Only the furnishing of new collateral would persuade the mortgage companies to wait for their money. The farmers felt they didn’t have any collateral, and in the traditional sense they didn’t: their savings, even the butter-and-egg money, were long gone; not only every acre of land but every piece of machinery was already mortgaged. But Lyndon Johnson had thought of new collateral: crops that hadn’t been planted yet. The farmers, he thought, should each agree to give their mortgagor a landlord’s share—a third—of the 1934 crop in exchange for a year’s extension on the mortgage. The mortgage
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