Part Owners and the Changing Spatial Structure of Farms in the South: A Case Study

Southeastern Geographer Vol. XXXI, No. 1, May 1991, pp. 44-51 PART OWNERS AND THE CHANGING SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF FARMS IN THE SOUTH: A CASE STUDY LizbethA. PyIe Part owners, farmers who own some land to use as their base of operations and rent the additional acreage they need to assemble a competitively sized farm, are now widely recognized as leaders in large-scale agriculture across the United States. (J) They surpassed full owners in terms of land in farms they operated in 1950 and hold that position today, controlling 54% of the total acreage in farmland according to the 1987 agricultural census. The Southeast has mirrored this national trend of increasing part ownership, which virtually replaced the "old-fashioned tenancy" of the sharecropping era. (2) Despite the region's unique agricultural history, southern farms have become as labor-efficient and capital-intensive as farms anywhere in the United States, investing in machinery, adopting new technologies, and renting the additional land needed to create larger holdings. (3) In recent years, part owners have continued to expand their operations on rented land and dominate the Southeast's harvested cropland (Table 1). While their dominance in crop production is not threatened, tenants (i.e., farmers who rent all the land they operate) have challenged part owners for the control of additional acreage. Although these trends for farming units seem relatively stable overall, aggregated statistics mask the dynamic nature of land tenure. In actuality, rented parcels of land can be added to or deleted from a particular farm unit, and this leads to changes in its spatial structure. There is no basic source of published information on farm layout, and insight must be gained from case studies. The Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS) houses an under-utilized source of primary data on farm operations in every county of the United States. Records on farm operators, the tracts they operate, and their tenure status on each tract can be coupled with large-scale air photos identifying the location of individual tracts. I used Dr. PyIe is Assistant Professor of Geography at West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV 26506. Vol. XXXI, No. 1 45 TABLE 1 COMPARISON OF SELECTED CHARACTERISTICS OF PART OWNERS AND TENANTS IN THE SOUTHEAST, 1978 AND 1987* 19781987 CharacteristicPart OwnersTenantsPart OwnersTenants Percentage of land in farms operated44.68.243.08.8 Average acreage of farm operation339.3166.6351.7223.0 Percentage of operation on rented land51.2(100.0)53.3(100.0) Percentage of all cropland harvested58.712.356.513.5 Average acreage of cropland harvested162.094.4159.2127.1 * Southeast defined as states in two Bureau of Census regional divisions: East South Central (Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama) and South Atlantic (West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida) Source: United States Census ofAgriculture 1978 and 1987. this combination of data sources to reveal changes in selected characteristics of farms growing crops in one South Carolina county. This report studies changes that occurred in the tenure, size, and spatial structure of farms in Calhoun County, South Carolina, during a ten-year period from 1976 to 1986. (4) Farms in Calhoun County are representative of agriculture in the Inner Coastal Plain counties where row crops continue to provide the lifeblood of the local economy. The county lies amidst one of the "islands of cropland in a sea of pine trees" that Hart identified in a study of cropland concentrations in the South. (5) His characterization of the area rings even truer today. Cotton has continued to contribute significantly to Calhoun County's agricultural economy despite acreage declines in the 1970s and early 1980s. Then, many farmers turned to soybeans, which they could double-crop with wheat or other small grains, but their enchantment with soybeans did not last. Soybean acreage plummeted between the 1982 and 1987 agricultural censuses, while cotton acreage increased for the first time in years. A drop in soybean prices, the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) for erodible land, and the boll weevil eradication program precipitated this reversal. Calhoun County's total land area in farms declined from 54% to 38% between the 1974 and 1987 agricultural censuses. To some extent, the 46Southeastern...