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  • Commentary on Merle C. Prunty’s Idle Rural Land Phenomena in Madison County, Georgia
  • John Fraser Hart

I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Merle Prunty. I loved him and I fought with him, often vigorously. He was an outsized personality, and he held his views as strongly as I hold mine. I used to tease him about being an adopted Southerner (he grew up in Missouri), and because he was a “convert” he seemed to feel obligated to feel defensive about criticisms and negative things said about the South.

I claim better credentials as a born-and- bred, dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, because my family roots extend back for more than two hundred years in the hills of Virginia and on the plantations of South Carolina. As such, I have felt freer to be critical of what I perceive as warts and blemishes in the region, perhaps even a bit too free at times.

I was forcibly reminded of these differences in attitude when I enjoyed rereading Merle Prunty’s intriguing paper on idle land in Madison County, Georgia. In 1960 Madison County, like much of the plainsland South, was in the early throes of a major rural land use transformation, the abandonment of cotton production and the succession of cotton patches to woodlands. In 1949, for example, Madison County had 77,512 acres of cropland and 20,400 acres of cotton; by 2007 the county had only 25,316 acres of cropland, of which only 14,336 acres was used to grow crops, including two small fields of cotton.

How should one interpret the loss of more than two-thirds of the cropland and essentially all of the cotton in a rural county in less than sixty years? Merle was troubled by what he saw as the failure of local farmers to use their land effectively. He said that Madison County was “suffering tremendous economic losses, undergoing economic upheavals of great magnitude, or both,” and was trying to figure out how to help farmers get their land back into economic production, to get the county back on track, so to speak. I prefer to try to chronicle what is happening, and to interpret this loss as but one small local manifestation of a major regional trend in land use patterns, without assigning value to it, much less attempting to modify it.

Merle elected to focus on a very small part of a very large picture. He identified, mapped, and tried to explain the phenomenon of idle land in Madison County. He defined idle land as former crop or pasture land that had grown up in broom sedge, but explicitly excluded old fields that were already being naturally restocked by young pines and associated brush. I believe that dominance by broom sedge is but one single brief ephemeral stage in the natural plant succession on abandoned cotton land, and a fixation on one brief stage risks [End Page 15] losing sight of the larger regional pattern of succesion of cotton land to trees.

Merle identified one specific stage in a plant succession and reified it, treating it as though it were an independent phenomenon worthy of investigation in its own right rather than as a brief stage in a decades-long process. His search for explanation thus was prejudiced, but he performed a very useful service by marshaling an insightful list of the factors that might be relevant to and associated with this process.

He dismissed as causal factors soil quality and topography (a bit incorrectly, I think), and population outmigration (which might be more a consequence rather than a cause). He ascribed greater importance to the then-ongoing shift from cotton to broiler chicken production (which required much smaller acreages of land), a decline in farm tenancy, and the growth of longdistance commuting of farm women to off-farm jobs in adjacent counties, which was facilitated by newly blacktopped roads.

I do wish he had talked more to the farmers who were making decisions about the way in which they were managing and using their land. As one small farmer said to me, “You can’t make no money on cotton, not even on paper, and...

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