4 - Labor productivity in cotton farming: a problem of research

Summary

Song made in lieu of many ornaments

With which my love should duly have been dect,

Which, cutting off through hasty accidents,

Ye would not stay your due time to expect.

–Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion

To speak of my efforts to estimate labor productivity in cotton farming in the postbellum South as “ongoing research” is to do myself an undeserved courtesy. The basic data on labor times per acre, by operation and region, were collected between 1958 and 1961. They were placed in a standardized tabular form at the same time that a similar effort by myself, Judith Klein, and my students at the University of North Carolina was yielding roughly acceptable results for corn, wheat, dairy products, and the tasks of farm capital formation. The dissertation results of Fred Bateman and Martin Primack were published as articles in the Journal of Economic History and my work jointly with Judith Klein was published in 1966 as an NBER conference paper. At that time, the Ford Foundation was still sending its life–giving rays into university research, and hopes were high that a rather complete picture of the uses of labor time in American agriculture at the middle and the end of the nineteenth century might be developed as the climax of the research.