where the same piece of land has been
planted in cotton every year for forty or fifty years. Forty years ago,
this same land would yield from one bale to one and a half per acre. And
today it will take from four to six acres to produce one bale.

Still another cause for the deterioration of the soil is erosion. There
is no effort put forth on the tenant's part to prevent his farm from
washing away. The hillside and other rolling lands are not terraced and
after being in use four or five years, practically all of these lands
are washed away and as farm lands they are abandoned. Not only are the
hillside lands unprotected from the beating rains and flowing streams,
but the bottom or lowlands are not properly drained, and the sand
washed down from the hill, the chaff and raft from previous rains soon
fill the ditches and creeks and almost any ordinary rain will cause an
overflow of these streams.

Under these conditions an average crop is impossible even in the best of
years. At present the South does not produce one-half of the foodstuff
that it consumes and if the present conditions of things continue for
the next fifty years, this section of the country will be on the verge
of starvation and