Texas Competitive Advantage

During the 1920’s Texas became the king of cotton, surpassing Alabama’s tittle as the leading producing state in the industry. The key to Texas’s competitive advantage in the industry comes down to land, labor, and technology. Before the Civil War, the profits of southern cotton plantations flourished due to the high productivity, and low cost of slave labor. However once all the slaves were freed, after the war, the downfall of the cotton producing states started to begin. Stuck in their old ways, southern plantation owners realized that they needed an alternative system to run their labor-intensive plantations. As a result southern planation owners offered their former slaves the opportunity to sharecrop their land, which for the freed slaves

These large and tightly controlled production systems were productive, efficient, and profitable. The last competitive advantage Texas had over Alabama was their use of new technology, specifically the gasoline tractor. During the 1920’s, when cotton farmers began to settle in Lubbock, Texas, they brought their tractors with them. The gasoline tractor was capable of speeding the production of cotton up much faster than the old traditional methods. In 1946, twenty years since the widespread use of the gasoline tractor onto Texas farms. Sixty seven percent of Deep South cotton farms still preferred their traditional ways of using mule power. Texas is a perfect example of how the comparative advantage of global industry’s in the 20th and 21st century has changed overtime. Unlike the pre Civil War era, global industries of the 20th and 21st century strongly depend on geographic location, newer more productive technology, and not competing, but avoiding the labor