6. Descriptions of the Collections


Alleger), On the Season: A Report of a Public Health Project Conducted Among Negro Migrant
Agricultural Workers in Palm Beach County, Florida (Robert H. Browning), Subsistence Food Production
Among Low Resource Farmers in Alachua County, Florida (John R. Butler), Financial Stress in
Agriculture: Policy Options and Financial Consequences for Farmers in North Florida (William G.
Boggess), Income, Resources and Adjustment Potential Among Rural Families in North and West Florida
(Lawrence A. Reuss), and Rural Farm Retirement: A Study of Rural Retirement in Five Florida Counties
(Daniel E. Alleger).

The published literature and primary research resources documenting the history of agriculture and rural
life in Florida reveal the major concerns of the day. With the rapid easterly spread of the boll weevil
across the face of the South, cotton declined between about 1910 and 1925 forcing many farmers off the
land. The World War I era saw the migration of tens of thousands of poor, rural Floridians to the
industrial cities to the north. The land boom followed by the bust in 1926 ushered in a long period of
rural poverty in the state which was not mitigated until World War II.

The key government publications needing preservation include those of the Florida Extension Service,
Florida Agricultural Experiment Stations, the Institute of Food and Agricultural Services (UF), and the
Agriculture and Consumer Services Department of Florida, as well as a number of government
committees. In addition, over 30 Florida agricultural societies existed in the 1800s and there are
currently some 170 societies, all of which have contributed to the agricultural literature of the state.

Publications of the interwar period document the draining of much of the Florida Everglades, a epoch
that forever altered the landscape and ecology of the state. These extensive mucklands became the
newest area of experimentation with various exotic crops. The capital-intensive character of mucklands
farming reserved these lands for corporate agribusiness which by the 1930s had established sugar and
winter vegetables upon the drained acreage south and southeast of Lake Okeechobee. Also during this
period the satsuma industry of north and northwest Florida lived out its short existence along with the
tung oil industry which lasted several decades longer; both crops eventually succumbed to the
uncertainties of Florida's climate.

Florida's frontier-like character persisted well into the twentieth century. The freedom of the open range
was state law until 1949 when fencing was finally erected along Florida's highways. The darker side of
this rough-hewn culture is revealed by documents detailing the state's anachronistic penury laws which
assured agriculture and the naval stores industry of a plentiful and often cost-free black labor force until
the close of the Great Depression.

World War II represents a watershed in agriculture almost everywhere and no less so in Florida, ushering
in the era of agribusiness and encroaching urbanization. The application of chemicals developed in the
war effort to agricultural purposes inaugurated humankind's great technological onslaught against pests.
It was hoped that DDT would do for Florida crops what ice and air conditioning did for humans--make
life more livable in what is naturally a less than congenial environment. The literature shows that high-
powered but ephemeral chemical fertilizers entirely replaced animal manures, and chemical herbicides
supplanted much hand labor, thus reducing the year-round labor force, but not the harvest labor, assuring
that the state's agricultural economy was dependent on migrant workers.

Technological change gave rise concomitantly to changes in the economic structure of agriculture. The
new methods were well adapted to large-scale operations and as the average size of Florida farms
increased, their total numbers fell. Some family-owned farms were able to adapt to the changes and
grow, but many others sold out to corporate farming concerns which capitalized on the multiple
advantages of economy of scale; all the while overall farm output increased exponentially. Though this
trend was national in scope, the literature documents that in Florida it proceeded at a precipitous pace.