Body Of State Research Articles

Land Improvement vs. Land Settlement for the Southeast

In the absence of a developed body of land policies, either Federal or state, it is frequently assumed that land improvement and development implies or will bring about physical and economic opportunities for creating new farms. The fallacy of this assumption is particularly evident when the aims and suggestions of current national land-settlement proposals2 and reports are applied to the Southeast. Here the general acceptance of this faulty concept would not only greatly damage the economic position of the present agriculture and general economy but would add long-term maladjustments, the elimination of which would require years of effort and great expense. The success of Southeastern agriculture clearly depends upon successful plans for reducing the number of subsistence farms, raising the level of efficiency of commercial farms (usually through enlargement of operations), and reducing the number and proportion of unskilled laborers dependent on agriculture. A realistic attack upon these basic problems will require carefully integrated programs of resource improvement and development; a redistribution of agricultural resources and incomes among the race and tenure groups; control of land prices; promotion of more desirable farm tenure; and, perhaps most important, development of vocations and skills leading to a more efficient type of labor, with different work habits and wider adaptability. Both the nature of these agricultural problems and the character of the measures appropriate to their solution make it desirable that the number of farms and the proportion of the total population permanently engaged in agriculture in the Southeast be reduced, perhaps by one-third of the farm population reported in the 1940 census.3 Insofar as veteran-settlement or other types of back-to-the-land movements envision an increase in the number of farm units in the Southeast, or an increase in the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture, they violate all the desirable goals and trends for which Southern agriculturists have been working. They violate also all recorded economic and sociologic bases for evaluating resource settings essential to successful farm operation.