Cotton, Wood Pulp, and the Man-Land Ratio of the Deep South

With the warping of international trade channels caused by economic nationalism in 1932, the South found itself facing a declining market for its principal cash crop, cotton. The New Deal proposed to remedy the declining purchasing power of the South, caused by the low price of cotton, by limiting the supply and pegging the price. With crop limitations, some land and men previously used for producing cotton either were shifted to the production of another crop or became idle.