Having grown up on a farm where our principal cash crop was cotton, I am always interested in what is going on in our state regarding the agriculture sector.

Agriculture is still Georgia’s leading industry, but there are always challenges in crop production—most often brought about by the fickleness of the weather.

Not only do farmers pray for abundant rain, but they also need a consistency of showers throughout the growing season.  In my time, I remember one year when heavy flooding took place, and we had to replant all the crops.  Too much rain was unusual, but it was a good reminder that a farmer always must worry about the unexpected.

My father had an old radio that he listened to in early morning trying to get the weather report out of Memphis, Tennessee.  He would smile broadly when he could decipher that the weather forecast was favorable.

We always worried about a hurricane coming up from Florida and raining on our cotton.  We couldn’t fathom the overt destruction that our state suffered in recent years with Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Helene.  

Too much rain, which hurricanes brought about in its outer reaches, could damage and ruin a cotton crop before the harvest was complete. That was always a worry, but there was not any threat that trees would be uprooted and roofs blown off houses.

When you ride down Highway 15 toward the Georgia coast, you still see piles of debris here and there with storm-ravaged tree stumps piled up in several places.

Often, what worries cotton farmers the most is drought conditions.  Throughout the summer when long dry spells exist, all rural church services will contain prayers for rain.

With all the challenges, Georgia remains the second-largest cotton producer of cotton in the U.S.  Texas is ranked number one.  (Georgia has a land mass of 59,420 square miles while Texas has 268,596 square miles, making the Longhorn state about four and a half times larger.)

With far less acreage devoted to cotton, Georgia nonetheless has always been ranked among the top cotton producers in the country.  The economic value of cotton production in our state is more than $1.3 billion.  

Internet research confirms that Georgia was the first colony to produce cotton commercially, which was in the Savannah area in 1734.  With slave labor, cotton made many men rich.

While Georgia was not a slave state originally, the invention of the cotton gin, a godsend for plantation proprietors, fostered and expanded slavery in the state.

Even with cotton’s immense value for plantation owners, there was the arrival of the boll weevil around 1915.  This dastardly insect ruined fortunes and brought about financial ruin and bankruptcies across the landscape.

My father had to drop out of school in the seventh grade to work full time on his father’s farm to help him stave off foreclosure.  Everybody suffered in one way or another.

I can remember that we heard Tex Ritter singing the boll weevil song on the radio about the blasted pest looking for a home.  It graphically confirmed that this spiteful pest wreaked havoc in so many people’s lives.

“The boll weevil got half the cotton,

“The merchant got the rest,

“Didn’t leave the farmer’s wife,

“But one old cotton dress,

“And it full o’ holes,

“It a full o’ holes.”

The song resonated with the farmers who realized that no matter what they did, there was no stopping this pest.  However, there was something worse coming—The Great Depression.

Farmers had some success with insecticides, but that brought about other issues, leaving many desperate.  Farmers could grow enough fruit and vegetables to feed their families, but there was not any money.  Most everybody I knew drove used cars.

If you had anything that was store bought, then you were a fortunate person.  Most mothers became seamstresses out of necessity, making children’s clothes out of flour and guano sacks.

Fast forward from those debilitating times and technology has gotten the boll weevil underfoot.  The greatest of agricultural menaces is now eradicated.  How great it is to put that reference into past tense.

You ride through the fields of south Georgia and you see cotton flourishing but no laborers with long sacks in the fields.  Cotton harvesting is done by machines now.

If you had told me when I graduated from high school in the mid-fifties that in my lifetime, we would see the eradication of the boll weevil and that cotton would not be picked by hand, I would not have believed you.