La Forge Farms

National Agricultural Library

subsistence homesteads

In 1937 the Farm Security Administration set out to discover a new system of farming for Southeastern I'd s sour i which would work better than the old. It decided to take the same land and the same people who had failed under the old system, and try to find new methods which might lead them to success.

Since the problems of Southeastern Missouri are very much like those of the whole Southern Plantation region, such an experiment promised to be of considerable value to the entire Mississippi Delta. If it succeeded, the new methods might be adopted by thousands of farmers; they might mean new life to a sick economy.

Consequently, the Farm Security Administration bought 6,700 acres near LaForge in New Madrid County, most of which had once been in a typical plantation. On this land there lived 100 share- cropper families — 60 of them white and 40 Negro. Their homes were unpainted, loose-boarded shacks with sagging roofs. In many cases a family of five or more had only one room for sleeping, cooking, and eating. Sanitation was primitive — when there was any at all. Living standards were barely above the starvation level. All of the possessions of the average family — including its clothes, furniture, farming equipment, livestock, and the food in the pantry — amounted to only $28 in value. Like the plantation they lived on, these families had not been able to make much headway under the traditional methods of farming.

For that very reason, the Farm Security Administration asked these people to stay on the land as members of the new project. It wanted to find out whether these run-of-the-mill share-croppers could make a decent, secure living if they had a chance under different conditions.

U.S. Department of Agriculture

Farm Security Administration

1940