Cotton Belt

The Cotton Belt is a cultural and agricultural region of the southern United States, stretching by the mid nineteenth century from southeastern Virginia to eastern Texas, where cotton was the dominant cash crop from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth. Cotton cultivation had been confined mainly to coastal areas of the Carolinas and Georgia until the 1793 invention of the cotton gin made it profitable to grow short staple cotton further inland, transforming states such as Mississippi into major producers built on plantation agriculture and enslaved labor; after the Civil War, production continued largely through sharecropping. By the twentieth century, soil exhaustion, the boll weevil, market changes, and regional industrialization sharply reduced cotton dominance, and farmland across the Cotton Belt today grows corn, wheat, and soybeans alongside commercial timber, though some cotton cultivation continues. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/