Answer:
In 1915, however, the boll weevil spread into southwest Georgia, destroying thousands of acres of cotton. That pest, combined with a very low price for cotton after World War I (1917-18), made diversification imperative. Moreover, outdated and damaging farming practices, such as plowing furrows without respect to the land's contour and intertilling (planting short crops beneath tall crops, which increases productivity but depletes the soil) resulted in topsoil erosion by the 1920s. Cotton production dropped from a high of more than 5 million acres and 2,769,000 bales in 1911 to only about 500,000 bales by 1923. In 2018, 1,305,000 acres of cotton were harvested, with a total of 1,955,000 bales produced and cash receipts of $735,696,000. Cotton is no longer "king" in Georgia, but cotton sales still accounted for more than 23 percent of the total cash receipts for crop production in 2017.
Farm Population
Georgia remained an agrarian state until after World War II (1941-45). The rural population did not decrease much between 1920, when
Vidalia Onions
Vidalia Onions
there were 2.1 million rural people and 310,000 farms, and 1960, when there were still 1.98 million rural residents. The proportion of the population living in rural areas decreased from about 85 percent in 1900 to 37 percent by 1990.
