Excerpts: In 1937 the Farm Security Administration set out to discover a new system of faming for Southeastern Missouri which would work better than the old. It decided to take the same land and the same people who had failed under the old system, and try to find new methods which might lead than to success. Consequently, the Farm Security Administration bought 6,700 acres near LaForge in New Madrid County, most of which had once been in a typical plantation. On this land there lived 100 sharecropper families — 60 of them white and 40 Negro. Like the plantation they lived on, these families had not been able to make much headway under the traditional methods of farming. For that very reason, the Farm Security Administration asked these people to stay on the land as members of the new project. It wanted to find out whether these run-of-the-mill share-croppers could make a decent, secure living if they had a chance under different conditions.