Chapter 8

Early Agriculture in Louisiana

By:

Brandon Kelly, Jacob Barron. and Joel Barron

Early agriculture in Louisiana while under French control consisted of a few major crops. Among these early crops were corn, rice, and vegetables. It was not long before cotton, tobacco, and indigo were also being produced. Iberville was the first to bring sugarcane to Louisiana, but little was grown until the 1750’s, when a better variety from Santo Domingo was introduced. The cane juice was boiled down into a thick mass, for the making of an alcoholic drink called "Tafia."

The early farmers and planters had many problems. Heavy rains often caused the streams and bayous to overflow, and storms sometimes destroyed their crops. Insects, raccoons, squirrels, and other animals ate the plants. Weeds were numerous and often grew faster than the crops. It was not until Louisiana had been settled for many years that there was enough meat to satisfy the colonists. During some periods, the killing of cattle, sheep, and even hogs was prohibited. In 1725 cattle sold for 500 to 600 livres each, but the price gradually dropped until by 1749 they were worth between 50 to 60 livres. By the end of the French period there were several vacheries, or stock farms where cattle were raised, scattered about the colony.

In March of 1766 the first Spanish governor, Don Antonio de Ulloa, arrived in Louisiana. Governor Ulloa encouraged the production of indigo and cotton as money crops and wheat, corn, and rice as food crops. In 1768 he wrote that there were only two horse-drawn flourmills in the colony, at Opelousas and Narchitoches. Governor Ulloa asked the government in Spain to send six horse-drawn mills and six water-driven mills to Louisiana. Once the new mills arrived, grain production began to improve.

Indigo, an important product during the French period continued to be widely grown until worms appeared and destroyed crop after crop. The farmers and planters then turned to cotton and tobacco. The fall of indigo crops allowed for the spread of sugarcane and cotton. Sugarcane had been grown in Louisiana for about fifty years but not in great quantities, and it had been used chiefly as a source of syrup for local use. Sugar was being granulated in other parts of the world just not in Louisiana. Now with the Indigo crops gone they needed a successful export. Growers realized that climate has a great deal to do with successful production of sugarcane. For a while, Bayou Manchac was regarded as the northern limit of cane growing. North of there the planters were to substitute cotton for indigo, despite the expense involved in processing it.

Governor Bernado de Galvez called a meeting of tobacco farmers, at which they fixed the price and established a system of grading, packing, and shipping the tobacco. The governor then agreed to purchase the entire tobacco crop. One planter bragged that Louisiana’s climate was better for raising tobacco than Maryland or Virginia. He believed Louisiana could furnish the world with tobacco. Nearly 75,000 pounds of tobacco were produced in 1790 around the Pointe Coupee District.

After Etienne de Bore’s successful production of granulated sugar in 1795, the south Louisiana planters began to clear more land and buy more slaves to plant more cotton and sugarcane. Planters built more sugar mills, so that they could produce larger quantities of sugar. By the end of the Spanish period there were many sugar-producing plantations in the colony, and the number was growing rapidly. As the years passed, more and more planters switched from cotton to sugarcane cultivation because they thought it would make them more money. Although the great sugar-producing region was south of the mouth of the Red River, sugarcane was grown as far up the Red River as the Natchitoches country.

Much attention was paid to cotton and sugar plantations; however, general farming was the common practice. From the farms and small plantations came hogs, cattle, sheep, cotton, corn, rice, vegetables of all kinds, and different varieties of fruits. These foodstuffs were produced in all sections of Louisiana, and even during periods of drought or too much rain there was enough food for all, with some left over for export.

Improved economic conditions during the years of Spanish control placed more importance on the slave system. This increased importance was due to the difficulty of finding agricultural labor. Slavery had existed in Louisiana since early in the French period. Governor Alejandro O Reilly ordered that slaves be brought only from Africa. He believed that African slaves worked better than West Indian slaves did, and he greatly disliked the West Indian practice of voodoo. However West Indian slaves were almost openly smuggled into Louisiana throughout the Spanish period. There were never enough slaves to supply the demand, so white men were hired by the month, many of them living in the homes of their employers.

The plantation system was the foundation of the antebellum Louisiana economy, and most history written about antebellum agriculture deals with planters, plantations, and slaves. But the great majority of Louisiana’s agriculturists were farmers, not planters. Their farms were spread over the entire state. In nearly all parishes were small farmers; yeoman farmers, with and without slaves; and planters, large and small.

Cotton was grown over the entire state, though it was not the major crop in south Louisiana, the state’s "Sugar Bowl." Not sugarcane but cotton was the most popular cash crop of large and small farmers because it could be produced without a large investment in equipment and slaves. This allowed cotton to become the cash crop of not only the farmers of north Louisiana and the Florida Parishes but also many farmers in the sugar region of south Louisiana.

        Photograph of Cotton Picking (Courtesy of All Posters.com)

The small planters and farmers did not depend solely on sugarcane and cotton for their cash income. Some grew rice, and a few produced tobacco. Others living near New Orleans or close to towns or villages produced vegetables for sale in the town markets. Louisiana was less important as a producer of rice in the antebellum period than after the Civil War. In 1860 Plaquemines Parish produced nearly two-thirds of the state’s rice crop of over six million pounds. Rice was usually grown on small farms fronting the Mississippi and in Bayous Lafourche, Teche, Terrebonne, and other streams of south Louisiana.

An old account suggests that Louisiana’s distinctive method of producing river rice was discovered by accident during New Orleans’ early years. During a hurricane a storehouse containing rice was destroyed and the grain stored there for use as food was thoroughly scattered. After a while there appeared at the edge of the backswamp a good stand of rice which was harvested and consumed. So, Louisianians learned to plant at the lower edge of the natural levee’s backslope in time to take advantage of the spring flood and then to harvest the grain during the dry period of late summer and fall. Modifications of this method remained in effect as long as river rice was important in Louisiana’s economy.

Tobacco was still produced, but probably not as often as during the Spanish period, when farmers were guaranteed markets by the Spanish government. Most of it was grown on farms in St. James Parish and around Natchitoches and Opelousas. During the 1820’s the farmers in St. James Parish invented a process of curing tobacco with high-pressure fermentation. The result was an unusually high quality product that has since been highly prized by connoisseurs of fine tobaccos. The curing process takes more than eighteen months to complete. The end product is called perique. Perique is added in small quantities to blended tobaccos, mostly for pipe smoking, and is exported to all parts of the world.

In some sections of the state, particularly the Atakapas and Oppelousas regions, people earned their living grazing cattle. In the 1830’s the prairies of the southwest supported large herds of cattle. At that time there were several men with over fifteen thousand head of cattle and over two thousand horses. Some people also raised sheep from which they obtained excellent mutton but poor wool. By the 1850’s the range in the cattle-producing areas of southwestern Louisiana was much worse than it had been earlier. Cattlemen considered it so crowded that they were talking of moving across the Sabine River to Texas.

Agriculture made very slow progress during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. Cotton prices declined steadily from the end of the war onward; land depreciated in value; livestock was killed or driven off; implements and tools had been stolen or worn out. Fields left unattended for several years and had grown up in brush. Many farmers and planters were bankrupt and could not borrow the money needed to make a crop. Insects and other pests attacked the crops in the fields. In 1866 and 1867 crop were damaged by floods, and this would happen often because the levees were not restored to prewar condition until after the federal government took control of them in the twentieth century. It was many years before agricultural production reached what it had been in 1860.

The decline in agriculture would have been much greater had it not been for the development of the rice industry. Some rice had been gown on the lower Mississippi River and along Bayou Lafourche, as well as in ponds around Breaux Bridge before the Civil War. In the late 1870’s the North American Land an Timber Company bought most of the old Louisiana prairie lands in hope they could be used for something besides pastures. They hired Dr. Seaman A. Knapp to find other uses for the prairie land. Knapp discovered that the prairie was ideally suited to rice cultivation, and he went to Japan and brought back several varieties of seed. Large numbers of people from the Middle West, people who had capital and who knew how to use grain-harvesting machinery, bought tracts of land and developed them into rice farms.

The use of more scientific agricultural methods gained momentum as the years passed. Demonstrations were given at agricultural experimental stations that were being established under the direction of Dr. W.C. Stubbs. Demonstrations were given in the use of new farm machinery the treatment of animal and plant diseases, and the terracing of land to prevent erosion.

Map: Agricultural Production in Louisiana (data adapted from the louisiana statistical office)

Links:
http://www.crt.state.la.us/crt/profiles/history.htm
http://www.movex.net/states/LOUISIANA.html