BUTLER/CUNNINGHAM

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Level 2

AL Ag Facts:

History

Selection of Similar Pages

All the slide shows referenced below are in Microsoft PowerPoint. To move up or down in a slide show, use "page up" and "page down". To get out of the slide show, use the "back" function on your browser.

Dr. Wayne Shell of AU Dept. of Fisheries has spent decades looking at the history of Alabama agriculture. For the 2003 conference, he prepared a short slide presentation of Alabama agricultural history before 1950. The buttons at left take you to the slides, and to a brief summary of the main points of the slide show. The main occupation of Alabama by Europeans and Africans did not occur until after the Native Americans were moved out by treaty and military force about 1830. After that, many Whites and Blacks moved in rapidly. Farm acreage and numbers of farms increased until about 1950, although production had begun to decline by then.

Herb Vanderberry of the USDA in Montgomery picks up the story after 1950, also with a slide presentation and a brief written summary from the conference in 2003. He includes some beautiful pictures of Alabama, in between some hard facts on the decline in the number of farms and in the total acreage devoted to agriculture. His pictures also indicate the important current role of animal growing (mostly poultry and catfish), and dramatically illustrate the modern meeting of city and country.

Alabama is a rural state, but it is no longer primarily agricultural. The button at left leads to an Excel (comma delimited) table that shows the dollar amounts of income from the major sources of income in Alabama, in millions of dollars. Notice that government and industry have exceed agriculture for at least a decade. Agriculture will continue to play a large role in Alabama, but along with other economic activities and other uses of the land, such as for hunting, fishing, other recreation, retirement, and other residences.

Even the rural population of Alabama is no longer primarily agricultural. In fact, farmers and farm residences are a small minority of rural occupants, as the US 2000 Census shows through the button at the left. We have been trying to find out more about those other rural residents through the Census data, but have not been able to get much hard information. Most readers of this site, who live in the country, will already be familiar with the variety of rural residents.

People are often surprised to learn that Alabama is about 70% forested, so that even most of the rural land is not farmland. This fact leads to some confusion. Some people think that forestry "took over" the farmland, but this is not quite true. Much of Alabama farmland was always a mix of pasture and light forest cover. That mixed land was converted to pure forest land as mixed farming no longer paid off. The button to the left provides two small tables and a short explanation of the situation over time.

The button to the left takes you to 6 slides that give some current facts about agriculture in Alabama. Maybe the most interesting facts are on the last slide, which show that only a small minority of the people who call themselves farmers (less than 20%) produce nearly all the marketable yield in Alabama. The sources for the information are on the slides, but mostly come from the USDA facts books as discussed on the AL Ag Facts home page.

The first button to the left leads to a written summary of Alabama agriculture and history of agriculture, based primarily on data from the first conference, but incorporating some ideas from the second conference.

The second button to the left leads to a written summary of the situation in rural Alabama, including the new rural residents. It incorporates information from both conferences. Together, these two buttons summarize the history above.