ticides, anhydrous ammonia (a superfertilizer that discouraged soil con-
servation), and huge tractors and harvesters. Hardly any workers were re-
quired, so call the place a farm, then, a big one, certainly, and a gear in the
great wheel called big agriculture, or ‘‘big ag.’’
There remain, however, two southern geographies where chemicals and
machines have yet to solve the problem of harvest, and where human hands
are necessary. The smaller and more discrete is the burley tobacco culture
of the mid-South, especially Kentucky. Eastern, flue-cured tobacco was sub-
jected to mechanical harvesting, finally, at the beginning of the s, but
air-cured burley continues to defy inventors and engineers. Burley begins
to ripen, or cure, in the field, as leaves turn a blazing yellow. Then work-
ers move in, cut whole stalks, tie them to sticks, and hang them in well-
ventilated curing barns. Hand labor is required again to take the sticks
down and to strip and sort leaves for the auction houses. Tiny burley crops
are still managed primarily with family labor. Larger fields, which grew
in size and number with consolidations of tobacco allotments during the
s, require crews of nonrelated laborers. For a long time these were
typically neighboring and dependent poor black folk. When those work-
ers found opportunities elsewhere, burley farmers turned to the migrant
stream from Mexico and Central America, the same workforce that sup-
plies labor to meatpacking plants and other loci of the most disagreeable
work in the country. Since the migrants are not citizens, and since many of
them are ‘‘illegal’’ transients and/or do not speak English, they are as vul-
nerable as sharecroppers ever were. So plantations of a sort may be said to
survive in southern places not historically associated with plantations.
This is also the case in the larger rural landscape that extends along the
South Atlantic coast, from reclaimed fringes of the Everglades up through
Georgia, the Carolinas, the Delmarva Peninsula, and beyond. Here lies an
old citrus and vegetable ‘‘produce’’ belt as well as an old migrant route.
Harvests of oranges, watermelons, strawberries, cucumbers, and dozens
of other products remain unmechanized. So crews of workers continue
to follow picking seasons northward every year. Once, these workers were
overwhelmingly Afro-southerners, many of them runaway, as it were, crop-
pers. More recently, though, migrant crews look like burley workers; they
are Mesoamericans. In North Carolina, which has the largest population
of legal Mexican residents in the region, a Mexican man tried to form
a union among cucumber pickers to bargain collectively with a pickle-
bottling company in . This (thus far) failing effort may portend much,
however, because these perverse shadows of plantation-style labor rela-