 On Georgia's farms and plantations, wartime destruction, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production and the regional economy.The state's chief money crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager.After the war, new railroad lines and commercial fertilizers created conditions that spurred increased cotton production in Georgia's upcountry, but coastal rice plantations never recovered.