While cotton production was being mechanized, competition from synthetics and cheap foreign cotton made cotton a less valuable crop. During the Depression, the bottom fell out of the cotton market. Across the South, the average price of a pound of cotton, which had been thirty-five cents in 1919, dropped to six cents in 1931. In Mississippi it fell to nine cents. Delta farmers began switching to other crops—corn, oats, soybeans—all requiring much less labor than cotton.16 By the 1960s, modernized plantations found they needed barely a fifth of their former work force.
