Just as wartime labor needs increased, the tendency toward mechanization that had begun during the New Deal expanded. As one historian has argued, the adoption of the mechanical cotton picker was revolutionary (Holley 2000). However, production of tractors and combines was not the highest priority of the war industrial complex, and it was only after the war that the turn away from mule-power to engine-power truly accelerated. In 1943, International Harvester developed a mechanical cotton picker, but production levels of the new pickers were low during the war, and the transition to mechanical cotton picking occurred in the postwar period and, even then, certain structural impediments slowed the process. The mule breeding and marketing industry was substantial, and planters and farmers had long-standing relationships with both the beasts and those who sold them. They had capital tied up in barns, harnesses, tillers, and plows, all of which could be adapted to machines, but the desire to do so took time to develop. In some cases, adaptation was not as easy as one might expect. Cotton gins, for example, were an essential component of the cotton production process, but the existing gins were suited to hand-picked cotton. Machine-picked cotton came with a load of debris that the old cotton gins could not easily process. While the immediate adoption of cotton pickers, tractors, and combines in the cotton belt seems slow if examining it on the ground in the 1940s, it was, in fact, remarkably fast in the long view. By 1960, mules were rare on most large plantations. Another important element in the adoption of mechanical cotton pickers and other such machines was the cost involved. Investing in machines required a capital outlay that demanded a certain production level, and larger farmers and planters would be the ones who found it expedient to make this transition (Raper 1946; Street 1957; Aiken 1998; Daniel 2005).
One final factor in the postwar production of cotton had to fall into place before the era of “scientific agriculture” could take shape: the use of new kinds of chemicals. Chopping away weeds and thinning the crop, something that occurred in the hottest months of the summer, was typically done by hand hoe and gang labor. Agriculturalists had experimented with the use of chemicals as weed control since the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, innovations, including the use of synthetic chemicals were pioneered, but the technology exploded in the post-World War II era as products like 2,4-D and other peroxyacetic acid herbicides became available. It was more commonly used in conjunction with the cultivation of corn, oats, and other cereals, as cotton was extremely vulnerable to its misapplication. The transition away from cotton, however, contributed to the growing use of these chemicals in the South and, eventually, chemicals friendlier to cotton were developed (Fite 1984; Daniel 2005).
The use of new chemicals, the adoption of machinery, and return to the trend toward wage labor marked the era of scientific agriculture and the rise of the neo-plantation. Although the transformation favored larger operators as smaller producers could ill afford chemicals and machinery, some small farmers found a way to survive. For most of the twentieth century, farm owners as a category typically owned the vast majority of the acreage they tilled. In the postwar period, the percentage of land “rented” by farm owners increased from the low single digits to over 50 percent by 1960. It became commonplace for them to own 40–50 percent of the land they farmed. They rented the remainder. This had the advantage of providing the economies of scale necessary to pay for the machinery and chemicals (Whayne 1996).
Another telling statistic in the transformation to scientific agriculture in the South was revealed in the 1960 agricultural census: the disappearance of the sharecropper category. In 1940, despite a New Deal era tendency toward wage labor, sharecroppers made up the majority of farmers in the cotton producing areas. Their virtual disappearance in a 20-year period is nothing short of remarkable. One of the unintended consequences was a demographic revolution that struck a blow to farm towns, businesses, schools, and churches. While the departed moved to southern and northern cities in search of industrial work, those who remained were left to live with the detritus of depopulation: shuttered downtown businesses, boarded-up country churches, abandoned tenant shacks, and underfunded schools. Civic organizations attempted to attract small factories that could employ unskilled laborers. Enticed by generous tax breaks, these factories moved into many areas of the South and hired the wives of farm laborers whose husbands worked seasonal jobs in farming and picked up whatever other employment they could find when farm work was not available. The factories, however, remained only long enough to turn a profit and, having invested so little in locating in these southern towns, moved further South within a decade or two. The costs to rural southerners are similar to those experienced by indigenous populations in countries where the so-called Green Revolution was employed. Meant to modernize and enable them to produce certain crops in greater abundance, the Green Revolution undermined local institutions and sustainable farming practices. The latter was not a part of the South’s experience with the rise of agribusiness but the other similarities beg comparison (Cobb 1984; Whayne 1996; Aiken 1998; Hurt 2020). Populations thinned to the extent that when the chicken processing industry developed in conjunction with the emergence of industrial chicken production in the postwar era, the processing plants had to resort to recruiting foreign labor as there was too little local labor available and willing to work in that industry.
Non-plantation areas faced their own transition to a different kind of scientific agriculture with the rise of large feed lots for hogs and cattle, but the transformation of the chicken industry was most surprising. It evolved from an enterprise dominated by farm wives and devoted mostly to production of eggs to large-scale agribusiness focused on production of broiler chickens for consumption (Walker 2000; Jones 2002; Gisolfe 2017). Chicken meat, normally considered a luxury on farms, became the new “meat.” The transformation began in the mid-1920s, accelerated during World War II, and had overtaken hill country farms by the 1960s. Small landowners who might have raised cattle or hogs and produced a mix of crops on thin soils in these non-plantation areas became tenders of chicken production facilities and dependent on contracts with entities like the Tyson Company. While small white landowners produced the chickens, however, an immigrant labor force processed them in factories that soon came under attack for violating safety standards. The chicken industry had, in some places, come under scrutiny for polluting streams with runoff from factories and farms (Striffler 2005).
In plantation areas, the move away from reliance on a single crop—cotton, rice, or tobacco—was the realization of a long-held dream of county farm agents. In tobacco and cotton areas, they had long been trying to convince planters and farmers to plant soybeans, a restorative crop, and move toward diversification generally. But the diversification farm agents desired was not quite the diversification that occurred. Instead, the South turned to a two- or three-crop system, especially in the old plantation areas where a mix of cotton, soybeans, and rice were grown on the same farming operations (Whayne 1996). Thus, while cotton, for example, was knocked from its throne, it remained an important auxiliary crop, sharing space on increasingly large neo-plantations of the post-World War II era with soybeans and rice. Tobacco faced a different fate because of the growing association of tobacco use with lung cancer, and large-scale tobacco cultivation became increasingly untenable in the late twentieth century (Hahn 2011; Bennett 2014; Swanson 2014).
The environmental threat posed by agricultural chemicals remains a controversial topic. Even as some chemicals restored nutrients to soils that had been depleted by single-crop agriculture and overcultivation, herbicides to kill weeds and insecticides to kill pests led to a host of concerns. Runoff from agricultural fields played a role in the creation of dead zones at the mouths of rivers, like the Gulf of Mexico. The chemical load in