For thousands of years, people have farmed the land that is Georgia. Illustration by Garry Pound.

By SHERRI SMITH BROWN

When the first European explorers—probably Hernando DeSoto and his band of Spaniards in 1540—ventured into the land that would become Georgia, they expected to find the forest primeval. Instead, they discovered a land bearing marks of centuries of use by the Indians. Open woodland vistas stood where Indians had burned forests in order to encourage the growth of new vegetation; a network of trails, blazed first by animals and second by man, criss-crossed the region, connecting villages, rivers and streams and ecological signs pointed to centuries of planting. Farming had occurred in this new land ever since man had realized that a seed dropped on the ground would grow.

The Indian Farmers
The Creeks and Cherokees who occupied the land at that time, the Cherokees basically north of the Fall Line and the Creeks to the south, grew many of the crops cultivated by the Mississippian cultures before them (see page XXX). They tilled large fields in the river bottoms and tended garden patches in and around their towns. The Indian farmers grew different varieties of beans and peas, pumpkins, squash, onions, wild greens and tobacco. They hunted turkeys, possums, deer, rabbits, squirrels, ducks, geese and pigeons in the forest and harvested turtles, oysters, crabs, shrimp, clams, catfish, trout, herring mullet and shad from the rivers, streams and ocean. Corn was plentiful.

But the days of Georgia’s first farmers were numbered.

Colonial Farmers
The first Europeans to settle in Georgia came under the auspices of a charter granted by England to the “Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America.” The Trustees were to administer the colony for twenty-one years and then it would revert to the Crown. They named the colony Georgia, in honor of the reigning King George. The English had a three-fold purpose for settling the region: the colony would be a place of new beginnings for England’s deserving poor; it would serve as a buffer between the coastal plantations of the Carolina’s and the Spanish territories of Florida, and it would be an agricultural experiment for producing a valuable range of tropical crops and silk.

From the beginning, these first settlers to Georgia were expected to farm. The Trust made a large grant to each in the form of free passage, equipment and food for the first year, seeds, agricultural implements and a plot of land to cultivate.

Once the settlers founded Savannah on the Savannah River in February 1733, their leader, James Edward Oglethorpe, surveyed and laid out the town in an arrangement of straight streets and open squares. Since it was planned that Georgia’s settlers should be yeoman farmers rather than absentee plantation operators, Oglethorpe allotted each only 50 acres of land, broken into three separate parcels: a small town lot located on one of the squares; a five-acre garden plot near the town limits, and a 45-acre farm lot still farther out from town.

Within a month, Oglethorpe also plotted out the Trustee’s experimental garden. In this garden, the colonial farmers planted oranges, olives, apples, pears, figs vines, pomegranates, cotton, coffee, tea, bamboo and some medicinal plants. An initial condition of land tenure required each colonial family to plant mulberry trees to feed the silkworms they were to raise for producing silk for England.

The Trustees placed a bounty on food crops, including wheat, peas, potatoes and especially, corn--the most important food crop grown. Most early colonial farmers farmed with the simplest of tools--an axe to clear the land, a hoe for cultivating, a spade and a rake. Plows and horses were scarce.

From the first, the Trustees prohibited slavery in the colonies. Morally, they believed it wrong, but also, it was antagonistic to their plan for a Georgia populated by a hard-working yeomanry of small landholders. It did not take long, however, for discontent to grow among the colonists. Other southern colonies had developed lucrative systems of production based on slave labor. Only the largest colonial families could effectively tend to their dispersed land holdings. And toiling in the mosquito infested fields was brutal in the heat and humidity. Eventually, the Trustees relented to the pressures for slavery, but by then it was too late. The relationship between the colonists and the Trust had deteriorated beyond repair, and the Trustees were forced to return the colony’s charter back to the Crown before the end of the 21-year term.

With that, the colonial farmer’s life began to change. Parliament liberalized land grants. Tracts essential for plantation-scale agriculture were more easily acquired. Now, slavery was not only tolerated but clearly encouraged, since a grantee could obtain additional acreage proportional to the number of slaves he brought with his family.

By the late colonial period, the typical inventory of a Georgia coastal farmer included 5 slaves; 300 hundred acres; hoes, axes, hammers and knives; a chisel, auger, whipsaw, cross-cut saw, hand saw and cleaver; 4 drawing knives, eighteen iron wedges and a grinding stone. The farmer had on hand over two hundred pounds of indigo, thirty bushels of corn, five horses and thirty head of range cattle, a horse cart and a saddle, a still, 25,000 shingles and 3 rawhides.

Large rice and indigo plantations rapidly developed along the coast. Rice production demanded tedious labor, skillful management and a heavy outlay of capital. To begin the enterprise, a planter needed an estimated forty slaves, two hundred acres of suitable swamp land, tools, equipment for cleaning and processing and food for the workers’ upkeep for one year. Unlike rice, indigo lent itself to a diversified, family-scale enterprise. A visitor to Jekyll Island in August, 1746, described the highly diversified farm of Major Horton, which was perhaps typical of the small plantation of the period. “A very Large Barnfull of Barley not inferior to ye Barley in England, about 20 Ton of Hay in one Stack, as spacious House & Fine Garden, a plow was going wth. Eight Horses, And above all I saw Eight Acres of Indigo of which he has made a good Quantity...”

The colonial farmers did their work well for the Crown. A 1763 list of Georgia exports consisted of 7,500 barrels of rice, 9,633 pounds of indigo and 1,250 bushels of corn; deer and beaver skins; cowhides, naval stores, timber and “other provisions” amounting to a total value of 27,021 English pounds. Ten years later, the total value of exports had increased almost fivefold and the list had expanded to include sago powder (a starch made from sweet potatoes), beeswax, tallow, hemp, tobacco, salt beef and pork.
By the end of the colonial period, Georgia farmers fell into three groups: small planters, subsistence farmers and plantation owners. The bulk of the colonists were small planters,who usually operated farms of some fifty acres with their families and a handful of slaves, and subsistence farmers, who had even smaller farms and no slaves.

Slaves were concentrated largely on the rice and indigo plantations. The typical plantation owner employed forty to fifty slaves on a landholding of four hundred fifty to five hundred acres. Aside from slavery, the most prominent social development to grow out of plantation agriculture was the rise of a landed aristocracy. This group, which came to make up about 5 percent of the population by the time of the Revolution, owned more than 20 percent of the best productive land and over 50 percent of the slaves. This statistic was one typical of Georgia farming up to the Civil War.

Tenants and Sharecroppers
The end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves was a watershed moment for Georgia agriculture. Fighting and troop movement had destroyed much of the countryside, and Union troops had wrecked the railroads. Confederate money was worthless and three-quarters of the state’s capital, the slaves, no longer existed. To re-build this economy, which had been based on agriculture and slavery, would take many decades and would dominate the life lived by white and black alike. This would be the era of tenant farmers, sharecroppers and the crop-lien system; and it would last until after the Great Depression.

The southern tenancy system of farming was the result of thousands of former slaves and landless whites who had no work nor homes and moniless landowners who were unable to pay their workers. This system allowed workers to be paid with a portion of the crop. Owners, no longer able to operate their plantations without slave labor, divided them into 20-to-40-acre units that could be worked by a farm family. These families, contracted as either tenant farmers or sharecroppers, worked the owner’s land for a specified portion of the crop.

The crop-lien system of credit was where a merchant extended credit to a tenant farmer or sharecropper for seed and fertilizer and even clothing and food in return for a lien or first claim on their portion of the crop. Oftentimes, the merchant was in the form of the landholder who ran a store from what was once the slave commissary.

The farmer’s dependency upon the crop-lien system basically determined his level of tenancy. Very often tenant farmers owned mules or equipment, could supply some portion of seed or fertilizer, could provide their own living necessities and might need little supervision from their landlord. Their portion of the crop might be up to two-thirds of three-fourths. By contrast, the sharecroppers usually owned no workstock or tools and contributed only labor. They were highly supervised by the landowner and were dependent on lien credit for all their necessities. Sharecropping farmers usually received no more than half the crop they worked. Unfortunately, landowners who were hard pressed by taxes, mortgages, production costs and low crop prices could not profit except by cutting into the profits of their tenants.

The tenancy system was at its peak during the first three decades of the twentieth century with these farmers living in a poverty that epitomized the rural South for years. Once in the tenant system, there was little chance of escape. Often after paying the lien, there was little or no profit. Tenants and croppers rarely cleared more than a couple of hundred dollars a year, leaving no choice but to turn to credit again. Many lived in glassless, screenless pine-board cabins in the fields they worked with no electricity, plumbing, wells and privies. They had few household furnishings, stoves, mattresses, clothing or shoes. The poorest croppers lived on salt pork, flour and meal. Few croppers owned cows or poultry nor could they plant a garden: not only were they too tired after a day in the fields but the landowner planted cotton right up to their doorsteps.

Farmers were growing corn, tobacco and peanuts, but cotton was by far the dominant crop. Not only was cotton cultivation labor intensive, it was rapidly depleting the topsoil of its nutrients. Farmers ignored agrarian leaders across the South who warned of cotton’s effect on the soil and of the farmer’s dependency on cash crops. Experiment stations were set up to introduce new farming methods, farm journals promoted plant and animal diversification and cooperative extension services proposed new ways to solve the problems. But despite the efforts of these reformers, markets, transportation, health, educational services and credit were all too inadequate to promote any change.

Georgia’s farm economy set on the brink of disaster throughout this entire period. Draught, flood or even a personal illness or accident could plunge tenants and landowners into economic disaster. A price fluctuation in the world cotton market was enough to produce economic depression in the entire state. The boll weevil attack in the early 1920s devastated families already on the edge of financial collapse causing them to abandon their farms and leave the region. Tenant and sharecropper families loaded down with their few personal belongings and migrating toward cities with hopes of possible jobs was a common sight. Between 1920 and 1925, 3.5 million acres of cotton land were abandoned, and the number of farms in Georgia fell from 310,132 to 249,095.

When the Great Depression hit the country in 1929, many of Georgia’s farmers had already been there for a decade or two.

The Progressive Farmer
In the end, the Depression helped to rid Georgia of the tenancy and crop-lien systems that the boll weevil and farm abandonment had begun. Programs created by the New Deal attacked the plight of Georgia farmers just as they helped all Americans. Credit was easier to obtain, allowing tenant farmers and sharecroppers to depend less on the crop-lien. The federal government began paying landowning farmers to restrict their production of certain crops which were glutting the market. With the crop reduction monies they received, farmers had the capital needed to buy tractors, milk machines, corn pickers and grain combines. Both of these factors decreased the number of workers needed to farm the land, which forced more and more laborers away from the farms and into the cities where they could find New Deal-created jobs. In the end, this was better for the laborers and further twindled the surplus of workers, which had created the tenancy system in the first place.

This would be the beginning of massive changes to agriculture in Georgia as well as the rest of the south. Mechanization was the most revolutionary. In 1920 only about 1 percent of the farmers in the eleven cotton states had a tractor. From the 1930s onward, the number of tractors owned by farmers steadily increased.

Mechanization of the cotton harvest had been one of the most perplexing technological problems in southern agriculture. In 1941, International Harvester Company built the first practical spindle picker. Mechanical pickers also harvested citrus fruits, and eight-row planters seeded the cotton crop.

World War II drew so many men and women to the armed services or industrial war-time jobs that it forced landowners to mechanize even more. At the end of the war, these men and women who had left the farm never returned. They now had the skills to seek employment elsewhere. The tenant farmer and sharecropper period of Southern agriculture had finally ended.

Tractor power now completely replaced human and animal muscle. The cotton picker came into general use. Landowners began hiring paid laborers to meet their more limited labor needs. Farmers could buy and farm larger tracts of land, using a lot less labor. As they had done for years, state and federal agencies continued to encourage agricultural diversification. Farmers started to listen and began to specialize.

Georgia farmers looked to peaches and peanuts--two crops that would become important to the state’s agricultural system. Tobacco became more important and livestock rearing, dairying and chicken and egg production got underway. Cotton production moved into western states, and new crops, such as soybeans and peanuts, replaced King Cotton in many Georgia fields.

Scientific farming became accepted and necessary to survive in the new environment. Chemical weed control and crop and livestock diversification made farming less labor-intensive. Better roads and transportation systems opened up more markets for farmers.

After World War II, the Rural Electrification Administration concentrated on delivering electricity to rural areas. Electricity not only brought running water, lights, indoor toilets and radio to Georgia farmers it also brought refrigeration--enabling dairy farming and poultry production to expand. As farm incomes rose, decent housing, schools and health facilities became a reality for Georgia farmers.

From 1949 to 1969, the number of farm families in Georgia dropped from 220,000 to 47,000. The remaining farmers tended to specialize. In 1970, soybeans and peanuts combined with traditional row crops like corn, cotton and tobacco to make up one-third of Georgia’s farm income. Poultry accounted for one-third and livestock, dairying, fruit and other specialty products combined for the other one/third.

By the late 1970s, tractors, combines, corn pickers or picker-shellers, pickup baler and field forage harvesters were common on Georgia farms.

Mechanization had resulted in fewer and fewer farm workers producing more and more.

Agribusiness
In 1955 the term agribusiness was coined to describe the vertical integration of agriculture through a company’s control of the production, processing and marketing of farm products. The term also includes industries that supply goods or services for agricultural production.

In the 1970s agribusiness became one of the major foundations for the economic prosperity of the Sunbelt. Mechanization, the emergence of large farm units, the loss of farm labor, crop diversification and changes in government farm policy have all contributed to the rise of agribusiness in the Georgia as well as the rest of the South.

Contract farming is a characteristic of agribusiness. An agricultural business contracts with individual farmers to produce and deliver produce for a set price. Then the company processes the farm commodity and distributes it for sale.

Agribusiness has transformed much of South Georgia into agricultural operations thousands of acres in size, devoted to major row crops like cotton, peanuts and soybeans. Some farms remain in the hands of multi-generational farm families. Others have become the property of non-resident corporations, large conglomerates such as Dole, Heinz or other agribusiness relating to the animal feed or food process industries that hire corporate farmers to run the operations.

More and more farmers now specialize, producing what the market demands--Culinary herbs, wild rice, ostrich, catfish and alligator. Poultry farmers produce thousands of chickens daily and rely on the agribusiness system to deliver their commodities to consumers concentrated in far-off large cities. In the 1970s Gold Kist, an Atlanta corporation, became one of the leading corporate producers, processors and distributors of poultry in the South.

In the 1970s agribusiness became one of the major foundations for the economic prosperity of the Sunbelt. Mechanization, the emergence of large farm units, the loss of farm labor, crop diversification and changes in government farm policy have all contributed to the rise of agribusiness in the Georgia as well as the rest of the South.

Agriculture today is not just about farming; it’s about feeding the nation. The concept of agribusiness reflects a trend that is steadily rising: farm operations involving larger numbers of people with only a small percentage of them actually raising livestock
or farming the land.

From The Best of Georgia Farms Cookbook and Tour Book by Fred Brown and Sherri Smith Brown.
 

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