Rivoli Chapter 2-3 Questions

1. Learn how Eli Whitney’s invention revolutionized cotton production and entrenched the slave plantations society.

2. On what fact does Rivoli base her argument that slavery was not the reason that cotton production in the US grew much more rapidly than in China and India?   
During the period of the US’s rise to dominance, China and India also had free labor available.

3. How does Rivoli account for the US’s rise to dominance in cotton production?
Institutions like private property, incentive structures, governance.

4. How did the share-cropping system protect cotton growers from labor markets?
The share-cropping system bound former slaves and their descendants to growers’ lands by not paying them cash wages for their labor.  This prevented laborers from leaving plantations and buying their own land.

5. What does lien mean in Rivoli’s description of the share-cropping system?
A lien is similar to collateral for a loan.  Sharecroppers could not use their cotton harvests as collateral for a loan, because it belonged to the landowner.

6. Learn how the boll weevil undermined King Cotton in the Deep South.

7. Where and when did cotton production move after the boll weevil struck the Deep South?Texas and Oklahoma: 1900-1920

8. Monkeys, geese, fire?  Why were these solutions tried in Texas but not Mississippi?
Texas cotton growers were looking for solutions to their unpredictable, arduous labor demands.  In Mississippi and the rest of the Deep South slaves, and later sharecroppers, were the solution to labor demands.

9. How was the labor solution in Texas similar to the labor solution in the Deep South? Use the term labor market correctly in your answer.
Texas growers avoided the labor market by organizing laborers in new company towns which housed laborers who were not paid cash wages and who were tied to the land just as laborers were in the Deep South.

Chapter 3

1. Identify the collection of resources available to farmers in the Lubbock area with which cotton growers in poor countries must compete.
Private companies, farmer cooperatives, universities, US government  

2. What happened to the importance of mules as cotton producers moved to West Texas?  Decreased How did this actually worsen the labor problem for a cotton grower? West Texas farmers used tractors and increased cotton production which meant that they had large acreages that still needed to be picked.

3. What factor led to the Bracero program?  WWII drained ag laborers out of West Texas. How did the program meet growers’ 3 labor requirements? They could count on labor on demand; they knew in advance what it would cost; they were guaranteed that labor would be productive. Why were West Texas cotton growers willing to let the program end in the 1960s?  90% of growers had shifted to mechanical production.

4. What was the AAA? The Agricultural Adjustment Act was a federal price support program that guaranteed prices and paid farmers to take land out of production to limit supply of cotton. How did it lead to the demise of sharecropping?  Farmers in the Deep South took the payments to quit producing which put sharecroppers out of work.

5. How did differences in farm size lead to differences in the adoption of mechanical cotton harvesters? Harvesters were expensive, too expensive for a small farm.  West Texas farms were already large and farmers readily adopted mechanical harvesters.  Farmers of the Deep South often had much smaller farms and could not afford to adopt mechanization.

6. How did Texas growers artificially create a killing freeze?  Chemicals. Why did they need to do that? Harvesters required dead plants.

7. Rivoli characterizes the Reinsches’ farm history as “a narrative of discovery after discovery”.  List several of these discoveries.  Mechanization, chemical pesticides, chemical defoliants. What institutions, working in concert, made this possible? USDA, universities, farmer cooperatives. 

8. How have the number and ownership of cotton gins changed during the past century? Decreased a lot How did this affect the Reinsches? It improved their control over the price they received for their cotton bales.  It also improved their profits because they owned a share in the cooperatively-owned gin.

9.  List 6 products that the non-lint portion of harvested cotton is used in.
catfish food, peanut butter, cattle feed, soap, potato chips, Olestra

10. What are 3 ways that growers have pooled resources to profit from production?
Gin, bale compression, denim mill for Levi-Strauss