HEALTH CARE

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 5, 1979, pp. 22-23

When your school-age child walks out the door, armed with books and lunch money, will that money be spent on the food in the lunch line, or will it be spent on other snacks, instead?

That is one of the issues to be aired in a series of three public meetings to be sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture early in 1979. The meetings, to be held in Nashville, Detroit and Seattle, are the result of enormous public response, both supportive and critical, of a proposal by the Agriculture Department to restrict the sale of certain foods.

In April 1978, the Department of Agriculture proposed to restrict the sale of so-called “competitive foods” in schools until after the last lunch period.

“Competitive foods” are defined as any food sold in competition with federally-subsidized school food programs. They may be sold from vending machines, in a la carte cafeteria lines, or at separate snack bars. The restricted foods were to include candy, soda water, frozen desserts and chewing gum.

The lunch program, in addition to making use of farm surpluses, has always had two goals: to feed children a balanced meal and to teach them good eating habits. These goals are not being met, according to many concerned partnts and nutrition specialists.

Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Carol Tucker Foreman has announced the withdrawal of that proposal and has scheduled the public meetings to allow additional public scrutiny of and comment on the issue surrounding the competitive foods questions.

“Seeking public opinion before drafting new regulations underscores our commitment to broader public participation in the decision-making process of government,” Foreman said.

Specifically, the meetings will focus on standards on which to base a regulation, related to the following four topics: (I) nutrition education; (2) health; (3) eating habits; and (4) local administration and impact.

The lunch program, in addition to making use of farm surpluses, has always had two goals: to feed children

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a balanced meal and to teach them good eating habits. These goals are not being met, according to many concerned parents and nutrition specialists.

Another issue, however, surfaced in schools whereby profits from the sale of competitive foods are used to buy band uniforms and/or support school social activities.

“Restriction would mean we wouldn’t have enough money for any activities,” says Lilly Fulton, a student council advisor. “We have to look at the positive aspects of well-financed and wellattended activities for the students.”

One of the other important issues is the impact of competitive foods on nutrition education. The Department wants to find out whether children get nutritional “messages” from the availability of competitive foods. They will seek public comment on how this affects children’s eating habits.

Students express the opinion that they have a right to choose their own diets. One girl writes, “I think the government should leave the so-called junk food alone because if we want to get rotten teeth or stomach aches … I think they should let us. We are old enough to know better.”

Nutrition experts disagree. Most maintain that schools should set an example in proper diet, encouraging students to develop healthier tastes in food.

Concerned supporters of the proposal also encourage restrictions on potato chips, pastries and uncarbonated drinks. One South Carolina food supervisor states, “This has definitely hurt our lunch participation. We cannot compete with potato chips, candy bars and soft drinks.”

A Texas cafeteria worker agrees. “What troubles me most is that we give the low-income children free and reduced lunches because they are not supposed to be able to afford the lunch. Then they go through the line and get their tray and throw all or most of it away and go to the machines and buy junk food for their lunch.”

The medical profession also supports the proposed restrictions. Many dentists said that foods with a high sugar content caused dental caries among school children. Some doctors warned that poor eating habits acquired early in life could increase the risk of diseases associated with poor nutrition.

The strongest objections to the proposal, however, do not seem to deal with its relative medical merits. Opponents to the action apparently resent government intrusion into the issue. A Garland, Texas, man says, “The right to sell competitive foods in schools is not a federal issue. It is a local right and a local responsibility.”

On the local level, where restrictions have been enforced, positive results have been obtained. In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the food service director found that “lunch sales rose by 11 percent after the County Board of Education banned minimally nutritious foods from sale during lunch time.”

The effect of the restrictions on plate waste is certainly a factor. Chocolate Manufacturers’ Association of America President Richard T. O’Connell maintains that competitive foods do not affect plate waste. He cites a U.S.D.A. study that does not attribute competitive foods as the cause of waste.

Others take a stance of compromise on the issue. “I would support a ban on sales until after the lunch hour,” says one mother, “and whenever such foods are sold, the selection should include nutritious foods such as apples, nuts, raisins, or yogurt.”

Perhaps the issue is most clearly seen by a Memphis, Tennessee, eighth grader, who writes: “We would love to have orange juice and many other kinds of juice to drink instead of soft drinks. It tastes better and fills you up more, but every time we go to buy some, it’s always empty.

“The school lunch is over-priced and raunchy tasting. So we buy potato chips and nutty bars, but it’s not by choice. If the Memphis board would get some cooks that could cook, we would eat the food. Because of the malnutrition and no food, we all have colds or sore throats. I just wanted you to know this … Hang in there and help us, please.”

The U.S.D.A. welcomes further comment on the competitive food issue. Written opinions should be sent to Margaret Glavin, Director, School Programs Division, Food Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. 20250.

A printed discussion of the topics to be considered at the meetings is available from Ms. Glavin on request. Anyone wishing to speak at the Nashville meeting should contact:

David Alspach or Edward Hightower Food and Nutrition Service U.S. Department of Agriculture 1100 Spring Street Atlanta, Ga. 30309 Phone: (404) 881-4259 Nashville residents call: (415) 251-5758

Black Farmers: A Vanishing Breed

By Robert M. Press

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 5-7

Bolivar County, Mississippi-Mary Coleman hunches over, shucking corn on the wooden porch of the small crossroads grocery store she runs here. Weedcroppers from the cotton fields will stop in around noon to buy cold bottles of sodapop, crackers, and Vienna sausage.

Houston Coleman, her son, has come by to talk to this reporter about the problems he and other Black farmers are having. He is a big man, dressed in gray slacks, a long-sleeved shirt, and mud-spattered black street shoes. He wears a straw cowboy hat and talks in a booming voice.

“At one time we had too much rain; next it was dry,” he says, recalling the past several years.

“That puts you in the hole. You keep borrowing and borrowing. Then you have a bad crop and next year you have to go back and borrow again.”

In 1976 the Coleman family could not get a bank loan or a federal farm loan, even though they had been consistently paying off their old debts. They were told their “payback ability” was not good enough, says Mary Coleman. “But it was all because we were Black,” she contends.

Just when things began to look desperate, the Atlanta-based Emergency Land Fund (ELF) loaned them $12,000 which the Colemans have since paid back.

The aim of ELF is to help Blacks keep their farmland a challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent.

During bad times, a lot of Black farmers in the area have quit or rented out, says Coleman, who now owns about 300 acres, which he farms in cotton and soybeans.

He swings into his pickup and we drive down a gravel road, then turn onto a dirt track bordering his cotton field.

Several adults and a few children – including his nephew – are hoeing weeds among the long lines of green cotton plants. Coleman lifts a big jug of ice water from the pickup and sets it down for the workers – all of them Black.

It is in the upper 90s. No clouds.

Houston Coleman picks up a hoe and starts chopping at some weeds among the cotton. “A lot of Black folks have sold their land,” he says. “Now they’re up North and they want to come home and they ain’t got no home to come to.”

Black farmers are a vanishing breed in the U.S.

A new federal analysis shows the number of Black farm operators declining by 90 percent since 1950, compared to a 54 percent drop among White farmers.

In the same period, the amount of Black-owned farmland has fallen by some 70 percent to less than one-half of 1 percent of total U.S. farmland. The amount of agricultural land owned by Whites has increased slightly since 1950, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) analysis based on 1974 Census Bureau figures.

The number of Black farm operators, according to the analysis, dropped from about 550,000 in 1950 to 53,000 in 1974. The number of tenant farmers also has been falling.

In 1950, Blacks owned some 12.5 million acres of farmland, almost all of it in the South, compared to 3.8 million in 1974. Whites, in the same period, increased their

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farm holdings from 825 million to 887 million.

The federal figures reveal an even greater loss of Black-owned farmland than ELF has been citing.

ELF steps in when other loan sources, such as banks or the federal government, refuse to take the risk of lending to Black farmers. It also offers legal aid to help Black families keep ownership of land.

In Mississippi, the state with the most Black farmers, Blacks got FmHA operating loans (for seeds, fertilizer, and equipment) of $2,746,000, while Whites got $21,029,000, in fiscal year 1975, according to USDA figures cited by ELF.

The total FmHA loans for the same period for purchase of land and for development were: Whites $9,852,000; Blacks $662,000.

Department of Commerce statistics for 1974 show that in Mississippi there were 32,061 White-owned farms and 6,387 Black-owned farms.

Edward Pennick, ELF director, says the Carter administration’s “rhetoric” on helping Black farmers has been good, but tangible action is missing. He wants more Black lending agents in the FmHA, but the FmHA’s Pickinpaugh says there are few positions available.

And the problem is not limited to loans.

Some Black farmers in South Carolina suspected prejudice when graders at a White-run packing shed kept giving them less than the top grade (and hence less money) for their tomatoes. When they formed their own packing cooperative, other certified graders gave their tomatoes top rating, says Edgar Jordan, of the Southern Cooperative Development Fund in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Poor farm management. Many Blacks fail to look at farming as a business, says Jordan. They have “poor record keeping, poor farm management,” he says.

Many of the South’s Black farmers have not learned new technology,” he adds. This is also true of poor White farmers in the regions, he says.

One thing that would help, he suggests, is formation of more cooperatives for sharing equipment and marketing.

Sale of land by inheritors. Farmland in most Southern states is inherited under a legal arrangement that gives each heir an interest in the entire farm rather than a piece of land for himself. But any one heir can sell his interest or petition a court to order sale of the land so that proceeds may be divided up equally among heirs. It is one way to turn an asset into cash.

The problem arises when not all the heirs agree to the sale – or are even aware of it. This situation occurs most commonly among Blacks.

Often heirs have the false impression nothing can be done to their land unless all the heirs agree. But that is not the case, says ELF director Pennick.

Attorneys’ fees in Alabama for handling such sales can be as much as 10 percent of the value of the sale.

Inheritances often are further complicated by lack of a detailed will, says Joe Adams, of the ELF branch in Mississippi.

A case now before the Alabama Supreme Court challenges the constitutionality of such proceedings. In that case, one of more than 75 heirs to the English family farm of some 300 acres, much of it in timber, asked the court to sell the land and divide the proceeds. The other heirs objected to the sale. (A White attorney bought the interest of the selling heir before the sale but asked that the sale proceed.)

Behind the Black exodus from the farm lie the voluntary decisions of many rural Black families to search for a better life in the city. But it is argued that many Black farmers would have stayed on their land if they had been able to improve their income.

Median income among White farmers (in constant 1975 dollars) increased from $9,730 in 1970 to $11,237 in 1975, but Black median farm income rose only from $4,278 to $4,857, according to USDA figures.

Blacks, much more than Whites, tend to have smaller farms and fewer outside sources of income. They are more vulnerable during periods of sharp increase in farm operating expenses and during periods of bad crops.

“The problem is the bad years,” explains James Carmicle, a Black Mississippi delta farmer. “Just when you’ve met the high production costs,” he continues, prices for crops drop “and you can’t make it.”

Carmicle owns 53 acres and rents another 70. One 40acre plot he works carries three deeds his own and those of his two sisters. “I work hard all year, then at the end of the year I can’t meet obligations,” he laments.

ELF and others point to these problems contributing to the Black departure from the farm:

1. Prejudice in making loans to Black farmers.

2. Poor management of Black farms.

3. Sale of Black farmland by one of the heirs without consent, or sometimes even knowledge, of the other heirs.

4. Sale of Black-owned farmland for unpaid taxes.

What is needed, they say, are fairer lending practices, including appointment of more Black lending supervisors in the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), more technical aid to Black farmers, and a change in state laws to make sales of farmland fairer to all involved.

Some help for small farmers is pending.

Congress is in the final stages of approving a bill to allow the FmHA to make loans to small farmers at 5 percent instead of the current interest rate of about 8 percent.

And the USDA is sponsoring several conferences over the next few months at which top department officials will meet small farmers and become better acquainted with

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their needs.

But on the main problems outlined by ELF, progress is slow:

Prejudice. Although its contention is difficult to prove, ELF asserts that Black farmers with small landholdings have a harder time getting loans than White farmers of similar circumstances.

“In some cases we’ve found this to be true,” says Lynn Pickinpaugh, new director of the FmHA’s production loan division. Complaints are investigated, but no large-scale discrimination against Blacks has been found, he asserts.

“Many times they say it is discrimination and it is other reasons,” says Pickinpaugh.

Speaking of what he has seen in the Mississippi delta, cotton farmer Houston Coleman says: “Most of the White folks are in the office – and they know what’s going on. Even if you qualify, a White man can run in there and grap a stipulation and twist it the way he wants to.”

Sale has been blocked until the appeal is heard.

Attorney Michael Figures, of Mobile, Alabama, representing the other heirs, contends such sales should not be allowed until any heir who wants to retain the land has been given first chance to do so. The same person should be given the right to buy out the others, he adds.

Tax sales. If a Black family living in Chicago, for example, inherits farmland in the South, the Southern county tax office might have lost track of them. An heir still living on the land may falsely assume he does not have to pay the entire bill until he is notified of long overdue taxes and forced to sell.

Notice for tax sales in some states is made only in the local newspapers, so distant heirs may never hear of the sale.

Once sold, owners often “redeem” the land. This means they can repurchase the land during a redemption period under conditions that vary from state to state. In Mississippi, for instance, the conditions include paying back the taxes, the cost of the sale, and interest on the unpaid taxes.

The redemption process is not always easy and takes time and added expense. One improvement, says Figures, would be to assure that any inheritor living on the land be given immediate right to repurchase it by himself, to the exclusion of the other heirs.

ELF has been operating a tax watch to alert heirs of pending sales. In Mississippi, says Adams, fewer Blacks are losing their farmland today as a result of tax-sales.

Robert Press is a staff correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor.

Reprinted by permission from The Christian Science Monitor. c 1978: The Christian Science Publishing Society. All rights reserved.

Solar Greenhouses: The Greening of the South

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1979 pp. 8-10

Publisher’s Note: I was in no mood to he convinced when Bill Dow began to explain his idea last year. As he sat with his legs draped around one of my office chairs, I wondered what kind of bedside manner I was about to experience from this physician who prefers T-shirts and tennis shoes as work garments.

There was a twinkle in his eyes, shielded only in part by the horned-rimmed glasses which kept poking back towards his forehead. Apparently, as a part of his ceremony, he scratched his head and asked, as if both of us might figure out the answer, “What could cut your heating bill 25-45 percent, produce some vegetables and fruit year-round, and only cost about $400?” “I thought we were going to talk about issues of health care or jobs…” Bill didn’t wait for the completion of the sentence. Just as well. He asked another question more direct: “Why not attach a greenhouse to your home, grow some vegetables in it, and use the warm air to heat your house in the winter?” A greenhouse onto my house. Fine, Bill, but what does this have to do with heating bills and food? “It’s all the same thing,” he said, with an arch in his voice and a shift in his chair. I knew then that he was going to enjoy this conversation:

Suitts: Okay, let’s see if you’re serious. Give me the basics.

Dow: While everybody else is talking about elaborate technology and fancy solar energy equipment, there’s something simple that a lot of folks can do that involves greenhouses. You know even in the winter a greenhouse overheats in the daytime and is generally ventilated to keep the temperature down in the low 80s. With a solar greenhouse, instead of ventilating the hot air to the outside, just allow the air into the house when it’s needed.

Suitts: That’s why you said solar greenhouse.

Dow: Yes. Not only would it act as a solar collector for heating the house during the day, but it also would contain heat storage devices so that the excess heat can in part he stored and then released at night. Then you have a heat source that can be used to maintain temperature.

Suitts: I think it’s going to be complicated.

Dow: Not at all. Let’s take it in steps. First, a greenhouse is to be attached to the south side of the dwelling. Obviously, you place the greenhouse at that location so that it can receive the full benefit of the sun from the east in the morning, from the south at midday, and the west in the evening. At the same time, the dwelling serves as an insulation and a barrier to the north which would be the side through which ordinarily the heat would escape during the winter days.

Suitts: Simple enough.

Dow: Yes, and there’s more. The second reason you place it on the south side is because the sun is lower on the southern horizon in the winter than in the summer. The fact is that much more heat passes through a surface when it strikes the surface on the perpendicular. Thus, in the winter, the greenhouse would give maximum heating potential because on the south side it would be perpendicular to the sun’s rays. Even at the coldest points in winter, the attached greenhouse on the south side could generate 900 heat with the winter sun.

Suitts: Okay. There’s heat in the greenhouse. Won’t it escape?

Dow: The storage of the heat can be accomplished in several ways. The two major types of storage are in the floor and in water. The floor of the greenhouse can be, for example, concrete slabs or gravel, each of which can heat up during the day either from direct sunlight or contact with the air. Then after sundown, the floor will gradually give up its heat to the greenhouse helping maintain the temperature. The storage of heat can also take place by placing water in various containers in the greenhouse. This is often done in 55-gallon milk containers. In either case, the principle is the same, the water heats up during the day and gives off heat at night. Thereby, you can store heat to

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warm the temperature in the night.

Suitts: Still, don’t you have to do anything else to prevent the heat from escaping?

Dow: Well, all the walls not covered with transparent material should be heavily insulated. The transparent “skin” or covering should be a double layer. The two layers, with air between, provide some insulation. The outside layer is usually a fiberglass acrylic material and the inside covering a polyethylene sheet. There are different types of covering on the market and the materials can vary.

Suitts: Tell me, what do we do with the hot air that we’ve got in the greenhouse? Carry me one step further.

Dow: Rather than venting the hot air which you have stored in the greenhouse to the outside, on the cold days of fall, winter, or spring, the warm air can be allowed to move into the adjacent house or building. Hot air moves to cold, you know, and by opening a window or a door from the greenhouse into the house, the warm air from the greenhouse will naturally move into the house. With an opening such as a door, the cold air off the floor will move into the greenhouse as the warmer air higher up in the greenhouse moves to the upper part of the door and into your house. If the opening is only a window, then the air can enter the greenhouse from a duct off the house floor to the greenhouse or from crawling space under the house and upon heating enter through the window.

Suitts: That sounds more like a doctor’s explanation of the respiratory tract. Are you sure about that?

Dow: A friend of mine in Durham, N.C., John Hatch, has a 8 X 16 greenhouse attached to his first floor with a sliding glass door. The living quarters are on the second floor. Throughout the winter, Hatch is able to turn off his heat at 9:00 a.m. and turn it on again a half-hour after sundown. Some people have used a fan to help move the warm air into the house. Same is true for heating the greenhouse at night. Some people use the passive heat of the storage facilities and others actively heat their greenhouses at night. An 8 X 16 solar greenhouse in Pittsboro, N.C., with seven 55-gallon drums of water storage, never got below 530 during this past winter. And that was without any additional heating and some very cold weather.

Suitts: What if the sun doesn’t shine for three or four days or a week?

Dow: If one is growing vegetables or plants sensitive to the cold and cannot be moved into the house, then there will be a need for a back-up heating system. This in all likelihood will simply mean leaving the opening to the house open so that heat from the house will hold the temperature up. The alternative which many people use is to simply put a heating unit in the greenhouse usually an electric heater or a wood stove. Another alternative some are using is to compost in an area adjacent to the greenhouse and utilize the heat given off by the compost.

Suitts: What about summer?

Dow: Indeed, the greenhouses do get hot in the summertime. However, adequate venting of the inside temperature will make it approximate the outside temperature. If this develops into a significant problem, a turbine vent can be put on the roof of the greenhouse. The turbine vents move a great deal of air and should hold the inside temperature about equal to the outside temperature.

Suitts: Bill, I gather this is where the business of growing the vegetables comes in.

Dow: Right. The food producing potential really is limited only by space and the grower. Many vegetables, such as tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, turnips, spinach, onions, and others can be grown. Fruits, too. The greenhouse may serve to prolong the fall and help the spring start earlier. This also means that one can start seedlings which can be transplanted to an outside garden later. Houseplants, obviously, can also be grown in the greenhouse.

Dow: Oh yes, and then there’s fish.

Suitts: If you are going to tell me some story about how to multiply fish and loaves, I’m ready to declare it a miracle.

Dow: Seriously, there are several places in the country where people are experimenting with using water for storing heat and growing fish. And these are edible fish, not the aquarium sort.

Suitts: It sounds impressive, exciting; however, I go back to the beginning. Am I going to give up an arm and a leg to get a greenhouse built? For myself, I’ve never built a greenhouse and really wouldn’t know where to begin.

Dow: Actually, it’s very simple and if you just know the basics about carpentry and do a little reasoning and reading, the task is hardly insurmountable. There are several good reference books I’d suggest you might want to look at – studying some details in each of them. (References listed at the end). In total, the parts and materials will be around $400-$500.

Suitts: It’s such a simple idea and really very exciting. I suppose it has a great deal of potential.

Dow: These greenhouses can be very important to folks with a little money and a lot of time. Where the government is spending millions of dollars to help poor and low-income families cut down on their heating costs, perhaps they ought to think about this idea as a means for “weatherization.”

I don’t want to take us too far. But, there is a possibility of some jobs being generated here. This kind of building can be done by the hard-core, unemployed young whose skills are not yet developed. In rural areas in the South, young folks could build greenhouses in jobs programs for the elderly and the disabled and get some valuable skills which could be used in later life. Actually, the ideal people for this task would be the small and subsistence farmers who need supplemental income. This type work would allow the time needed for agricultural pursuits. The actual building can be done in three to four days.

Farmers have the basic construction and horticultural skill already. With some basic theory and design, background and information they should be able to get into this developing trade. Perhaps, with time this could be expanded to include other forms of solars and appropriate technology installation and maintenance. At the very least, the added income could help maintain these farmers on their farms rather than have them join so many already severed from their land.

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There are still some questions to be answered before the scale of this kind of project gets massive. True, the technology is simple and the undertaking is relatively inexpensive as a means of partially heating a house and producing food. Still, we don’t know precisely how much heat savings or food can be generated. We don’t know exactly what the cost efficiency comes to be. There’s a need for more data and more experience. I don’t mean that the question at this point is will it work. Rather, the question is how well will it work given certain conditions, such as the type of weather or the floor space to be heated in the house. Also, how well does it work in urban areas compared to rural; in the South, West, or even the North.

When you think about it, however, the possibilities may extend a long way. For instance, could the increase in humidity in the house coming from the greenhouse alleviate many of the upper respiratory tract problems which are bothering people in the wintertime because of dry house heat? Also, what about reducing stress? When people become more vulnerable to social and economic pressures, they become more susceptible to disease. So, it might he possible that a solar greenhouse which reduces heat arid produces food, could help somebody feel more self-sufficient, self-reliant, and make them less susceptible to disease. Maybe…

Suitts: Wait a minute. Let’s not put too much of the potential before the fact now. Come back to the ground floor. Where do we go from here?

Dow: For folks with money and the inclination to try it, they can begin to follow up on the idea for themselves. For those with no money – and these are really the people who might be helped the most – lending institutions, governments, churches, and foundations are going to need to make some money available for some exploration and demonstrations of how it all works. No matter how you look at it, it can’t be a bad return on the dollar: heat, food, possibly jobs, and perhaps improved health – all for a little time and a little more floor space in your house.

For information or inquiries, write Bill Dow, SRC, 75 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

REFERENCES:

The Food and Heat Producing Solar Greenhouse. Fisher Yanda; Building Using Our Sun-Heated Greenhouse, Helen Scott Nearing; The Solar Greenhouse Book, James C. McCullogh; “Organic Gardening Farming” magazine. December 1977.

URBAN AND RURAL DEVELOPMENT

By Diane Johnston

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 26

“…they were ready to face the odds and fight for what they fervently believe in — the future of the family farmer.” That was how Atlanta Journal reporter Charles Seabrook described the atmosphere surrounding the American Agricultural Movement’s (AAM) tractorcade to the nation’s capitol this January. It was the farmers’ second trip to Washington to protest what they felt were unjustly low farm incomes. En route in January, the Southern contingent of the AAM stopped by the Southern Regional Council’s office to hold a press briefing for the Atlanta media. It was an attempt on their part to help the media understand their complaints and to offer them an opportunity to explain their position relative to the rest of the nation as consumers.

Those present included Alvin Jenkins of Colorado, one of the AAM’s four founders, and Tommy Kersey of Unadilla, Georgia. Kersey is considered to be the head of the Georgia Agricultural Movement. They were accompanied by a handful of other AAM members, from Alabama, Texas, and even Montana.

During the two-hour press session, the farmers presented their grievances. Basing their case on the need to preserve the family farm, they explained what they felt is happening to traditional agriculture today.

The small farms, according to the Movement, are being taken over and bought out by large conglomerates. These “agribusinesses” can raise food prices beyond the consumers’ control, while small farmers can help moderate prices, the representatives of the group told those present. They explained that it is the middleman: the food processor/distributor, who is raising the nation’s food bills. The farmers called upon consumers to join together with farmers to combat the unnecessary inflation that occurs between the time the produce leaves the farm and when it is purchased by the consumer.

The AAM also called for increased income to farmers. Objecting to their stereotyped “country hick” image, they said they have a right to own other commodities, just as American city or suburban dwellers do. But with current low farm incomes, and high land and machinery costs, the farmers say it is difficult to make ends meet, much less have extra money left over to spend on leisure activities.

Alvin Jenkins explained that with the current land and equipment inflation rates, his college-age son could start a farm, and with working more than eight hours a day, seven days a week, without a vacation, he would still never break even. At the same time, Jenkins’ daughter could get a forty-hour a week job in a professional field, get three weeks’ vacation and bring in a sizable income. Jenkins explained that this is very disheartening for the farmer who would like to see his offspring carry on the family tradition.

The farmers also suggested that, with 70 percent of America’s farm families deriving some income from off-farm sources, higher farm incomes would have another benefit. With better farm profits, off-farm workers could quit their jobs and return to the farm, thus opening job opportunities for others. Conversely, if farm prices continue their current trends, rural families will be forced to leave their land and emigrate to the cities. There, the AAM says, they will find themselves unemployed, with little else to do but join the Welfare rolls.

The American Agricultural Movement representatives outlined their plan to increase farmers’ wages. In addition to eliminating the middleman, the AAM calls for the Carter Administration to raise the price floor on American farm goods. Wearied by the speculative nature of the American agricultural market, they demanded that the Government “Get the Boom and Bust out of food prices, especially wheat products!’

Throughout the briefing, the farm group made reference to a need to return to “parity” or 90 percent of parity. This ambiguous term refers loosely to the buying power of a farmer’s goods, relative to the prices of other commodities. Essentially, parity would mean that whatever commodities could be purchased with the income from a bushel of wheat in the years 19101914, the same number of goods should be purchasable at today’s wheat prices. To do so, wheat prices should be raised to meet other commodity prices, the AAM says.

American Agriculture also emphasized the necessity of breaking down international tariff barriers. With a world-wide free market system, American farmers would have a larger, more stable demand for their products. Food could be offered to needy foreign countries at more reasonable rates, while American farmers would enjoy higher, more dependable profits for their goods.

After departing the SRC office, the delegation joined the other farmers on their tractorcade to Washington, D.C. The long trek, characterized by cold weather conditions, breakdowns, delays at toll roads and slow traveling, brought an angry group of farmers to the Capitol the week of February 5. Bad weather and poor public relations made for grim results. Displays of violence and the estimated $2 million damage done to the Mall will probably only hurt their cause. Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland gave the farmers a very unsympathetic reception, echoing the Carter Administration’s recent policy of cutbacks.

Perhaps by 1980, the group will have organized enough to lobby more effectively. Meanwhile, the future of the small farmer, and perhaps the American Agricultural Movement, remains uncertain.

The Progressive Farmer: A Long Row’s Hoeing into Lespedeza

By Cary Fowler

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 4, 29-32

Southern politics in the 1880s was alive with the fever of a native-born Populism. Led by the Southern Alliance (renamed the National Farmers Alliance in 1887), the Populists gained political control of several Southern states and burgeoned into a national organization. Across the South literally hundreds of pro-Alliance newspapers and magazines sprang up with names like Comrade (La.), Toiler’s Friend (Ga.), Weekly Toiler, (Tn.), Revolution (Ga.), People’s Party Paper (Ga.), Southern Mercury (Tx.), and the Weekly Advance(Tx.)

Perhaps the most influential farm magazine in the country today, the Progressive Farmer was founded in the passion of the 1880s by a leader of the National Farmers Alliance. Clearly, its founder, Col. Leonidas Polk, saw the magazine as a weapon in his fight for the farmer. Polk was a native of Anson County, a poor, sun-baked, sand hills county bordering South Carolina in central North Carolina. A soldier, a farmer and a politician, Polk was also the national president of the million member Alliance. Under Polk the Alliance became increasingly critical of both major political parties, calling for reforms such as the nationalization of railroads and the establishment of a commodity credit scheme (later enacted by Congress in 1933). In the Progressive Farmer Polk urged farmers to organize and participate in politics. Meanwhile, Polk, who was North Carolina’s first Commissioner of Agriculture, was himself becoming a prominent and influential political leader on the national scene. Then, without warning, on the eve of the 1892 convention that would have nominated him as the first Populist Party candidate for president, Polk died. With his death, the Progressive Farmer lost its founder, its editor and eventually, much of its passion. The magazine was only six years old.

Hacking at Populist Roots

Progressive Farmer was handed down to Polk’s son-in-law who edited the weekly for the next eleven years until Clarence Poe, a young North Carolinian staff member and four others bought the magazine during hard times in 1903 for $7,500. The memory of Polk must have been fading fast, for the Progressive Farmer was quickly transforming itself into a big-time publishing business. Less than thirty years after Poe took control, Progressive Farmer had gobbled up fifteen other publications and increased its readership over one hundred fold.

Under Poe, Populist politics were drained from the veins of the Progressive Farmer. The magazine’s editorials were nominally well tempered and responsible. Support was given to parity, and the evils of drink and the credit system (“a greased runway to debt and poverty”) were discussed in some detail. But by the 1920s more and more of Poe’s writings were focusing on farming customs and practices. As the nation’s farmers entered one of their bleakest periods in 1929, Poe turned his attention to the virtues of planting lespedeza and red clover in crop rotations. He called for a 13 month calendar of 28 days each. And he began to attack what would endure as his life-long enemy, “one arm farming” – the lopsided emphasis of Southern agriculture on plant production and the shunning of livestock production.

By the end of the 20s, the price of cotton had dropped to a nickel a pound. The depression had arrived. In Washington, new agricultural policies were in the making – policies which would form the basis of our present-day agricultural system. Enacted into law in 1933 under the name of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, these laws encouraged farmers to take land out of production, and offered government payments as incentives to limit production and drive up prices. Land planted to cotton declined from 39 million acres to 29 million acres in one year. The law was a success. The results were disastrous.

Across the South, hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and tenant farmers were no longer needed and were expelled from the land. At the time, Southern agriculture was unmechanized – fewer than 20% of the nation’s tractors were to be found on Southern farms. Government payments to farmers participating in set-aside programs provided the capital to mechanize and modernize Southern agriculture. And this machinery provided the means to push even more farm laborers off the land. Distribution of income within the farm sector swung heavily towards the big landowners, while small farmers held on by their fingertips.

In the rich, flat Arkansas delta, the dispossessed began to gather in the humid, mosquito-filled night. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers organized meetings near little towns like Tyronza and Marked Tree. Against obvious and overwhelming odds a union – the Southern Tenant Farmers Union – was born, struggling against government policies that were driving people from their land and livelihoods. It was 1934.

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In April, Poe, still the editor of Progressive Farmer, focused the magazine’s lead editorial on the “Six Great Issues Confronting Agriculture.” Sadly, the plight of the tenant was not one. By the middle of the summer, editorials were calling for more family reunions to be held. And by the fall of 1934, the reader was being given editorials with titles such as “Schools Must Educate for Leisure.” For the conscientious tenant there was the “Brighten the Corner Where You Are” column offering tips on how to beautify tenant shacks.

A Fair Shake For The Big Boys,

As the Progressive Farmer became more remote and insensitive to its own roots, it came to identify increasingly with the interests of the big farmer as opposed to the farm worker or small farmer. In 1943 the National Farmers Union was singled out for criticism. “The National Farmers Union might be fairer to our larger farmers.” The editorial went on to chide NFU’s president for asserting (incorrectly?) that “the profits are going to the big farmer.” By 1960 the division between big farmers and farm workers was clearly seen. “How much can wages paid farm workers be increased without decreasing the farmer’s net income?” was the question posed by an editorial entitled, “Farm Workers Union Poses New Problems.” Ten years later the Progressive Farmer was still at work looking out for the interests of the big farmer. It termed the Senate’s vote to limit subsidy payments to a maximum of $20,000 per farmer “a blow to U.S. agriculture” and called on the government to give a “fair shake” to the big farmer.

And Girls …

The Progressive Farmer did not ignore all dispossessed or oppressed peoples, however. Shortly after women won the right to vote, the Progressive Farmer in a column entitled “What Farm Women Need to Know” was advising its women readers that “good taste consists in being inconspicuous.” Today the Progressive Farmer boasts that it was the first farm magazine to hire a trained home economist (read woman) as “Woman’s Editor.” Despite such evidence of progressiveness, Progressive Farmer’s treatment of women has been both scant and traditional. In 1960, Progressive Farmer bestowed its “Woman of the Year” award on a deserving but surely unexpecting recipient. It was the first time the award had been given since 1939 – only the second time it had ever been given. No fewer than

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five men were given “Man [sic]of the Year” awards that year.

And Darkies

Progressive Farmer‘s treatment of Black people has been less scant and more controversial. To its credit Progressive Farmer editorialized against lynching in the 1920s. Lynching it seemed was bad because it gave a poor image to the South. The magazine noted that lynching dissuaded business and industry from locating in the region. At one point, Progressive Farmer even suggested that lynching be declared illegal, as though murder itself were not already illegal enough.

At the same time the reader was being given anti-lynching editorials, the Progressive Farmer was offering up praise for the region’s good race relations. The old plantation owners were described as “sensitive,” “compassionate,” and “humane” masters by one writer, the son of a Confederate colonel. Ironic praise for these good race relations was given to the victims: “A fine spirit of harmony between the two races has always existed in our South Carolina piedmont section. No race riots and few heinous crimes can be traced to the Negroes here.”

By the 1930s standard garden variety racism permeated the magazine. On a single page in a 1933 issue, Blacks were termed “Negro,” “colored,” and “darkie.” An ad for Oliver plows announced, “Here Are The Tools For Your Boys And Mules.” Meanwhile the covers of the magazine celebrated a style of life increasingly out of reach of both Blacks and Whites – ladies with parasols chatting at the gateway of the stereotypical Southern mansion midst graceful live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.

As repugnant as such forms of racism are, they do raise an important, perhaps unresolveable dilemma: how severe can our criticism be of Progressive Farmer‘s racism during a period when this “style” was so commonplace? To what extent can we expect this magazine to have diverged from the norm of its time?

If our criticism of Progressive Farmer‘s stance on racial questions in the twenties and thirties is tempered by our knowledge of the times, so too must their positions in the fifties and sixties be judged in light of the events of those decades. School desegregation dominated the headlines of the fifties. Progressive Farmer was against it, explaining that “Certainly everybody must have noticed how much more quickly a group of Negroes will get to talking, laughing, and joking than a similar group of White people. They are happier in their own group.” In an early sixties’ editorial, Progressive Farmer assured its readers it was “vigorously opposed to school integration.” The ominous title of this particular editorial proved the point: “Abolish Public Schools Only As Last Resort.”

Progressive Farmer had its progressive moments. A 1960 editorial voiced support of voting rights for Blacks. But the editors could not be content with letting such a strong stance stand alone.

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They added that with these new rights would come responsibilities -Blacks would have to solve “some of their problems of morals.”

The remainder of the sixties provided more of the old-fashioned rhetoric on the issues of race. Editorials coming out of Progressive Farmer‘s all White editorial and business staff bore titles like, “Is NAACP a Credit to Negroes?” and “Lawless Chickens Come Home to Riotous Roost.” The first Black person to be pictured on a cover of Progressive Farmer in the sixties appeared in 1965 – two Black farm workers were shown spraying an orchard with pesticides. The following month, Blacks were shown picking vegetables under the watchful eye of a White supervisor. These were Progressive Farmer-approved Blacks – Blacks who had stayed at home to roost, credits to their race.

The Farmer As Consumer

Over the course of Progressive Farmer‘s long, 93-year history, the magazine has lost sight of the interests and needs of the small farmer, not to mention the farm laborer. Ironically, it was Progressive Farmer‘s longtime editor, Clarence Poe, who on the occasion of the magazine’s fortieth birthday, observed that the Progressive Farmer was not and should not be just a “piece of property” or a business, but should strive to be “an educational institution devoted primarily to human service.” But Progressive Farmer was already quickly becoming a big business and destined to be even bigger. As if to prove the point, Emory Cunningham, Progressive Farmer‘s current president and publisher was elevated to that post from his position in the advertising department.

One can witness the big business trend of Progressive Farmer in the content of the magazine itself. As chemicals developed for use in warfare during the two world wars became available for farm use, Progressive Farmer was in the cheering section. The new capitalintensive, ecologically-destructive methods were hardly questioned. To read Progressive Farmer, one wonders how agriculture survived 20,000 years before the introduction of chemicals. “Organic” agriculture (the type all farmers practiced when the magazine was founded) was seen as impossible. “Some fruits would disappear …. Farmers are fed up with sharecropping with insects and other pests,” the editors warned. When Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, appeared suggesting that modern agriculture was backfiring, creating resistant super-pests while poisoning the environment, Progressive Farmer responded with vicious editorials and cartoons portraying a world over-run with insects. “Don’t let them get to first base,” the magazine advised.

Progressive Farmer presented the new chemicals as safe and effective. A Gulf Oil ad for one insecticide even pictured an employee gargling with his company’s product. From the twenties to the present date, ads for farm chemicals have become more and more prominent. The hand that feeds is rarely bitten. Despite genuinely useful articles promoting sound management and technical practices, the magazine continues to promote a form of agriculture increasingly relevant to fewer and fewer farmers – the specialized, large-acreage, wellcapitalized boys.

By the 1960s, Progressive Farmer‘s editorials were concentrating more and more on narrowly defined farm issues and “nonpolitical” agricultural questions. The politics that remained was conservative. As early as the 1940s, Progressive Farmer began urging its

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readers to join the nation’s largest and most conservative farm organization, the Farm Bureau. Farm Bureau platforms were even printed in the magazine. But gradually the lure and comfort of the technological as opposed to the political captured the minds and hearts of the men of Progressive Farmer. The implicit message of decades of Progressive Farmer has been that if farmers will just use the right equipment and the proper chemicals and plant the appropriate crops, all will be well. But, as Progressive Farmer was encouraging its farmers to be good consumers, the farmers were steadily losing control of agriculture to the machinery monopoly, the petro-chemical industry and the various varieties of middlemen. Good markets disappeared. The new market system forced whole regions to specialize in the production of one or two crops like a banana republic. The diversified farm of old was killed . Land prices exploded as speculators entered the market. Farm debt skyrocketed. Farmers got squeezed. When they were down, the government kicked them. And when they organized to fight back, the Progressive Farmer was silent.

Along the way the Progressive Farmer lost sight of its original goals and repudiated its own roots. Worse yet, it seemed willing to poke fun at its history if a buck were to be made. Progressive Farmer‘s review of its own recently published collection of editorials, articles and ads from 75 years of the magazine was entitled, “Nostalgic Book Offers Chuckles.”

Were Colonel Polk still with us, he would not be chuckling. Nor would he be content to ignore the sad lot of the small farmer. Doubtless he would be using Progressive Farmer to spread the advice the Kansas Populist Mary Lease offered to the readers of her newspaper. “Farmers,” she said, “should raise less corn and more hell.”

Cary Fowler works at the Frank Porter Graham Agricultural Training Center in Anson County, North Carolina. He is author of the Graham Center Seed Directory.

Harris Neck Battles U.S. Government

By Chini

Vol. 2, No. 1, 1979, pp. 14-17

For the people of a tiny fishing and farming community located on Georgia’s rich Atlantic coast, standing up to the Klan and going to jail are but small prices to pay in their 37-year struggle with the United States government for reclamation of their community.

Taken in 1942 by the federal government for the World War II campaign, the 2,687 acres of land known as the Harris Neck community provided an economic base for 75 to 95 Black families.

Located 40 miles south of Savannah, Georgia, this plenteous tidal basin, intersected by three navigable rivers, is a natural bed for oysters, crabs, shrimp and clams. The topsoil of the area is a fecund mixture of black dirt and white sand.

So rich was this land that not only were all the community’s substantive needs met, but also an economic base was built. The families before 1942 has built an oyster cannery, fishery, and processing facilities for the food grown in the productive “truck gardens” located on the land. The only item that families had to purchase from outside their community was flour.

Because of the closeness of the community, the culture had remained very strong, with histories and skills being passed from generation to generation. Many Africanisms were preserved in the rich “gullah” tradition of the Georgia Sea Islands.

The Black families had lived on this land since

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January 16, 1868 when General William T. Sherman issued the celebrated Field Order No. 15, which set aside all the Sea Islands, from Charleston to Port Royal, and adjoining lands to a distance of thirty miles inland, for the use of Blacks. This coastal area had been under the control of rich white planters, who had fled the land in fear during the Civil War.

Blacks were given title to 485,000 acres of land, including parts of the . dread “Peru Plantation” located in McIntosh County, Georgia. This is the parcel of land, settled by these 75 to 95 Black families, that later became known as the Harris Neck community.

The takeover of Harris Neck by the federal government during World War II began a chain of events that continues even today. While the men of the community were in Europe shouldering their share of the U.S. war effort, the federal government, encouraged by local businessmen, came to Harris Neck, gave its residents a 48hour notice to move, set fire to their homes and their crops, bulldozed their community burial ground and gave the residents as little as $2.44 per acre for destruction of their lives and livelihood.

One of the businessmen involved, E.M. Thorpe, received nearly$ 14,000 for his 26 acres of land and retained 14 acres of land located on one of the three intersecting rivers, while another businessman, Irving Davis, not only sold the Harris

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Neck families a 26-acre tract on which they are still “temporarily” relocated, but also retained grazing rights on the land for his herd of cattle.

All Harris Neck families contend that the government promised to return this land at the end of the war. However, upon the foundation of crushed bones, charred homes and thwarted lives, the U.S. government erected a “temporary” air base consisting of three 5,000 feet runways, a water system, docks, roads and approximately 98 buildings to house the Third Fighter Command.

Many residents moved from their land would not live to know that this air base was never used extensively because of the marshy conditions of the land and the proximity of other war time military installations. Many would also never know that this land was not to be returned by the U.S. government to its rightful heirs. Soon after the war, the voice of the Harris Neck community was lost in the roar of land speculators including churches, various businesses, as well as local individuals.

The chances of returning home grew even slimmer for the Harris Neck residents when, in 1944, the Surplus Property Act gave federal agencies and state and local governments priority over the rights of the former residents. Under the Farm Credit Administration and the War Assets Administration, McIntosh County was named receiver of the 2,687 acre tract. County Attorney Paul J. Varner pointed out that McIntosh County had “big plans” for maintenance of the air base facilities.

These “big plans” never commenced. Soon after county takeover of the land, local government officials and businessmen came in and looted the government property.

Tom Poppell, former McIntosh County sheriff, obtained a lease for 102 acres of the land at a cost of $10 per year. Poppell, later accused by the federal government of using adjacent lands for “importation of marijuana”, surrendered his lease in 1957 because of alleged improprieties in obtaining the land. Poppell admitted in a letter to Georgia Sen. Eugene Talmadge, that although he knew the land taken by the government had been promised to be returned to Blacks, he felt McIntosh County was the better landlord.

Perhaps because of improprieties that resulted from county takeover of the land, the federal government moved to retake the land on May 25, 1962. The government declared the 2,687 acre tract a wildlife refuge, stating that it was the “only place on the eastern seaboard where the Canadian wild geese would land.”

Alton Davis, son of Irving Davis, was allowed by the federal government to retain his father’s grazing rights at a cost of $1 per year. Davis is also one of five current commissioners in McIntosh County.

Meanwhile the Harris Neck families waited and observed. In 1972, the 26 families who are direct descendents of the original community organized to reclaim their ancestral land.

Led by Edgar Tim mons, Jr., the Harris Neck community formed the People Organized for Equal Rights (POER) and in April 1979 staged a camp-in on the Harris Neck Wildlife Refuge. POER asked the U.S. government for a $50 million reparation to the community to rebuild churches, schools, businesses and residences lost during the military takeover.

U.S. District Judge Avant Edenfield issued a restraining order against the camp-in which residents chose to ignore. On May 1, in an emotional confrontation with federal marshals, three Harris Neck residents, Edgar Timmons, Jr., Rev. Chris McIntosh and Hercules Anderson, as well as Atlanta activist Rev. Ted Clark were arrested.

Three days later, Judge Edenfield sentenced the four men to 30 days in jail and ordered the refuge closed to the public. Federal marshals were instructed to arrest any trespassers. The four protestors are out of jail, pending appeals.

The Harris Neck community has moved its fight to other arenas. In a counterclaim filed in the U.S. District Court to the government’s ejection action the residents are asking for return of their titles to the land.

U. S. Representatives Walter Fauntroy (D-Washington, D.C.) and Bo Ginn (D-Georgia) have introduced a bill, HR 4018, calling for return of the land to the residents.

The residents now await a court ruling on the validity of their case and for the bill to be reported out of Congressional committee.

However, they do not wait passively. With the support of such groups as the Emergency Land Fund, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the people of the Harris Neck community are waging a massive informational and educational campaign for the public.

At the beginning of the summer, 28 Black elected officials, including Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson and State Reps. Douglas Dean and Bobby Hill, pledged their support to the Harris Neck community.

In July, during a three-day protest rally commemorating their eviction from their land,

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Harris Neck residents were warned that the issue was “larger than they thought.”

Emergency Land Fund Executive Director Joe Brooks told the residents they were a part of a national scheme to take land away from Blacks, especially fertile land on the Georgia coastal islands, including Hilton Head and Jekell Islands. “In 1905, Blacks in this country owned more than 15 million acres of land; now, in 1979, Blacks own less than 3 million acres; and, by 1985, at this rate, Blacks will be landless,” warned Brooks.

Earl Shinhoister, regional director of the NAACP, advised the residents not to be deterred in their struggle, not even by the likes of such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of White People, who had eleven members stationed at the protest rally to heckle the Harris Neck residents.

Comedian-activist Dick Gregory told the residents recently that he had several serious questions about the government’s takeover of the land. Gregory said that he thought the issue went beyond the government taking farming and fishing land from a small Black community. Gregory suspects the building of a military airstrip and the history of drug trafficking in the area may mean that there is government involvement in illegal dealings.

A long-time community resident, a child during the 1942 eviction, best sums up the “new” Harris Neck spirit, “I feel something is going to give. I feel good about it. I believe the Lord is going to look out for us. He’s going to help us because we need this land. Our children need this land.”

Chini is a member of the Southern Collective of African-American Writers.

The Case for Small Farms

By Ginny Looney and Duna Norton

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 22-25

When the State Legislature was forming the next-to last county in Alabama in 1877 from the southernmost hills of the Appalachian chain, the legislators joked that the land was so poor a crow would have to carry a sack of corn to survive flying from one end of the county to the other. Yet, the land that became Cuilman County had by 1920 become the top producer of a variety of crops and has since had the largest farm sales of any county in the state.

While the reputation of Culiman County as a farming area has been growing, the reputation of one of the leading agricultural counties during the 19th century has been declining. Lying 65 miles southwest of Montgomery in the area of the Coastal Plain known as the Black Belt because of its large Black population, Wilcox County has the natural advantages to be a prosperous farming area. An 1888 promotional brochure said, Wilcox “is highly favored, both with respect to the character of the land and the abundant supplies of water.” As the vast estates on which cotton once grew

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turned to timber and pasture, the fortunes of the two counties shifted until in 1974 Cullman County, with the same amount of farm acreage as Wilcox, had 15 times the amount of farm sales.

The comparison of Cullman and Wilcox Counties offers the classic contrast between small family farms and large family plantations, and a striking evidence of how the ownership and control over land is a major factor in determining a society’s economic structure. In these two counties as elsewhere in the country, the pattern of land ownership determines land use, its productivity and the quality of life in rural communities. In addition, the income of workers, amount of taxes paid and number of public services provided all appear to be tied directly to the number and size of land holdings in a rural county. The results of the comparisons suggest what the government policies have not recognized: small farms are better than large farms for the economic health of a community because they contribute to a larger tax base, more public services, higher median incomes and more intensive use of natural resources.

For almost 40 years, the importance of small farms has been recognized in a few academic circles and government studies. In a study conducted for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics in 1941, Dr. Walter Goldschmidt examined the effect of farm size on community development by comparing two farming communities in California which differed only in the size of nearby farms. Family-sized farms surrounded one, and large corporate farms surrounded the other. The study found people were supported at a higher income near the family-sized farms than near the giant corporate farms, which had a higher percentage of low paid farm workers. Another study done in 1977 to expand Goldschmidt’s work analyzed 136 additional towns in California and found that small farm regions supported more communities, were more viable and offered more services than towns in large farm communities.

Besides improving the economic well-being of a community, small farms also produce food more efficiently, contrary to a widely held belief that big farms are better. “Modern agribusiness is more efficient because so few people are involved in food production,” the myth goes. “One farmer feeds 40 people.” That argument was refuted at a 1978 conference on land ownership in Alabama by Goldschmidt, now a UCLA professor, “When a tractor draws a combine to harvest wheat, the farmer is employing hundreds of hours of urban manpower expended in the steel mills and the oil refineries …. The farming sector of our economy appears to have dwindled remarkably when, in fact, a large portion are agriculturists working in the urban industrial environment.” Studies by the U.S Department of Agriculture in 1967 and 1973 have shown that the most efficient farm is the modern, fully mechanized one or two person operation.

Because Alabama has a tradition of small family farms along the Sand Mountain Appalachian hills and a history of large land holdings where plantations previously dominated in the Black Belt, a comparison of the two regions can show directly the effects of land ownership in the South. Using the 1974 U.S. Census of Agriculture, two students at the University of Alabama selected the 10 counties in Alabama with the smallest average size farm and matched them with the 10 counties in Alabama with the largest average farm size. Farm size was chosen as the factor dividing the two groups because it clearly indicates how well the land, a basic resource, is distributed among the county’s residents.

Jefferson and Montgomery Counties were eliminated from the study because of their metropolitan characteristics. The small farm counties which remained and their average size farm in 1974 are Marshall (80 acres), Cullman (84), DeKalb (87), Walker (91), Winston (99), Etowah (113), Morgan (114), Cleburne (120), and Blount (122). The large farm counties, which are also the counties with high Black populations, are Greene (392 acres), Macon (419), Sumter (427), Wilcox (444), Perry (472), Bullock (482), Dallas (503), Russell (578), and Lowndes (726).

The study found that the counties with more small farms had higher agricultural production and median incomes of both farmers and farm laborers. The small farm counties had more farms and sales with less farm acreage than the “large” counties. While the “small” counties had 11 percent of the state’s farm land, they produced 29 percent of the farm sales. The large farm counties, however, had 18 percent of the state farm land but had only 8 percent of its agricultural products.

Figures on farm production show that the

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small land owner uses labor intensive methods in farming in order to get a high return on every acre. The need for economy is not nearly as important for the owner of 500 acres who will use capital intensive methods of farming requiring much machinery and land. Besides making better use of the land, the farmers in the “small” counties had higher incomes, earning nearly $2,000 to $5,000 in 1974. Farmers in the “large” counties earned half as much, and in three of the counties, the median income fell below $1,000.

A composite view of the farmer in the north Alabama counties from the 1974 census is a man with 99 acres, one of 1,500 farmers in the county. He would have crop sales of $1,900 and stock and poultry sales of $20,800 a year with sales averaging $238 per acre. His 1974 income would be $3,270 a year. The statistical “average” farmer in the nine south Alabama counties in the study would own 494 acres as one of 500 farmers in the county. He would sell $6,200 of crops and $10,200 of stock a year for sales of $39 an acre. His median income would be $1,628 a year.

An analysis of several other social and economic factors within the two groups of counties demonstrate that concentrated land

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ownership restrains the development of the local community. Among the small farm counties, the three counties with a low percentage of farm land (less than one-fifth of the entire county’s land) had the largest percentages of forest land and the largest concentration of corporate ownership of the forests. Two of the three also had the highest numbers of absentee land owners.

While Walker, Winston and Cleburne Counties fit the pattern of higher farm sales found among the small size farm counties, the relatively low amount of farm land and correspondingly large amount of forest land has resulted, at least in Winston and Cleburne, in low tax revenues and public services more in line with the large size farm counties. Instead of the land being concentrated in the hands of industry and private land owners, thousands of acres of land in those two counties are owned by the federal government as part of the Talladega and Bankhead National Forests. Winston and Cleburne vividly point out the revenue problems for a county when huge tracts of land are withdrawn from the tax rolls.

Except for the two with large blocks of tax exempt government land, the counties with the small farms had a much stronger tax base than the counties with the large farms. Small farm counties had twice as much revenue from ad valorem taxes and two and a half times as much total tax revenues. In turn, the higher tax income has resulted in the small farm counties having twice as many miles of county roads and greater than a third more expenditures for public education. The median income was nearly twice as high while the poverty rate and substandard housing is half as much as in the large farm counties.

A comparison of individual “large” and “small” counties with the same proportion of farm land and rural population also confirms the important role of the small farm community development. For example, both DeKalb in the north and Greene County in south Alabama have 47 percent farm land and 73-80 percent rural population. Twenty-six percent of the workers in DeKalb commute to jobs outside the county while Greene has 21 percent commuters. Despite these similarities, the 1970 median income in “small” farming DeKalb was $5,316 compared to a $3,034 median income in Greene County. DeKalb had 1974 ad valorem taxes totaling $542,000 and 1975 total tax revenues of $1,693,000; in contrast, Greene County with its large farms received $464,000 in ad valorem taxes and $1,440,000 in total taxes. There are three times the miles of county roads and two times the expenditures for education in DeKalb County and only 55 percent of the poverty and 60 percent of the substandard housing that was found in Greene County during the 1970 census.

Land ownership, of course, is not the only factor which differentiates a small farm county from a large farm county. When “small” and “large” counties have the same percentage of farm land, their percentages of urban population and people who commute to work outside the county may differ. More striking, most of the large farm counties have majority Black populations which even through 1970 were governed largely by Whites. The absence of Black elected officials has meant historically that public services, such as roads, were often not extended into the Black community. The extent to which racism rather than land ownership lowered the income of Black Belt counties and the county tax base cannot be identified; however, the two issues are certainly intertwined.

Black farmers, nearly all small operators, are losing land nationally, at a rate of 300,000 acres a year. At the same time, the lack of job opportunities is forcing Blacks, particularly those from 24 to 35 years old, to migrate from the large farm counties. Between 1960 and 1970, two of these Black Belt counties lost a fifth of their population, one county lost a fourth and another a third. More recent figures show that, while most rural areas are gaining population, predominately Black rural areas continue to lose population.

Still land ownership is a crucial factor in the development of a county. No matter how other factors change, the pattern is that small farm counties can support more people at a higher income level than the counties dominated by large farms. The trends suggest, however, that the growing concentration of land ownership isn’t being stopped. The South lost 29 percent, or 454,000 farms, during the decade of the 60s. Southern Black farms decreased by 69 percent. As small farms dwindled in number, the large scale farms increased, and their share of farm sales continue to grow. With government bias in subsidies for large farms and tax laws making it difficult for small farmers to earn a decent living solely from farm income, the main monetary gain for small farmers today is when they sell their farm land. Government policy has effectively excised the culture from agriculture and forced farmers to adopt the large scale economy of agribusiness or leave farming. Most small farmers are leaving.

Ginny Looney is a former newspaper reporter in Alabama who now resides in Atlanta. Duna Norton is director of the Agricultural Marketing Project in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

The Lost Colony of North Carolina

By Donna Dyer and Frank Adams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 3-11

“We don’t have poverty in Hertford County. People live like that because they want to. They don’t want it any other way”–L.M. “Mutt” Brinkley, Hertford County Commissioner.

In speaking of the rural poor of Northeastern North Carolina, Sister Mary Genino, a Catholic nun who has worked in the region for three years, acknowledges a bewildering configuration of powerlessness: “They are bound,” she says, “by a social structure that has not changed for hundreds of years. It has affected their economic freedom, their political freedom and their social freedom. They don’t vote–though no one comes around with a gun or turns them away from the voting polls. They drop out of school–because education doesn’t get them anywhere. And although there are no written laws that say ‘blacks and ‘while,’ the mores of past generations are still rigidly adhered to.”

Seldom since William Byrd staked the Virginia–North Carolina boundary in 1728 has there been so much discussion within and without the region about conditions of life in the “Northeast.” Some have begun to call the area east and north of Interstate 95 the state’s “lost colony.” Colonies exist when a region’s people or natural resources are under the sway of outside individuals and institutions. A colony is subordinate to and dependent upon outside sources of accumulated capital, upon the “superior training” of outsiders or their agents, upon the outsiders’ control and manipulation of privileged information, or some combination of these factors.

Advantage over the colonized or peripheral region is preserved through manipulation of wages and labor markets, through continued or increased levels of outside ownership over resources, and through the thousand and one ways in which wealth and concentrated power make themselves felt. There are also the advantages which are played through in discriminations of sex, race, religion or culture. And when necessary, there can be a show of force. Poor people are usually numerous in dependent regions (witness Sister Genino’s comments), and passions over racial attitudes, sexual traditions or religious beliefs often divide them, further preventing effective challenges to the causers and causes of poverty and quiescence. Appalachia is one such colony in the United States.

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Is Northeastern North Carolina another one?

In August 1981, Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., spoke at an “economic summit” arranged by the Department of Commerce in Edenton, once the state’s capital. The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot announced the event saying the Northeast’s governmental and commercial leaders were being invited “to continue a process of focusing bureaucratic, political, and economic attention on the region.”

Later that month, either spurred by the governor’s zeal or unimpressed by what they heard, sixteen counties formed a coalition calling itself Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow to promote a regional agenda for economic growth. In October, they met with a delegation of Virginians to plea for help in pushing tourism, industrialization, links with the thriving Tidewater, and markets for new products. The area’s feelings of being a stepchild were underscored by talk of secession. State senator Melvin R. Daniels, Jr., a Democratic Party stalwart and influential banker, told the Virginians, “If things don’t go right with redistricting in Raleigh, we might petition Virginia to take us back in–everything from the Roanoke River through the Chowan River Basin.” Whether ploy or facetious warning, Daniel’s remarks drew swift rebuttal from equally powerful state senator J.J. “Monk” Harrington, a Lewiston manufacturer, who bluntly defended the state’s efforts to spur development. He said, “I think Northeastern North Carolina has been looked out for quite well by North Carolina officials. I have never known them-Virginians–to give us anything. We give and they take.”

Governor Hunt’s Balanced Growth Policy stirred some faint hopes for economic growth in the Northeast, a land of productive farms, endless timber tracts, pocosins, slow moving rivers and small towns. But the highly visible policy debate during the governor’s first administration spawned more rhetoric than results. The coalition’s leaders, pushed by Ahoskie newspaper publisher, Joe Parker, were agreed in their determination to see some change in the region’s bleak economic status. They arranged public meetings and held symposia at community colleges and offices of Chambers of Commerce. However, despite the region-wide, public nature of all the talk, very few of the debate’s participants offered more than a glimpse into the Northeast’s economy, or provided an analytical framework for discussing the region’s severe economic ills.

For instance, there are shifting definitions of which counties are to be included, or more accurately, are willing to be tarred as “underdeveloped.” The Governor’s Task Force on Northeastern North Carolina, the group responsible for the Edenton Summit, included Beaufort, Bertie, Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Halifax, Hertford, Hyde, Martin, Northampton, Pasquotank, Perquimans, Tyrrell and Washington. Their list coincided with the sixteen-county coalition. Other observers, particularly a few municipal, regional planners, and University of North Carolina professor of planning Ed Bergman, argue the entire First Congressional District shares the common demoninator of an agrarian-based economy with the lowest per capita income in the state. In accepting Bergman’s position, we include Carteret, Craven, Greene, Lenoir, Pamlico and Pitt counties in our analysis.

Too, the debate has been blurred by a division as to the reasons for persistent underdevelopment. Some point to myriad human deficiencies; others blame the lack of roads, schools or bridges. The first camp attributes the region’s plight to ills they say are inherently a part of the Northeast’s people and their culture. In circular fashion, they claim that the often shocking statistics of poverty, poor health, inadequate diet, ignorance, rotting housing, or lack of participation in the electoral process characteristic of the First Congressional District, explains the origins and causes of underdevelopment. Another camp, perhaps the majority, holds that the lack of adequate roads, incentives for investors, shortages of skilled labor, and inadequate tools for capital formation prevent regional modernization.

Both camps ignore several essential questions: Who owns or controls the land in this sprawling region? Who owns the region’s jobs? Where do profits go? How are governmental services distributed, or taxes levied? These key questions are at the base of any regional analysis. And while the Governor and the coalition have let them go begging, some of the citizenry has not.

Dr. Eugene G. Purcell, a minister and professor of philosophy at Atlantic Christian College, spoke at a regional development seminar organized by Elizabeth City’s College of the Albemarle on November 17, 1981. He drew knowing, approving nods from listeners when he declared that growth is difficult because people “realize the critical decisions that affect them most are made by people they cannot see and do not know.” Purcell continued: “The economic future of small towns is determined in a corporate boardroom in a distant city.

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Impersonal bureaucrats make decisions about state or federal funding and control of the schools, the quality and availability of medical care, who gets a slice of the welfare pie, what interest rates you pay for borrowed money, and even the quality of the air you breathe or the water you drink.”

Intellectuals are certainly not the only persons asking who prospers from the region’s people and resources. In 1979, before the present debate became public, a popular bumpersticker was sold at many Northeast restaurants, grocery and hardware stores. The message? “Welcome to North Eastern North Carolina: Owned and Operated by VEPCO.” The bumpersticker reflected the successful drive by twenty-one Northeast municipalities to terminate contracts with Virginia Electric and Power Company (VEPCO), headquartered in Richmond, and then buy power from Carolina Power and Light Company, based in Raleigh, saving, they predicted, $1.1 billion over a twenty-one year period.

Who Owns the Land?

According to the Sixth Edition of the Profile of North Carolina Counties, published in 1981,thereare5,783,500 arable acres in the District. Farmers till 24.9 percent of the land, or 1,400,700 acres. Timber is grown on 61.8 percent, or 3,572,200 acres. The federal government owns 233,909 acres, or 2.5 percent, using that land principally for military bases or parks. The remainder is taken up by roads, towns, trailer parks, shopping centers, junkyards, schools or prison camps.

All told, according to the 1978 U.S. Census of Agriculture, there are 10,658 farms in the District. They produced twenty percent of the state’s agriculture receipts, or $657,204,000, averaging about $62,000 per farm. The majority are small, inherited, family-held operations whose number is declining.

North Carolina State University’s Dr. Leon E. Danielson found in a 1981 study that about a third of all the state’s farmland was owned by retired persons, or by white- and blue-collar workers who farmed part-time and worked other jobs. The average size of a North Carolina farm was forty-two acres. The patterns he found hold in the Northeast, especially because tobacco is grown in abundance, and is labor intensive, and can be done part-time. But changes in farming practices, operating costs, interest rates and labor costs are wiping out the small family farm. Black farmers in the District have been particularly hard hit. Their number declined from 2,570 full-time farmers tilling 111,888 acres in 1954 to 529 full-time farmers working 26,876 acres in 1979, a drop of seventy-nine percent, causing the N.C. Division of Policy Development in June 1981 to predict that by the end of the century “there will be no black-owned farms,” in the state.

As small farms vanish, larger farms and “superfarms”–requiring huge capital resources and extensive management skills, have taken their place, adapting new technologies and taking in previously unused or marginally productive land. This trend started in 1973 when Malcolm P. McLean, the one-time Winston-Salem trucking magnate, paid $60 million for 581 square miles c land or about one third of the entire Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula, and appropriately called what he’d bought (the state’s largest farm), First Colony Farms. Since then, dozens of other investors, all but two from outside the region, have bought and developed land, cleared and drained the property, then leased or resold the farms to absentee owners or corporations. Mostly corn, soybeans and hogs are raised on these farms. A partial list of the Northeast’s superfarms includes the 44,000acre Open Grounds farm in Carteret County, owned by an Italian grain merchant; the 35,000acre Mattamuskeet Farms in Hyde County, owned by John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co. of Boston, which has another $70 million in invested farm mortages elsewhere in North Carolina; a 7,500-acre farm along the Roanoke River in Halifax County, owned by ten New York City investors; and two Washington County farms–one totalling 9,400 acres and the other 4,700 acres–owned by foreign investors hidden so completely by corporate veils that even the resident managers don’t know for whom they till. Only two of these megafarms are held by North Carolinians: Rich Farms, a 13,000-acre operation east of Belhaven, and the 15,000acre farm operated by the relatives of A.D. Swindell around Pantego.

Decisions about the daily operations on these are made locally, but management policies are set elsewhere. Profits and tax advantages accumulate elsewhere, too. Further, local control over land use policy is eroded, if not lost, as a result of absentee farm operations. Even the state’s Environmental Management Commission found their reins a bit short. They voted to assess the impact of the superfarms on the ecology because “no one knows now what effect the ‘gigantic denudations’ of large farms . . . will have in the long run on weather, water, and wildlife . . .” First Colony managers pooh-poohed the study as having little value other than “keeping a few state bureaucrats off the street.”

Who Controls the Water?

Water, so vital to farming and seemingly so abundant in the Northeast, is also becoming scarce as a result of industrial activity controlled by absentee owners, or interests outside North Carolina. The superfarms profoundly alter water distribution patterns. Thousands of pounds of farm chemicals run off into swamps and rivers, and have had a devasting impact on fish and shrimp in the

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sounds. Meanwhile, underground cones of depression traced to huge industrial withdrawals daily in Virginia have begun to diminish the underground water supply in Hertford, Northampton and Gates counties. Union Camp Corporation, operating in Franklin but headquartered in New York City, pumps about forty million gallons out of the ground daily, dropping the ground water level at least eighteen feet annually. To the south near Aurora, Texasgulf, Inc., headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, but owned by the Government of France, pumps over nine million gallons of water daily to keep its subsurface phosphate mines dry. These withdrawals, combined with the ground water pumped by municipalities or by other industries, has caused the Northeast’s ground water level to drop nearly forty feet in ten years, according to Robert Cheek of the N.C. Department of Natural Resources. Private wells from Wanchese to Rich Square have dried up as a result of the depleted artesian aquifier. Already, fishermen net crabs in the Chowan River as far upstream as Winton.

Who Controls the Forests?

The region’s timberlands are held primarily by hundreds of private landholders in small tracts. This is the pattern across the state. There are some 245,000 non-industrial forest landowners in North Carolina, more than in any other state in America. They control about eighty percent of the commercial forest production–which yields over three billion dollars annually, if the furniture industry is included. In North Carolina, only twelve percent of the forests are held by all corporations, but in the First Congressional District, five giant forest product firms own twenty-one percent of the forests, or 746,322 acres. None of them are headquartered in the Northeast although each has a regional office there, and one, Weyerhaeuser, operates a mill in Plymouth employing nearly 2,300 persons to replant trees, run its nursery, haul logs, and run the complex, sprawling mill itself.

Weyerhaeuser illustrates how firms outside the region directly influence the life inside. The Tacoma, Washington, corporation owns or manages 660,000 North Carolina acres, mostly in the First Congressional District. Even with all these holdings, Weyerhaeuser-owned timber accounts for only twenty-five percent of its production needs. Nearly three-fourths of the timber it processes must come from smaller landholders, many of whom are unable to afford investing an average of $120 per acre to replant and then wait twenty to forty years for a return on their investment. To insure that its needs are met, Weyerhaeuser constantly buys up more timberland. Also, the company sponsors reforestation programs which enable the family timberowner to hold onto land, but puts hundreds of Northeast acres under its indirect control, or under the indirect control of the handful of other companies. For they are the only buyers available.

The giant firm influences the region’s social economy even more directly. At the end of October 1981, Weyerhaeuser settled a four-year-old suit brought by black employees at its Plymouth mill. They had alleged that the company assigned blacks in disproportionate numbers to its wood products division rather than the higher paying

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fiber division. No blacks worked in the nursery, they said, and only a handful in salaried positions. Some seventy-eight percent of the work force in Plymouth (1,800 persons) was black, and the counties from which the firm drew the majority of its workers have large black population. Weyerhaeuser agreed to divide $700,000 in back pay among approximately 725 workers and pledged no further discrimination in job transfers, hiring, or promotions. Discriminatory wage patterns–to say nothing of hiring policies–provide a major reason why the region’s poverty is widespread and enduring and why the term “colony” is accurate.

Race has not been openly a part of the current debate about the region’s economic future. Black participation has been marked by its absence. Only after the sixteen-county coalition’s preliminary plans were well laid were any blacks invited to join what had been an all white, mostly male group.

An ad hoc committee of the N.C. Department of Commerce reported on March 19, 1979, on “the minority concentration issue.” Its authors, many of whom lived in the Northeast, sought to “dispel the myth that areas populated by high concentrations of minority individuals are to be avoided as possible locations in industrial facilities.” Some potential industrial clients, they noted, spurned the region because of its lack of water, sewer services, poor roads, or their low regard for its schools, shopping centers, cultural activities and recreation. Others frankly balked at the Northeast because of race. “Some . . . cite higher minority concentrations in the population and labor force as an additional factor adding to the lack of client interest . . . Some have stated a firm will not look at an area which has over thirty or forty percent minority concentration. The explanation is given that, in general, due to the lack of economic and educational opportunity, the Southern rural Black worker is perceived as having a poorer work ethic and is more easily organized by union efforts.” According to the 1980 Census, blacks are the majority of the population in four of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties and a third or more in eleven others.

Who Controls the Jobs?

Long periods of unemployment or long daily commutes for workers are another regional characteristic. Sixteen Northeast counties reported unemployment rates above the state’s average in 1980. Tyrrell County had the highest unemployment rate in the state–11.5 percent. Aggregate figures do not account for seasonal employment in the tourist industry (a major factor in Dare, Pamlico and Carteret counties) nor farming, making it likely that real unemployment during some months may be much higher than official averages reveal. For hundreds of persons, the option is commuting. Between 2,200 and three thousand North Carolinians drive daily into Virginia to work at Tidewater shipyards, or the meat packing and food processing plants in Suffolk and Smithfield. As the prices of fuel, autos and vans increase more rapidly than general inflation and the real incomes earned at these distant jobs, the region’s economy is further weakened by reducing the actual amount of money available to be spent or saved in Northeast.

The work which is available in the Northeast is characteristic of jobs to be found in other colonies–apparel sewing and manufacturing, timbering, mining, or food processing–which pay the lowest wages and characterize first-stage, primitive industrialization.

Even a casual look at available employment in the Northeast explains why workers choose to commute such long distances. Jobs are scarce. In twelve of the twenty-two counties, less than thirty percent of the nonagricultural workforce is employed in manufacturing. The state’s average is 34.6 percent. In the nine counties where more than thirty percent of the work force is employed in manufacturing, jobs in food, apparel and lumber dominate. By considering Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt as “metropolitan centers” among the other overwhelmingly rural counties, work in those three categories accounts for fifty-six percent of the District’s jobs. Across the state, the average is twenty percent. These low-paying, low skill industrial sector job categories quickly feel the nation’s cyclical economic lurches. When building permits drop nationally, the Northeast’s trees do not. When clothing sales decline, sewing machine operators are laid off.

In only two of the Northeast’s twenty-two counties do average weekly wages exceed or approach the statewide average of $222.56. Seven counties reported weekly wages of less than two-thirds the state’s 1979 average. During that year, North Carolina, which became the nation’s eighth most industrialized state, ranked fiftieth in average weekly industrial wages. Hyde County workers labored for the lowest wage in the state, if not the U.S.,–$85.66 a week.

There is a parallel scarcity of unions. In nine Northeast counties there isn’t a union local at all; in the others only three locals are listed in telephone directories. Recent efforts by the United Food and Commercial Workers, a progressive union with an emphasis on organizing among the poorest paid sectors of the labor market, failed to overcome widespread fear among poultry processors in two huge, profitable factories. Even those unpleasant jobs were precious to people who know other work isn’t available. One veteran UFCW organizer, a native of Williamston who is based in Asheville, says, “Organizing back home is as tough as any place in the South I know of.”

Low wages, the large number of unemployed, plus the lack of unions dull any prospect for immediate change in

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wage patterns. When new firms do locate in the Northeast, pay levels remain low despite increased competition for labor. For example, a British-owned elastic manufacturing firm in 1981 took over a Jamesville building which had housed a zipper factory also owned by absentee investors. As an official from the elastic firm cut a ribbon to reopen the once-abandonded plant, he told Martin County boosters, “Pay scales at the company will be commensurate at least with those of the region of the state.”

By subtracting the public sector portion of the non-agricultural jobs, an even gloomier picture of the region’s real wage level emerges. Persons in government employ tend to be paid at higher hourly wage rates than persons in the private sector. Government employees comprise about twenty-five percent of all jobs in the Northeast and thirty-five percent of the non-manufacturing jobs in the region. Across North Carolina, the public sector averages only sixteen percent of the total work force, and twenty-five percent in non-manufacturing. In some Northeastern counties, Gates, for instance, public schools are the largest single employer. And while county government exercises control over a few jobs, most government workers are managed, hired, and fired by policies or regulations set in Raleigh, Atlanta, or Washington.

In December 1981, Governor Hunt told a Military Appreciation Day ceremony that the armed forces were more important to the state’s economy than tobacco. “The military pays out about $1.7 billion dollars annually in North Carolina,” he said, “while tobacco generated about $1.3 billion dollars in wages and salaries in 1981–one of the best yet for our number one crop.” In 1980, the military pumped $230 million into the Northeast, primarily to run the Cherry Point Marine Air Station, the New River Marine Air Corps Station, Camp LeJeune, Johnson Air Force Base, the Fifth District Coast Guard Station in Elizabeth City, and the demolition training center operated by the Central Intelligence Agency outside tiny Hertford. Over 41,000 persons are employed at those installations. Higher than average levels of government employment, plus the large concentration of military bases, further characterize a colony.

Who Controls the Capital?

Determining the final resting place for profits gained from the region’s workers and resources helps to explain why the Northeast has a severely limited capacity to form a local capital base. According to the 1981-1982 N.C. Directory of Manufacturing Firms, there are 103 manufacturers employing one hundred or more persons in the First Congressional District; only thirty-four of these are headquartered within the region. The rest make their decisions and count their profits elsewhere, usually far from North Carolina. Of these absentee firms, thirty-five, or one-half, are either textile, apparel, or lumber producers. And while the 103 firms employ nearly 23,000 persons, sixty-nine of them, or the majority, control the jobs of 18,000 persons, according to N.C. Department of Commerce figures. Every one of those sixty-nine firms is headquartered outside the Northeast. One is a foreign government.

Still another measure of how the region’s resources are drained away by absentee capitalists is seen in expenditures for new plants or machinery. These capital investments translate into tax revenue for local government, indicate a firm’s solvency, stability, and, importantly, potential for additional jobs. They hint of continued plans for operation. Only four of the twenty-two counties are within ten percent of the state’s average per establishment capital investment levels. They are the most urban counties–Beaufort, Craven, Lenoir and Pitt. In the rest of the Northeast, capital investments ranged from seventy-five to five percent below North Carolina’s average. Industrial development has paid off less than handsomely for local tax coffers. When Peat Methanol Associates announced plans to build a $250-million plant on forty acres south of Lake Phelps, Washington County officials crowed, “It would be a terrific iprovement of our tax base,” but were unable to tell “how much of the finished plant would be subject to county taxes.”

The Northeast’s low-wage, low-skill manufacturers produce goods with low added-value above the costs of raw materials plus labor. According to The 1977 Census of Manufacturing, only firms in Pitt and Lenoir approached or exceeded the state’s average value-added statistics. Thus, industrialization has neither translated into prosperity for individual workers nor substantial additional tax revenue for local governments.

Tax laws add to the region’s impoverishment. The property tax is a chief source of funds for North Carolina’s schools, human services, and some local roads. The Northeast’s county and municipal governments rely on ad valorem taxes for revenue. These taxes are disproportionately paid by small farmers, or homeowners, and storekeepers, rather than owners of the superfarms or the forestry industry relative to their profits per acre. Farms and forests are taxed according to “use values” instead of “market values,” the measures used to assess homes, trailers, autos or personal property. Land used for farm forestry usually carries a lower assessed value than residential, commercial or industrial land use.

For years, North Carolina tax law has exempted timber companies from paying taxes on cut-over land for ten years after re-seeding or replanting. In 1973, the General Assembly went a step further by exempting all

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standing timber from the tax base. The impact of their decision can be seen in tiny Gates County where 165,000 acres, or 75.5 percent of all its arable 219,300 acres, is used for forestry. Three timber companies owned 57,752 acres in Gates the year the exemption bill passed. The previous year, they had paid $7,823.73 on standing timber alone, and a total of $21,124 to the tax-poor county which had no industry at the time, and can boast only of one small sewing factory now. In a single legislative stroke, Gates lost nearly a third of the taxes paid by the timber companies. Yet the human problems faced by county government persisted. According to the 1980 Census, over twenty-four percent of the population was poor, twenty-two percent of the houses were substandard, and the unemployment rate fluctuated between five and eighteen percent annually.

How valuable was the timber harvested in Gates County that year? On one seventy-four acre tract the timber sold for over $302,000. Seven yers later–as the tax burden grew heavier as a result of the forestry exemptions–Gates County farmers sought relief. They claimed four hundred farmers, farm laborers and the county’s few businesses paid for seventy-five percent of the county revenue needs. Nor was Gates by itself. Throughout the region, the ad valorem tax rate is higher than the state average. Greene County has the highest rate in North Carolina, at $1.39 per hundred dollars of valuation, followed closely by Pamlico and Tyrrell with rates of $1.25 per hundred.

As tax rates increase, the incentives for industrial development decrease. This forces individual property tax rates to continue to climb, making it ever increasingly difficult for small property owners to hang onto their land. Adding to this self-perpetuating cycle is the regressive state sales tax. One cent of every four collected by the state in sales taxes is returned to the counties from which the revenue derived. Only a handful of the Northeast’s counties possess significant trading centers. Elizabeth City, Edenton, Williamston, Greenville, New Bern and Kinston qualify, as do Little Washington and Roanoke Rapids. However, market magnets such as Fayetteville, Raleigh and Durham–even Richmond and Tidewater, Virginia–regularly attract the Northeast’s shoppers. Rural counties with limited retail sales fail to benefit from the sales tax revenues to the degree “market” counties enjoy, thus increasing the pressure to tax rural county property at higher rates.

How are Government Services Delivered in the Northeast?

Consider the following: According to the Eastern Carolina Health Systems Agency in Greenville, the region’s health planning organization which has the largest geographic area to serve of any agency of its kind in North Carolina, sixteen counties are “medically under-served and have health manpower shortages.” Regarding emergency medical care only, the agency found that fourteen of the region’s hospitals had no twenty-four-hour physician coverage. Eight of them did not have registered nurses on duty twenty-four hours daily in emergency rooms. Only half the region’s ambulances–132 of 264–met Department of Transportation standards, and the region was short 513 ambulance attendants. Partly as a result, the agency noted, the region’s stroke mortality rates are twelve percent above state averages. Motor vehicle deaths are ten percent above state averages. Heart attack victims run a ten percent greater risk of dying before getting medical attention in the Northeast than elsewhere in North Carolina. Getting to hospitals is further complicated by the fact that nearly a third of the region’s roads are unpaved. In eleven counties, the average number of miles of unpaved roads outstrips the statewide average of 33.8 percent. In sprawling Beaufort County, for instance, over 44.3 percent of the roads are unpaved.

In a 1979 study of the Department of Human Resources listing of every county’s human service agencies, which included sheriffs’ departments, jails and prison camps, as well as hospitals, Red Cross agencies, or Departments of Social Services, a relationship between a county’s poverty and scarcity of resources appeared. In Camden County, where twenty-one percent of the 5,829 citizens were poor, there were thirty-one state or federal agencies, the fewest in North Carolina, to provide the available range of services open to other North Carolinians. Gates County, which had thirty-two listings, the next fewest in the state, had, as has been noted, nearly a quarter of its 8,876 citizens impoverished. In Hyde County, with thirty-four agencies, thirty-seven percent of the 5,875 citizens were poor. There was no public housing authority listed in these three counties, yet in Camden, nineteen percent of the housing was substandard, in Gates, twenty-two percent was below par, and in Hyde County, twenty-three percent was substandard. By contrast, in Wake County, seat of state government and one point in the affluent Research Triangle, and where less than ten percent of the citizens are poor, there are 876 agencies, the state’s highest number. In second place was Guilford County with 483, then Forsyth with 412 and Mecklenburg with 353.

Schools are often at the core of citizens’ expectations from local governments, and they frequently reflect the degree to which governments can or will finance human services. Across the region, dozens of schools have been left in the lurch and are falling to pieces. A Raleigh newspaper found that Bertie County’s only high school held fifty-four classes daily in three World War II quonset huts. Classrooms flooded regularly during rains. Two other Bertie County schools had been condemned as unsafe but continued to be used.

For the region’s older citizens, the picture is hardly brighter. In North Carolina, an average of sixty-eight dollars per person was spent on Medicaid in 1980. Fourteen of the Northeast’s counties spent less than the state average, and Northampton spent only thirty-eight dollars annually. This dismal listing could continue, but the point seems clear: Human services are scarce and supported at levels lower than available elsewhere in North Carolina.

Some Conclusions and Prospects.

There is not a single Northeast county in which the per capita income equals or exceeds the state’s average, which was $7,382 in 1979. In Hyde County, the figure was one half the state’s average; in Greene, it reached ninety-five percent. In the decade between 1970 and 1980, the Northeast’s citizens made no real gains in per capita

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income if their wages were measured against those of fellow North Carolinians. In real terms, adjusted for inflation, the gap remained about thirty percent lower. Thus, it is not surprising that nineteen of the twenty-one counties reported higher-than-average levels of poverty, and in four counties, the number of poor was double the state average.

The internal colony metaphor provides insights into some aspects of reality, distorts others, but forces attention on a set of questions. Some of the Northeast’s citizens want to know who controls development, and how. A growing number want to regain control of their jobs and land.

Long before the state’s policymakers told black farmers they were an endangered species, those farmers were struggling to survive despite predictions, policies and practices bent on eliminating their way of life. Decades of planning by the state for a unique seafood industrial park in Wanchese–at costs estimated at over $100 million in state and federal funds–raised fears among Dare County fishermen. “I’ve always said that the project will destroy us,” one fisherman told a Raleigh newspaper. “We’ll have no control over the large corporation which can absorb losses our small operation can’t stand.”

Two lines of strategy have characterized official response to the plight of the Northeast. One tack, ever since William Byrd set down the eighteenth century dividing line, has been to send in missionaries to correct deficiencies thought to be inherently a part of the local population’s own waywardness. Byrd noted in his famous journal, ” . . . sometimes the Society for Propagating the Gospel has had the Charity to send over Missionaries . . . ” to Edenton, whose residents, he wrote were “too lewd for the Priest . . . “, lacking ambition “enough to aspire to a Brick chimney,” wanting in religious devotion, and without “the least taint of Hypocrisy, or superstition, acting very frankly and above-board in all their excesses.” Helping people get used to or accept their deprivations continues to this day as the chief means which many well-intentioned persons use in Northeastern North Carolina.

Others, uneasy about blaming the victims but equally concerned about regional shortcomings, have substituted the term “progress” for the patronizing “backward.” To cure ills, these capitalists argue, a modernizing corps must be posted to the region to bolster schools, lure new industry, build roads, negotiate tax incentives. The Northeastern North Carolina Tomorrow coalition would bring into the region scores of professionally-trained persons: experts in hog and black dirt farming, medicine, community development specialists, economists, and lawyers experienced in corporate finance.

These elite approaches ignore the talents, energies and questions of the Northeast’s citizens who don’t own the banks, newspapers, or manage the superfarms. Without local, democratic control over the region’s resources and the capital needed to develop them, the colonial circle will go unbroken. Nonetheless, there are things which can be done.

In offering the following suggestions, we recognize the resistance posed by the visible and active dimensions of power and also those which, as Sister Genino suggested at the beginning of this essay, result from generations o. powerlessness. Northeastern North Carolina awaits a more thorough going analysis than that which we have provided. In the absence of such a regional analysis, as the debate goes on, we suggest some possible next steps.

First, small scale, labor intensive farming should be fostered, particularly for minority farmers or the young who are virtually prohibited from entering farming unless land is inherited. A family farm development authority similar to one established recently in South Carolina should be created by the Legislature for the Northeast. The authority would make long-term, low interest loans to persons who earn sixty percent or more of their annual income from farming, or who have adjusted incomes of less than $25,000. Absentee landownership should be halted as one step in a long-range land reform program.

Second, markets should be guaranteed for crop alternatives to tobacco, peanuts and corn, particularly the wide range of vegetable crops which can be grown profitably in the Northeast but which are as often as not imported. One U.S. Department of Agriculture study reported that North Carolinians import three fourths of all the fresh vegetables they consume.

Third, the timber industry, or N.C. State University, should take existing forest management programs into Elizabeth City State University and East Carolina University or the region’s community or technical colleges. The aim would be to upgrade the husbandry skills of small-tract timberowners, and to search for alternative marketing sources for wood products.

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Fourth, the managers and employees of small businesses should be provided opportunities to upgrade skills in all phases of their businesses at state subsidized training centers at no cost to the individuals or businesses. No firm with more than one hundred employees would be eligible; nor would any absentee-owned firm.

During the past two decades, small businesses have generated sixty-six percent of all the region’s new jobs. The state should abandon its touted industrial recruitment program and concentrate instead on development of enterprises directly related to the region’s economic needs, the skills of its people, and those marketable uses of the region’s resources. The state should establish a revolving loan fund for democratically managed businesses. This would provide working capital or start-up funds for small businesses owned and managed by workers themselves.

Fifth, state and local governments should re-examine the impact of tax policy, law and formulae on timber, farming, fishing, and small businesses; absentee ownership of both land or industry should be discouraged through higher taxation. The guiding aim of any review would be to insure rural counties a fair share of tax revenues, and to insure they are not unfairly drained of resources vital to maintain schools and human services, while seeking to spur indigenous economic activity.

Sixth, the state should encourage the growth of small scale, locally control led energy development through continued solar tax credits, demonstrations to small farmers of alternative energy options, home insulation rebates, or energy efficiency audits at large and small industry sites.

Seventh, the state should provide the necessary technical assistance for local county officials seeking to adopt industrial development policies which take into account appropriate technology, small-scale and locally controlled enterprises, or with qualifications which include firm size, ownership, waste discharge, energy efficiency, and, particularly, production links with local resources.

In the final analysis, however, we residents of Northeastern North Carolina must ourselves organize the means to autonomy. We should apply pressure on absentee owners, state politicians, county administrators, and policymakers at every level. We must close the gap between the “lost colony” and the state to which we pledge allegiance and pay taxes.

Donna Dyer and Frank Adams are natives of eastern North Carolina. Ms. Dyer is a principal with Triangle Planners Network, Inc., a nonprofit corporation offering planning and technical assistance to community groups. Mr. Adams is the author of Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander and is a community educator who now lives in Gatesville. Maps and illustrative materials for this article were prepared by Marge Manderson of the SRC staff.

Ending the Short Stick In Mississippi’s Woods

By Tom Israel and Randall Williams

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 16-18

Pine trees are commonplace, but timber is an industry, especially in the South where forests stretch from Houston to the Carolinas. In Mississippi today, timber is the largest provider of manufacturing jobs and the state’s largest crop.

The timber industry will play a key role in the next several decades in the South. The trees are here, the giant wood products companies are here, and a paper shortage is projected for the next twenty-five or thirty years. The crop is constantly expanding, as witnessed by oldtimers who drive through rural areas and point out the cotton fields of their youth, now grown into the piney woods.

For the harvesters of the crop, however, even those who enjoy the work, woodcutting is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous and poorest paying of occupations.

There are two types of wood harvesters–pulpwooders, who cut and haul wood to be made primarily into paper products, and loggers, whose labor ultimately leads to the making of lumber. They can be distinguished on the road by the way the wood is stacked on their trucks: pulpwood is short and stacked across the truck, while logs are long and stacked lengthwise. In Mississippi, an estimated ten thousand people work in the woods, and about eighty percent of them are black. However, log haulers are more likely to be white than black, largely because cutting logs is more profitable than cutting pulpwood and because the timber companies have allowed whites to take that economic step up.

About four-fifths of the wood harvesters are pulpwooders, and they are the chief beneficiaries of the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act, which was to go into effect July 1. The story of the passage of that act and the reasons why it was necessary is worth hearing.

Woodcutters are paid a piece rate for each cord of wood they sell. A cord is a volume measure of four feet by four feet by eight feet. The pulpwooder and his crew cut the trees down, saw off the limbs, cut them into five-foot

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lengths, load them on the truck and haul them to a wood yard. The work is hard and dangerous: a get-together of woodcutters where everyone has all his fingers or toes is rare.

An average truck load has three or four cords with a gross value to the woodcutter of about $120. When the hauler brings the wood to the yard, it’s measured with a long yardstick. The common practice is for the wood hauler to hold the stick against the stack of wood on his truck, and the dealer stands back and reads the scale off the top of the stick.

The woodcutter can’t see the scale and he isn’t even told how much wood was on his truck until it has already been unloaded, by which time it’s too late to argue. The United Woodcutters Association estimates that woodhaulers earn about six to seven thousand dollars a year if they work full-time, and that an average cutter loses about fifteen hundred dollars per year to the short stick. So it has been a real problem.

The Woodcutters Association decided to organize a campaign around this issue and tried for three years to get a bill passed that would set standards for measuring-scaling–the wood at the yard. But woodcutters are very isolated from one another. They work in remote locations and they usually know only the other woodcutters who may be in their family or in their church.

They may recognize some other woodcutters by sight or may recognize their trucks which they’ve seen on the road or at the woodyard, but they don’t know them. They also haul their wood to about 250 scattered woodyards throughout the hills of Mississippi (The United Woodcutters Association is organized in forty-two counties in Mississippi.)

A second barrier to effective organizing is fear on the part of the workers. The Association is not, like most unions, an organized shop. The people who join and who speak out in favor of such things as the fair scaling act are completely unprotected at the woodyard against firing and harassment. Even woodcutters who simply attend Association meetings are subject to intimidation from dealers.

To overcome some of these barriers to organizing, the Association started a cooperative. The woodcutters have to own and operate chainsaws and trucks and they burn up large amounts of supplies, which they usually get from the wood dealers for whom they work, often at exorbitant prices.

The system is very similar to sharecropping. The woodcutters are considered independent contractors and are thus not usually covered by insurance or other benefits from either the wood dealer or the big paper companies, yet they end up in economic dependence to the wood dealers, who function much like labor contractors.

When a woodcutter needs a tire for his truck or a chain for his saw or even a loan for a piece of equipment, he will go to the wood dealer who will advance him the money and then deduct it a little at the time from the woodcutter’s pay for each cord of wood. The net effect is that the woodcutter never gets out of debt and his already meager take-home pay is whittled away even more. From the payment he receives from the wood dealer, of course, the woodcutter also has to pay his helpers, own and operate his truck and saws, pay social security and buy insurance, if he has it.

The cooperative was thus a very effective organizing tool. The Association now has co-ops at forty-three different locations around the state where the woodcutters can get their saw files and their chain oil and a dozen other products they need to stay in business. The woodcutters not only get lower prices but they get to meet and get to know each other, which helps break down the problem of isolation. And because the members of the Association are the administrators of the co-ops, they gain confidence in working together as a unit.

All of this work helped in the three-year campaign to get the fair scaling practices act, but it wasn’t enough. The campaign succeeded when the word finally got out to the landowners that they were losing as much as the woodcutters due to the short stick, or inaccurate measuring of the loads on the pulpwood trucks. The landowners off whose land the wood is cut are also paid on the basis of the measurement taken by the wood dealer at the yard. By doing a lot of organizing among small farmers, the Association eventually got an endorsement from the Farm Bureau, and on March 8 the Mississippi Fair Pulpwood Scaling and Practices Act passed.

The act requires licensing of wood dealers and establishes uniform measurement procedures, procedures where the woodcutter can file complaints, and third-party arbitration to settle disputes. These procedures are important to give protection to the woodcutter who actually files a complaint, so he won’t be told the next day not

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to come back to that woodyard again.

The next step for the Association is to organize strikes at some wood yards. The fundamental poverty of the woodcutters is not going to change until they are paid more. Getting an accurate measure will mean a lot more money but the woodcutters are still paid very little for their labor. By the time he pays all the costs of production, the woodcutter who clears eight or nine dollars on a cord of wood is doing very well.

The Association put together its first strike last summer in Fayette, Miss., where three yards were shut down for about one month. One yard settled with a two dollars per cord raise and an agreement to post standards on how the loads would be measured. The second yard came through with just a raise. The third yard, which was run by International Paper Co., shut down and moved out of town.

In addition to more strikes and other job actions, the Association is now campaigning for workers’ compensation coverage for woodcutters; as independent workers with the middlemen wood dealers between them and the paper companies, they have been denied this protection for on-the-job injuries or deaths.

Finally, there are thousands of woodcutters in other Southern states whose working conditions are equally as dangerous, whose pay is equally as low, and whose isolation is equally as limiting.

For these woodcutters, it seems, imitation of the Mississippi example may be the first step on the road out of poverty.

Tom Israel is the lead organizer for the United Wood cutters Association. This article is adapted from his remarks at a recent conference hosted in Montgomery by the Southern Poverty Law Center, where Randall Williams is employed.

Forestry and Equity

By Tom Hatley

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 19-23

If you travel along a state highway during the Southern winter, your eyes follow unavoidably the constants of the land: field openings of red, brown, and dun-colored soil breaking against the highway, and never far off, green seams of forest against the horizon. The intervals of green in the Southern landscape, more, often than not, signal the presence of pine and other fast-growing softwood trees. The land is also green in another sense, however, for the sixty million acres of softwood forest in the South today are financially valuable. The harvest of trees in an agricultural product second only to the value of tobacco cropping in North Carolina, and twenty percent of that state’s land area is covered with pine trees. The South supplies nearly half of the nation’s softwood timber today and can grow even more wood in the future. Across the South, softwood trees such as pine, sweetgum, and sycamore provide a main part of the employment base for 1.3 million forest industry workers, in occupations ranging from falling trees to making paper.

Corporations and, increasingly, banks, insurance companies and pension funds are investing in timberland in the South with the expectation of dependable investment returns from four to six percent over inflation. Boosters of this financial promise point to Georgia-Pacific Company’s decision to move its corporate headquarters from Portland, Oregon, to Atlanta and the forty-million-

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dollar pulpmill being built by a Finnish-American joint venture in New Augusta, Mississippi, as bellwethers of a new age. Much more than a simple discovery of the South’s potential to become the new “woodbasket of the nation,” corporate decisions to invest in the South often have to do primarily with changes and dislocation in the global market for wood products. For instance, the Baltic region of Scandinavia cannot continue to meet the West European demand for paper pulp, which it has supplied since late mediaeval times, off of its own cold and wet land alone. Whatever the underlying reasons for the shift to the South, the increasing worldwide wood demand, whether for cooking fuel, paper pulp, lumber, or methanol, means that the changes taking place in the Southeast will be long-lasting.

On the Southern forest today, small-sized land ownerships remain the rule. This particularly holds true for the valuable mature or near-mature pine stands across the South. Forty million acres of pineland are in private hands. In North Carolina, 250,000 owners held eighty percent of the state’s private land. Each of these individuals owns a tract which is on the average less than one hundred acres.

Black people in the South hold a substantial share of this wealth in land and trees. Yet an unfortunate combination of economic and social forces is pushing these blacks toward landlessness. Dependable statistics concerning black land ownership–how many acres, how many owners–are very difficult to come by. The Census Bureau itself estimates that the number of black farmers was undercounted by fifty-three percent in the 1974 Census. Similar problems appear in the counts of many agencies concerned with rural trends. In a sense, this statistical fuzziness reflects the indeterminate (or even unrecognized) standing of minority landowners and their problems for many government programs.

Some alarming trends show themselves in spite of the imprecision of the statistics on certain points. Over the past decade the number of black farms diminished at two and one-half times the rate of white agricultural holdings. Today roughly 85,000 farms are being operated by blacks; there were 130,000 in 1969. Of course, not all black landowners are farmers. Department of Agriculture figures suggest that there is a large group of blacks (perhaps fifty percent of the size of the number of active farmers) who own rural acreages but do not actively farm them. The rate of decline in the holdings of black farmers proper probably crosses over to this group as well, as it does for the relatively small holdings of native Americans.

The trend toward land loss by minorities, particularly in the South, where their holdings are concentrated, is not new, but, instead, of slowing, it is increasing. The 1982 report of the US Civil Rights Commission, “The Decline of Black Farming in America”, warns early on that “At [the present] rate of loss, there will be virtually no blacks operating farms in this country by the end of the next decade.”

The situation which the Commission addressed in its report is often labelled a crisis in farmland ownership. But the problem extends beyond the image of cultivated fields and pastures that the word farmland calls to mind. Valuable and appreciating minority-owned forests, whether on a section of a family farm’s acreage or on non-farm holdings, are also vanishing. Of farmland owned by blacks in the South, certainly more than half is forested; non-farm rural land is even more wooded. In the changing economic landscape of the South, the small landowner, particularly the black landowner, is losing substantial present and future forest assets to corporations and individual investors seeking tax shelters.

E.F. Hutton Group, Inc. offices in medium-sized cities across the nation are at this moment offering shares in a second limited partnership of twenty million dollars to purchase woodland in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Promising a turnover time of as little as seven years, a return of eight percent during the life of the partnership, and significant tax shelter aspects, Hutton fully subscribed the first offering in less than four months. This arrangement (and others like it offered by Merrill Lynch and First National Bank of Atlanta) capitalizes on the very large standing stock of mature pine timber in the South today. Though the promotional literature for these plans stresses the long-term potential for a bull market in the Southern forest, each plan is basically designed to harvest both trees and tax credits. As Hutton’s promotional brochure notes: “Southeastern timberland is avail-

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able.” Sadly, the long-term loss of minority-owned land in the South has contributed to the tragic ‘availability’ of woodland formerly held by small owners.

The billion-dollar-plus land and timber asset owned by minority landowners in the South remains a significant potential equity resource of Southern blacks. Yet putting an exact price tag on this land is difficult. Land prices are highly variable throughout the South. One hundred acres within the asphalt reach of a city like Charlotte or Jackson may have a high development value; a similar piece of land in a rural section may bring only a fraction as much. The share of land value contributed by the forest is also difficult to pin down. Perhaps as much as one-half of the total value of black-owned forestland (again, representing roughly fifty to seventy percent of the total black land-holding) can be attributed to the value of the trees growing on the land. Because of their high value in today’s market, pine stands disproportionately contribute to this total value.

Markets for forest products are highly changeable. Yet the financial advantage of selling pine timber relative to other species seems very likely to continue for the next ten to thirty years. During this same period, local or regional markets (such as in North Carolina’s furniture belt) may also be strong for hardwood species such as oak, walnut and maple. But the greatest forest asset of small owners today, and the best promise for financial return, remains pine softwood stands–many of them on minority lands–growing across the region.

Pine stands demand special management techniques, and both the need for such techniques as well as the potential scale of forest income are peculiarly rooted in the historical origins of the pine forest. Exploring the social and ecological past of the Southern pine forest can bring the current situation of forestland in the South–its opportunities and problems–into sharper focus.

Of the forty million acres of pineland in private ownership in the South, most are the unexpected inheritance of agricultural change during the years from 1930-50. Stephen Boyce of the US Forest Service has told this story best in a series of fine technical articles on wood supplies in the South. The generation of Southern farmers of this period realized that with the help of new tractor and chemical fertilizers, they could make their production goals on much smaller acreages. New farm policies seeking to restrict production encouraged them in this adjustment, and this, along with direct dislocation, contributed to the acreage of land left unplowed and fallow. When the land was left uncultivated, pine seeds, windblown from trees along field edges, took root and grew into a new extensive pine forest. Today these twenty-five to fifty-year-old pines constitute much of the regional forest asset that investors are now discovering. True to their beginnings, the Southern pinelands remain largely in the hands of farmers and small landowners black and white.

An aerial photograph showing green. old field patches of pine in the corner of a Piedmont or Coastal Plain county can be read like a still-shot of land change. Five or so major species of pine are the dominant old field species in the South because they germinate and come to maturity under full sunlight better than other trees. They are not tolerant of the shade cast by a neighbor. Common ecological threads tie together all of the pine stand patches. The trees are often growing on less productive soils that follow the farmers’ logic: steeper, drier slopes and eroded fields were the first abandoned. The pines can slowly heal some of the damage done to this ground.

Once it takes hold, the pine forest has a lifespan stretching to 150 years. The early life of the pine stand sees seedlings gradually crowd out the yellow of broom-sedge and asters to form a thick canopy. By middle age, the number of trees in the stand drops off sharply, and those that are left grow taller and more valuable. Eventually the growth rate of these trees tapers off, and longer-lived trees such as oaks or elm and hickory begin to grow faster than the pines and finally outlive them. Forest management can be effective in improving the value of pine stands during the middle years–roughly from thirty to sixty–of their life.

Most of the millions of acres of pine forest growing on small, privately-owned tracts across the South are now entering this critical period. Though these thousands of individual stands are not all equally promising, the larger acreages have a particularly strong potential to make forest management pay off through building long-term income. As the trees on private land age, this possibility will begin to diminish. Around the end of the century, about the time that the post war generation of Southerners reaches retirement age, a decline will be in full swing.

Today so many of these old-field pine stands, now entering maturity in the financial sense, are being cut that forest economists are predicting a dip in the Southeastern softwood supplies. At the same time, small landowners are not renewing these stands through tree planting or other measures. What is showing up in the

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graphs as a small tilt today will become a serious shift twenty or thirty years down the road, when the current southern softwood surplus has been opportunistically consumed. Even though corporations have begun extensive planting programs to try to insure a portion of their future wood supplies, they cannot make up the deficit on their lands alone. A serious and unfortunate consequence is that corporations are responding to this dilemma by turning toward establishing intensive forest plantations on Southern wetlands such as peatlands and alluvial river bottoms. Serious environmental damage results from converting natural forest ecosystems to simplified, single species landscapes. The consequences of wetland conversion range from losing genetic diversity as native plants and animals are pushed out by uniform monocultural plantings, to short-circuiting the complex pathways by which wetlands regulate water flows and buffer pollution. In light of this, it makes environmental sense to continue and even intensify the harvest of trees off oldfield stands with a history of disturbance like those commonly on small land-holdings. The alternative is, all too plainly, to allow corporations to continue to gamble with large scale modification of natural systems valuable to all Southerners.

Intensifying the management and harvest of trees off private lands makes good economic sense for the small landowner as well. However, just as there are makes opportunities to make this choice worthwhile, minority landowners are being pushed out of a market that they, along with other small holders, have dominated for years.

Part of the problem has to do with the way in which small landowners view the financial potential of their forests. Most are accustomed to treating forest land as a nest egg or savings account with a small investment return. Yet anyone who has counted the annual growth rings on a stick of firewood has witnessed the rate of which trees add to their “principal”. And the market price for wood has increased steadily over this century Given this, long-term forest income can more closely resemble an annuity with continued growth beyond inflation. However, active forest management is nearly always necessary to make this promise a reality.

Most of the pine forests owned by private individuals in the South grow and are cut without the benefit of sound forestry practices. When these lands are not properly managed, or are sold or foreclosed, another corridor to a stronger rural economy is closed off for blacks. On the mature pine stands, the manner in which trees are harvested has a great deal to do with the future income that can result from the forest. For example, clear-cutting/he family property all at once will often result in a second forest of far less value than that initially on the land, particularly if the original forest was an old field pine stand. Over the past decade, only twenty percent of the pine stands cut in the South have returned to pine through natural reseeding from nearby trees. Another twenty percent, mainly on larger holdings, was replanted. For financially hardpressed landowners, the investment in purchasing and setting out seedlings makes planting a difficult step to take. As a result, cashing in on a nest egg of old-field pines may well be impossible the second time around.

Foresters have developed middle-of-the-road cutting techniques that may offer a way out of the cycle of clear-cutting and neglect that is today’s rule. Two methods of cutting and regenerating the forest–“group selection” and “shelterwood”–are promising. These techniques work with the existing mature forest to renew the stand as the forest is harvested over a period of years. Under shelterwood management, thinnings are carried out early in the life of the forest; then, when the forest stand reaches middle age, two or more substantial cuttings are made. As the canopy is opened, light falling on the forest floor will allow a second generation of pines to grow under the old stand of trees. When the original stand is removed, a new vigorous pine generation will be ready to take its place. The group selection technique creates a forest of patches of different-aged trees by making many small openings in the forest canopy from year to year.

Shelterwood and group selection management styles may hold financial advantages for the small owner as well. Since frequent cuttings are made, income will be received on a regular schedule rather than all at once. When a stand is finally harvested, another stand will be approaching a point at which it too will be financially productive. These techniques are not useful on all lands–particularly less fertile ones. However, they are currently being used on only a small fraction of the Southern forest on which they could be effective.

The difficulties of bringing minority-held forest land under productive forestry practices also lie outside of, as well as in, the woods. The average size of forest tracts held by black owners is small, probably less than fifty acres. On land-holdings of this size, it is difficult to obtain management advice while the stand of trees is growing, and to

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schedule sound patterns of harvest for profitable sales. However, as the trees mature, there are many possible strategies for overcoming these handicaps. Organizing marketing and management cooperatives among small landowners may offer one way out of this problem. The chief advantage is that, by combining ownerships, co op members can gain more leverage and demand better prices from buyers of timber and pulpwood. Yet cooperatives without a loyal membership and good technical advice have a hit-or-miss record of success.

Small landowners also must find a path through the tangled thicket of forest law. Timber sales, contracts, and the determination of tax liability all require special knowledge. Because forestry policy making is a very specialized domain, isolated from scrutiny by the general public, much of what is on the books is pitched toward corporations and larger owners. Yet there are opportunities here as well, particularly with regard to taxation and direct subsidies. Owners of forestland or timber are afforded favorable long-term capital gains status on the sale value of their trees, and on management costs that improve forest growth. Also on the positive side, a joint state-federal “Forestry Incentives Program” can pay up to half of the cost of reforesting cutover land, or caring for the forest. In many areas forest lands qualify for special ad valorem property tax status, which can reduce the cost of owning land. However, all of these programs remain under-subscribed by small land owners. Most do not know of their existence.

In every Southern state there are federal and state agencies that could be key players in offering forest management assistance to minority landowners. These public service organizations are split between groups concerned specifically with the forest–such as State Forestry Services–and groups like the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA), the Soil Conservation Service, and Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service–that are concerned mainly with farmers and farm owners. The latter group of agencies, especially the FmHA, has come under sharp criticism for failing to directly address the problems faced by black farmers. The Civil Rights Commission report found that the FmHA “has not given adequate emphasis or priority to dealing with the crisis facing black farmers today . . . The level of assistance provided [to minorities] is insufficient to correct the effects of past inequalities or to reflect the urgency of the problem at hand.” One reason for lack of involvement by the FmHA is the small size of most black farms. American agriculture, and American forestry as well, emphasize bigness, leaving behind the small scale family farm for an integrated, corporate, tomorrow. Yet there is persuasive evidence that small farms are not in themselves less efficient in terms of crop productivity or energy expenditure. Instead, the problem largely lies in the language of regulations, in market structures, and in the perceptions of loan bankers and some agency personnel.

The same biases and problems carry over to small-scale forest owners and the agencies they could call on for help. State forestry services are often closely allied to forest industry, and, in spite of this alliance, many are relatively poorly funded. These agencies have also failed to focus imaginatively on the problem of underproductivity of small landowners in particular, much less on the especially urgent problems of minority holders. Yet in forestry there remains a widespread allegiance to the worth of small forests, and this belief could provide an underpinning for building programs targeted to aid minority property owners.

Realizing the full potential of forests to contribute to the financial health of small landowners will require effort. State and federal agencies concerned with forestry and conservation will need to work hard to reach minority landowners. Links to wood and lumber markets will need to be forged, and small landowners must be open to a new way of viewing their forest land–as an asset to be carefully cultivated. This is a long and difficult agenda, but a basic resilience in the Southern land, which engendered today’s productive pine forest out of agricultural dislocation, gives room for optimism.

A sense of this strength in the land comes through in Ellen Glasgow’s turn-of-the-century novel Burren Ground. The post-Reconstruction southside Virginia is resistent to the efforts of farmers at cultivation: Although “Spring after Spring the cultivated ground appeared to shrink into told fields’ where scrub pine or oak succeeded broomsedge and sassafrass as inevitably as Autumn into Winter,” still. “Now and then a fresh start would be made.” Like these lines, the succession of chapters–“Broomsedge, Pine and Life Everlasting” in the book also signal regeneration. Good management of the natural tendency of land toward forest can be turned to the advantage of small landowners, and give them an edge on survival. Forestry practiced in a way responsible to the land as well as to the ledger can help minorities to remain in possession of their rural Southern heritage.

Tom Hatley, native of North Carolina, forester and writer, is spending the summer at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria.