ner black farmers, the huge majority of whom were tenants or sharecrop-
pers, might begin to establish not only better diets but the first important
measure of independence from landlords and their commissaries. Com-
munities of successful participants were celebrated every summer at Fort
Valley’s Ham and Eggs Week.
White agents and receptive farmers were not concerned so much with
subsistence and independence as with productivity and markets. The ex-
perience of Agent E. W. Gaither of Hertford County, North Carolina, dem-
onstrates a new and, ultimately, portentous departure. Hertford is a coastal
plains county in the poor, sandy-soiled, and ‘‘backward’’ region of the state
that was the heart of resistance to so-called fencing reform and fire sup-
pression. Gaither arrived for part-time work in and became Hertford’s
full agent in , toward the climax of North Carolina’s battles to close the
range and suppress fire. Acutely aware of this political context, Gaither cam-
paigned to improve now-confined livestock, beginning with an anti–hog
cholera program and installation of a dip vat to eradicate cattle fever ticks.
About he decided to make a seemingly outrageous public gamble that
he could win—or lose and be run out of Hertford. Gaither told a group
of farmers that a hog, to be profitable, ought to weigh pounds at six
months of age. His audience apparently guffawed. With much ceremony,
the agent found a ‘‘demonstration’’ farmer with a sow and seven piglets.
Gaither supervised the feeding and care of the animals and then their exhi-
bition at the county fair, where on average they weighed pounds. Fair-
goers, the agent wrote later, loved the demonstration pigpen as much ‘‘as
any side show,’’ and he ‘‘was allowed to remain’’ in Hertford County.^16
Gaither was but one of many heroes of modernization across the South.
White and black, men and women, the agents labored throughout the dif-
ficult interwar decades. These were economically stressed times, during
which the farming population generally declined. Poor commodity prices,
floods, droughts, dust storms, and tractors combined to drive out the land-
less, the small owners, and the unlucky. Agronomic experts aimed to help
surviving farmers become more efficient—witness Agent Gaither’s miracle
with confined hogs. Efficiency included conservationist soil restoration
and soil building and capital investments (conceivably from better live-
stock sales) in better production equipment and machinery, which were
instrumental in increasing production on expanded fields. County agents
favored large, influential farmers, who in turn might expand agents’ in-
fluence. But in the South (perhaps more than other regions), during hard
times state and county agricultural experts counseled farmers to ‘‘live at