Sugar planter. [volume] (West Baton Rouge [i.e. Port Allen, West Baton Rouge Parish, La.]) 1856-1925, 1868-12-05
~CROPS-SMALL FARMS.

ADVOCATE, of Wednesday last, upon the
estimated crop of Louisiana sugar this
year, we take the following extraordinary
prediction
"The National Intelligencer ventures
to state that it will be twelve hundred
thousand hogsheads."
If the semi official organ of President
Johnson made a statement so ridiculous,
w advise that journal to devote more
attention to home politics, and let South
ern agricultural matters alone. Why, it
is the most absurd of all absurdities to
predict such a crop, when Louisiana ever
in her palmiest days never reached one
half that number Of h~ogsheads. As
stated by the Advocate, 50 much zane
has been bought this year for seed that
it is impossible for any person to estim-
ate the crop = nor can it be done until
the last ~ is ground and the last hogs
head shipped. UuquestionabIy. there
will be more made this year than last,
and so on it will continue until the de.
mand for seed zane ceases ; but no sane
man will attempt to estimate a crop while
old plantations are being restocked or
new ones opened, with co%ntinuousd demand
for seed.
With the laboring force now under our
control-and it is the last generation of
negroes that will ever do field work
much may yet be done to redeem our fine
plantations from the desert waste into
which many of them have fallen /; but
taking everything into consideration, and
with a calm and reasonable survey of
our future prospects in this branch of
agriculture, our opinion is that the
wealth of Louisiana lies in small farms,
making say, from twenty to fifty hogs
heads each. Machinery is now i'll use in
different parts of the State exactly suited
to this system Of planting. 1t is cheap,
portable and nswer all the purposes of
the ponderous works now in use in our
old fashioned sugar houses, which costs
much, and which, in a few years more,
be laid aside as one of the
that were-relics of the halcvon
days that once made our State the wealth.
lest in the Sonth. Bnt this generation
still clings to old customs and old recol.
forgetting, or not being dispos-
ed to remember, that great changes have
occurred within the past seven years,
and that greater changes must take
place as time rolls on, in regard to field
labor in the South. Az said before, we
are now working the last negroes that
can be relied on for that purpose. The
generation, male and female, show
a decided aversion to the tasks set before
them by their parents who were trained
from childhood to the cultivation of sugar
and cotton. They prefer, as a general
rule, Oh easier and more trih;ng
ways of gaining a livelihood, no matter
how, so long as they secure enough to
sustain them for the hour. Around and
about US on all sides we see this. and
the fact staring US in the face, we
to prepare ourselves for the time
when colored labor can no longer be re-.
led upon. On large plarge plantations
his will be soonest manifest, and it is to
owners Of them that we throw out these
timely warnings; 1t is n%oDsensical to
ak Of white iAborers' for large sugar
and suicidal to import coolies
rom China, or elsewhere, to supply the
'lace of negroes-admitting the POSSIBLE.
ty.of so doing. Our population is mix
ID enough as it is without running the
'hsnceA Of . still greater commingling of
he blood. We are aware that such
will not suit the taste Of MANY
# our readers, but if they look at things
they IRE, and not as they would have
hem to be. the business of our position