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"If you want to count slaves as wealth and conclude from that the South was wealthy, that would be misleading. "

Of course I agree, but am merely telling you what some defenders of the Southern Cause have argued to me here on Free Republic.
They say that in the 1850s, the South was both wealthy and prosperous, and in a sense they are right.
If you count the income produced by slaves, and the value of those slaves, then the average Deep South slave owning family was considerably more prosperous than their northern farmer and factory-worker cousins.

As to the eventual effect of modern farm machinery, you have to be circumspect here.
Remember, machinery is only designed and produced to supply a perceived need, and where there is no need, no machines will be built or used.
So as long as the South considered itself to be prospering under its slave economics, where is the motivation to change?

Indeed, we have modern-day examples of how this works.
Even in hi-tech California, where low-cost Mexican workers are available to harvest crops, there is relatively little farm mechanization going on.
Why should a farmer buy a million dollar harvester, when he can hire a few Mexicans dirt cheap?
As for the cost of caring for slaves -- didn't they pretty much take care of themselves, grow their own food, etc.?
I doubt if the cost of caring was all that high.
What was high was the cost to purchase slaves, but that was strictly a function of the market place of supply and demand.
Slaves were expensive because they were worth a lot -- so they were much in demand.

If you count the income produced by slaves, and the value of those slaves, then the average Deep South slave owning family was considerably more prosperous than their northern farmer and factory-worker cousins.

That's like saying factory owners are more prosperous than someone running a cottage industry. Slaves represented a considerable investment, so of course a slave-owning family was more prosperous--they had to be to own slaves.

Even in hi-tech California, where low-cost Mexican workers are available to harvest crops, there is relatively little farm mechanization going on. Why should a farmer buy a million dollar harvester, when he can hire a few Mexicans dirt cheap?

It is sometimes not a question of buying a harvester. Some crops do not lend themselves to mechanical harvesting. I grew up on a tobacco farm, and to my knowledge, there has been no successful mechanical harvester ever developed for the crop, even though the crop is labor intensive and labor costs were the greatest expense.

Many produce crops cannot be successfully harvested without destroying the plant, and because the crop does not ripen all at once.

It seems that we have gotten to the point that we are arguing about machinery versus slavery. Since slavery was abolished, I do not know how to prove whether or not the Confederacy would have continued the institution of slavery even if machinery were readily available. My best guess is that farmers or plantation owners would decide which was most profitable. I believe that slavery is more expensive than machinery. The question for me is not about the field hands but the house slaves. Would the wealthy aristocracy want to keep slavery as a viable institution for domestic labor reasons? All that we can do is try and make reasonable guesses about what might have happened if certain situations or factors had changed.