Raleigh : Government : North Carolina Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services
North Carolina agriculture was once predominantly a subsistence agriculture with little extra produced for trade or sell, but today it is overwhelmingly a cash crop agriculture competing on a world market. An hour of farm labor produces nearly eight times as much today as it did only 40 years ago. Most people have a sentimental and false notion of what rural life was like in the past. But the truth is, it was a brutal life where people worked long and hard and typically died young. The environment also suffered. My purpose is to help you realize that our society and our land use has changed immensely over the years. Land that is wooded now was once farmed. The countryside was once much more densely populated than it is now. We have less land in crops now than we did just after the Civil War. And, the perception that forest land acreage is decreasing is a myth.
