ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the enormous subject of Farming and community well-being in the nonmetropolitan South, and, how these two highly complex and interrelated dimensions of Southern life and work may be transformed by the advent of new agricultural technology. The South's agricultural sector offers a storied, and at times villainous, history of social organization and change. The economic and social history of the South is characterized by radical economic and social upheaval. Southern society has been characterized by a dependency upon agricultural production. The cotton plantations of the South tended to be subdivided into small holdings on which emancipated black laborers and some poor white laborers worked the land. Since World War II, the economic and social forces shaping the structure of American agriculture have also been central to Southern agricultural production. Beef farms comprise 33 percent of the total farm numbers in the South.
