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PICKING SCENE.
A great field white with bursting bolls and dotted by a score or more of dusky
pickers, and the haunting melody of old-time negro songs—here indeed is a sight
and a sound never to be forgotten.
Che Farm Library
oo TT ean
Its Cultivation, Marketing, Manufacture,
and the Problems of the
Cotton World
BY
CHARLES WILLIAM BURKETT
Professor of Agriculture, North Carolina College of Agriculture and
Mechanic Arts,
AND
CLARENCE HAMILTON POE
NEW YORK
Doubleday, Page & Company
1906
LIBRARY of CONGRESS
Two Conies Received
JUL 19 1906
Cc ) 5 c
Copyright Entry ~ (3 ao ae
gt /9¢ 39
ASS 4xx6. No. ¥
J 4. 5.58 ©
Copyright, 1906, by Doubleday, Page & Company
Published July, 1906
All rights reserved,
including that of translation into foreign languages
including the Scandinavian
e
er6
Yonder bird,
Which floats, as if at rest,
In those blue tracts above the thunder, where
No vapors cloud the stainless air,
And never sound is heard,
Unless at such rare time
When, from the City of the Blest,
Rings down some golden chime,
Sees not from his high place,
So vast a cirque of summer space
As widens round me in one mighty field,
Which, rimmed by seas and sands,
Doth hail its earliest daylight in the beams
Of gray Atlantic dawns;
And, broad as realms made up of many lands,
Is lost afar
Behind the crimson hills and purple lawns
Of sunset, among plains which roll their streams
Against the Evening Star !
And lo!
To the remotest point of sight,
Although I gaze upon no waste of snow,
The endless field is white;
And the whole landscape glows,
For many a shining league away,
With such accumulated light
As Polar lands would flash beneath a tropic day !
—From “The Cotton Boll,” by Henry Timrod.
Lagi
t
'
ah
TABLE OF. CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: HAIL, THE KING!
SECTION I.—KING COTTON: HIS REALM
AND HIS SUBJECTS
Cuapter I.—History of Cotton: From Ancient India to
Our Own Time ; : ‘
Cuapter I].—Acreage and Production: Where the
World’s Supply is Grown 3
Cuapter III.—Does Foreign Competition Threaten the
South’s Supremacy ? ;
Cuapter IV.—The Men Who Make Gan Whites ne
Blacks; Planters and Tenants .
Cuapter V.—A 25,000,000 Bale Crop: Will the esnth
Be Ready When the World Demands It ? ;
Cuapter VI.—Cotton: What It Means and Will Mean to
the Southern States : ;
Cuapter VII.—The Organization of Cotton Geass and
What It May Accomplish
Cuapter VIII.—Stopping the Leaks in Cotton Profits
SECTION II.—THE COTTON PLANT: HOW IT
GROWS AND IS GROWN
Cuapter [X.—Structure and Botanical Relations
CuapTerR X.— Varieties of Cotton and Their Classification
PAGE
77
85
viii CONTENTS—Continued
PAGE
Cuaptger XI.—Breeding Up the Cotton Plant i Nee
Cuaprer XII.—The King’s Realm: The Land of Sunshine 104
Cuapter XIII.—Soils and How to Handle Them . 109
Cuaprer XIV.—Bringing Exhausted Soils Back to Life 115
Cuaprer XV.—Cotton Unique: A Self-Supporting Crop . 120
Cuapter XVI.—Buying Fertility for the Soil : + 186
Cuapter XVII.—Farm-Made Manures: SavingFertility
for the Soil . : ‘ ‘ . 134
Cuapter XVIIJ.—Home-Mixing of Fertilizers: Saving
the Manufacturer’s Profit . : . 139
Cuapter XIX.—The Cotton Farmer’s Equipment of Tools 147
Cuapter XX.—Culture From Seed to Boll 4 « SS
Cuapter XXI.—The Ills That Cotton Is Heir To « 68
Cuaprer XXIJI.—Insect Enemies of the Cotton Plant ee
Cuapter XXIII.—Harvest Time in the Cotton Field . 194
Cuarpter XXIV.—What Does It Cost to Make Cotton? . 200
SECTION III.—MARKETING AND PRICES
Cuapter XXV.—Preparing for Marketing: The Work of
the Gin : Bp
Cuapter XXVI. eee The iis to the ciinale . 224
Cuaptrer XXVII.—The Unceasing Contest Between Bulls
and Bears. F “ 4 . 234
Cuapter XXVIII. BU How the World Watches
While the Plant Grows : . 249
Cuapter XXIX.—Prices: The Puzzling Problem of Cotton
Values ; ; : ; : . 260
CONTENTS—Continued ix
PAGE
SECTION IV.—MANUFACTURES AND _ BY-
PRODUCTS
CuapTeR XXX.—Cottonseed: Once an Outcast; Now a
Prince : QT 5
Cuapter XXXIJI.—Cotton Oil: The o King) Feeds as Well as
Clothes His Subjects : : ; nies
Cuapter XXXII.—Meal and Hulls: King Cotton Also
Feeds Our Flocks and Herds : . 290
Cuapter XXXIII.—The Rise of Cotton Marine . 801
Cuapter XXXIV.—The Cotton Factory in the Southern
States . ; weet
Cuaprer XXXV.—The Making of Cotton Goods . 319
CuapTter XX XVI.—Conciusion—Tue Epic or Corton
Tuat is YET To BE WRITTEN ; : . 330
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Picking Scene . ; : : : : : Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
A Monarch that Brooks no Rivals . . : : soe
Part of Our $410,000,000 in Cotton Export Values . : barn
Production of Cotton 1850 to 1900 . : , : Eee
Cotton Statistics . . : ‘ : ap nie
Production of Cotton 1900 (by States) : ; ; te Oe
Breaking Land for Egyptian Cotton . ‘ 5 : eae 5)
How The Negro Tenants Live . : ; : : . 88
Negro Pickers at Work and at Home . : ‘ vi 38
Cotton Picking inthe Lowlands . : 50
*Light-hearted, good-natured and aisily lynched zi (Mr. Dooley 51
Cotton Bolls, Fibres Other than Cotton . : 56
The Mechanical Cotton Picker . ; : i Od
Soft and Compressed Bales: Gathering Santen : . 64/
More Cotton Statistics . : ‘ : , ? SGD
Southern Views : : é ‘ : : ; Ci ik
More Scenes from Dixie . ‘ , Bie 1
The Cotton Association is a Factor to be Beskongl with : he 80
Holding for Better Prices . : : : ; ; SNS
Varieties of Cotton . : - ; : 2-90
Varieties of Cotton . : ' : : : : he) ON
Varieties of Cotton - ; ‘ : : gale
Economical and Expensive Covionunisléae : : : ee
Improvement of Cotton . ; : : : : . 100»
Where Cotton Grows Best . : : : ; ; - OR
Getting Fertilizer from the Air. : ; ; ‘ hea
Cultivating the Crop ; ; , : ‘ : OSD
The Rescue of Old Lands. ‘ : ; ; Oe Ee
Old-fashioned Methods Not Yet Hareotien P : 123
Diagram Showing Relative Quantities of Nitrogen, Powsh and
Phosphoric Acid Required for the Production of an Average
Yield (per Acre) of Corn, Wheat, etc.; Crimson Clover; Cotton-
Cultivation in its Final Stage . : : ‘ ober
ILLUSTRATIONS—Continued
FACING PAGE
Two Ways of Fertilizing . ‘ : : : + ae
Soils and Their Improvement . 134
Comparative Quantities of Plant Food i in Different Beriliaine
Ingredients. 3 : : : ‘ 3 ot!) Nae
Modern Cotton Malian : : : ; : : . 146
**How much does it weigh?” . : : ‘ : . 147
Young Plants Just AfterGermination . : i . 164
As Destructive as an Invading Army—The Boll Weevil : . 165
Starting the Crop. : : : . 180¥
The Alpha and Omega of Cotton Malane : , : . ee
The Boll Weevil’s Conquest of Texas. . : : : . 188°
Before the Cotton Factory Came . ; 189
Transformations of Cotton Bollworm (H ails armiger
Hubn) Double page . . ; : ‘ - 188-189.
White for the Harvest . . : : , . 200
Making Cotton Without Hand Ghanem : - . 201
Ginning and Baling the Cotton . s ; - : . 208
Hope and Realization : : 3 : : : . 209
Waiting Turns at the Gin . : ; : J : « 228
A Look on the Inside. : : ; : : ‘ . aa
Cotton after Baling . i ; ~) ease
‘*How Much Do I Git at Fifty eenits a Hard ‘ed Ey ies . aon
Stages of Cotton Picking . : : ; : ~ 242
Nerve Centres of Cotton Finance . i B ; 2 . 243
Interior of New York Cotton Exchange. : ‘ . 244
Condition of the Cotton Crop. : : : ‘ . 245
The Ebb and Flow of Cotton Prices. ‘ : s . 260
In and About a Cotton Factory . : : : Ba -,3):
Cottonseed, the Finest Cattle Food . : : ; . 276
Cotton Seed Huller_. : : , ; ; : , . 25
Interior View of Cotton Mill . . : : : ; . oe
Cotton Manufacturing in the South . j ‘ : » S13
Manufacturing: Fancy Dobby Loom : .
Cotton Fabrics. ( : : : . : : « S21
INTRODUCTION:
HAIL, THE KING!
INTRODUCTION: HAIL, THE KING!
“Cotton—what a royal plant it is!’ Henry
Grady once exclaimed: “The world waits in at-
tendance on its growth; the shower that falls whis-
pering on its leaves is heard around the earth; the
sun that shines on it is tempered by the prayers of
all the people; the frost that chills it and the dew
that descends from the stars are noted, and the tres-
pass of a little worm upon its green leaf is more to
England than the advance of the Russian army on
her Asian outposts. It is gold from the instant it
puts forth its tiny shoot. Its fibre is current in
every bank and when, loosing its fleeces to the sun,
it floats a sunny banner that glorifies the fields of
the humble farmer, that man is marshaled under a
flag that will compel the allegiance of the world and
wring a subsidy from every nation on earth.”
THE ONE CROP FOR WHICH NATURE HAS NO
SUBSTITUTE
And in this flight of eloquence the Georgia ora-
tor did not overestimate the importance of the
South’s great staple crop. We do not exaggerate
when we claim that no other plant in all the vege-
table kingdom is of so much importance to the hu-
man race. Destroy any fruit plant in the world,
and men would grow gots fruits. Let any lumber
3)
es COTTON
tree become extinct to-morrow, and other trees
will take its place and our building go on as before.
Even if corn or wheat or rice should perish from
the earth, we could grow enough of the other crop,
supplemented by rice, oats, barley, rye, peas,
beans, etc., to feed both man and beast with com-
fort. But there is no substitute for cotton that can
be cultivated on a large scale; no substitute, animal
or vegetable product, with which civilization’s pres-
ent demand for clothing could be supplied.
Nor is there any plant with a history more mar-
velous or more romantic—more suggestive of the
legend and mythology of its Oriental home where
it first began to serve mankind. If Frank Norris
had lived in the South instead of California, what
an Epic of the Cotton he might have given us—
what a story of Cotton, responding only to the
warmth of a Southern sun, and yielding a richer
fleece than ever Jason dreamed of; Cotton, whose
influence did most to bring us an alien race from
Africa, and then did most to perpetuate in Ameri-
ca the institution of human slavery; Cotton, on
which a “Dixie Land, the Land of Cotton,” once
built its hopes while it waged one of the greatest
wars of modern times; Cotton, which helped the
vanquished people to their feet again, and now
bids fair to restore them to a proud position in
wealth and industry!
THE BASIS OF THE WORLDS DOMINANT INDUSTRY
It is probably not too much to say that cotton is
now the basis of the domfmant industry of the
globe. In their primary forms the iron and steel
products of the world represent a value of only
COTTON 5
$1,700,000,000 yearly, while the estimated value
of the world’s annual output of cotton goods is
$2,000,000,000. On cotton most of the human race
depends for clothing—three times as much cotton
as wool being produced, and the world’s
wool production having decreased from 2,750,000
bales in 1895 to 1,750,000 in 1905, while in the
same period the world’s cotton supply has grown
from 10,304,000 bales to 17,782,000 bales. And
of this enormous cotton supply three-fourths is
grown in the Southern section of the United
States. Twice the world’s total gold output last
year would have been required to pay Southern
farmers for lint and seed; three-fourths of the
capital stock of all the National Banks in the
country would have been inadequate.
COTTON EXPORTS EXCEED IN VALUE ALL OTHER
AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL EXPORTS
Among our American export crops cotton is a
monarch that brooks no rivals. According to a
signed statement furnished the writer by Mr. O.
P. Austin, Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, De-
partment of Commerce and Labor, January 28,
1906, the total value of our exports of cottonseed
and cottonseed products for the year ending June
30, 1905 (raw cotton alone $381,000,000), was
$410,657,752 as against $410,205,653 for “all
other agricultural exports.” In other words, take
all other animal and vegetable products exported
any year—wheat, corn, barley, oats, rye, flour,
meal, oatmeal, fruits, vegetables, liquors, tobacco,
wine, cattle, hogs, horses, sheep, beef, pork, mut-
ton, butter, cheese, canned goods, lard, oils, wool,
6 COTTON
hides, skins, etc., ete.,—the entire contribution, ex-
cept cotton, furnished the outside world by every
American farm, ranch, dairy, fruit farm and gar-
den, from Maine to California, from Michigan to
Texas, from Alaska to Hawaii, including the
South’s own not unimportant share—take all this,
and with the proceeds of one year’s cotton and cot-
tonseed exports, the Southern cotton-grower can
buy the whole colossal aggregation, still have a
surplus of several hundred thousand left as pin
money, and be ready to start business again with
the more than $200,000,000 he gets annually for
supplying the 25,000,000 spindles of our own
country.
“If Europe during the past five years,” says
Mr. R. H. Edmonds, “had gathered together every
dollar’s worth of gold produced in all the mines of
the earth and shipped it to the South, it would still
have fallen $206,000,000 short of paying for that
part of the cotton crop the South has sent beyond
the seas.”
COTTON BOTH CLOTHES AND FEEDS MANKIND
In many ways cotton stands out unique among
all the plants that men grow. Not only is it the
only crop which has greatly changed the destinies
of nations and continents (but for cotton, slav-
ery would not have so flourished in the South as to
plunge America into a great civil war), but it is
unique in that it contributes to a greater variety of
human needs than any other plant that Providence
has placed upon the earth. From pole to pole, in
every zone and clime; from the cradle to the grave,
in every stage of life; from prince to pauper,
COTTON 7
among all sorts and conditions of men, it is of
course the chief material used for clothing, but
every year more and more of its products are
brought to our tables, and it is called upon to feed
a steadily increasing number of our flocks and
herds.
You get up in the morning from a bed clothed
in cotton; you step out on a cotton rug; you let in
the light by raising a cotton window-shade; you
wash with soap made partly from cottonseed oil
products; you dry your face on a cotton towel; you
array yourself chiefly in cotton clothing; the “silk”
in which your wife dresses is probably mercerized
cotton; at the breakfast table you do not get away
from King Cotton; cottolene has probably taken
the place of lard in the biscuit you eat; the beef and
the mutton were probably fattened on cottonseed
meal and hulls; your “imported olive oil” is more
likely from a Texas cotton farm than from an Ital-
ian villa; your “butter” is probably a product of
Southern cottonseed; the coal that burns in the fire
may have been mined by the light of a cotton-oil
lamp; the sheep from which your woolen clothing
came were probably fed on cottonseed; the tonic
you take may contain an extract of cotton
root-bark; the tobacco you smoke not unlikely
grew under a cotton cover and is put up ina cotton
bag; your morning daily may be printed on cot-
ton waste paper—and even in that Oriental skir-
mish it tells about the contending forces were
clothed in khaki duck, slept under cotton tents, cot-
ton was an essential in the high explosives which
were used, and when at last war had done its worst,
surgery itself called cotton into requisition to aid
the injured and dying. |
8 COTTON
THE HANDMAIDEN OF CIVILIZATION
Cotton, furthermore, is also unique in that more
largely than any other plant it contributes to the
higher wants of man and more justly than any other
plant may be termed the Handmaiden of Civiliza-
tion. For while the lowest classes of men (and ani-
mals) demand food, the demand for clothing and
ornament is a mark of civilization. Even as far
back as Eden itself, the desire for clothing was the
first evidence of knowledge and conscience given by
the first man and woman placed on earth. And with
all races of mankind since, the progress of enlighten-
ment has been largely registered by the advances in
clothing. “Society is founded upon Cloth,” was the
doctrine of Carlyle’s Teufelsdrockh; and he was
not far wrong in declaring that “Man’s earthly in-
terests are all hooked and buttoned together, and
held up, by Clothes. . . . Society sails through
the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust’s Mantle, or
rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in
the Apostle’s Dream; and without such Sheet or
Mantle, would sink to endless depths or mount to
inane limboes, and in either case be no more.”
Of so much importance, then, is the crop we are
to consider in this volume; the only one of the
great staples for which no satisfactory substitute
can be found; the only plant in the world that in a
large measure both feeds and clothes mankind; the
one plant most worthy of being reckoned the aid
and ally of Civilization.
Small wonder that more than two generations of
men have called it King Cotton, and that its realm
is as wide as the earth! Or as certain of our own
bards has said:
COTTON
“‘Where sleeps the poet who shall fitly sing
The source wherefrom doth spring
That mighty commerce which, confined
To the mean channels of no selfish mart,
Goes out to every shore
Of this broad earth, and throngs the sea with ships
That bear no thunders; hushes hungry lips
In alien lands;
Joins with a delicate web remotest strands;
And gladdening rich and poor,
Doth gild Parisian domes,
Or feed the cottage smoke of English homes,
And only bounds its blessings by mankind !”’
ae
| | ee
SECTION I.
KING COTTON: HIS REALM
AND HIS SUBJECTS
in
4h
oe
if
”
tS
De,
CHAPTER I.
THE HISTORY OF COTTON: FROM ANCIENT INDIA TO
OUR OWN TIME
We have no desire whatever to inflict upon the
long-suffering reader any exhaustive review of the
uninteresting remarks on cotton which pedantic
scholars have picked up here and there in ancient
literature. In fact, the only unpleasant task con-
nected with the writing of this volume has been the
enforced reading of several chapters of such mat-
ter. Be patient then, gentle reader; we shall not
prolong the agony.
To find the first use of cotton by our race, we
shall have to take the road to Mandalay and go
back to a time five centuries before the birth of
Christ—back to the dim past in the land of Buddha
and Brahma-—and Kim; back to the scene of the
great Mahabharata, and the other legendary
glories of the dreamy Orient. Before the world
had known the sway of a Caesar, long even before
the age of Pericles, the old Hindoo law declared
that “the sacrificial thread of the Brahman must be
made of cotton,” and as punishment for theft of
cotton thread directed a fine three times the value of
the article stolen.
(13)
14 COTTON
CHINESE AND INDIAN CULTURE OF COTTON
Herodotus tells us that “the thorax or cuirass
sent by Amasis, King of Egypt, to Sparta” in 550
B. C., was “adorned with gold and the fleeces from
trees’ —and he goes on to explain that in India are
trees “the fruit of which is a wool exceeding in
beauty and goodness that of a sheep.” A crude sys-
tem of hand-spinning, weaving and dyeing was
early worked out by the Hindoos more than two
thousand years ago—and singularly enough, in alk
of the centuries that followed this, intelligent peo-
ple added practically no improvement to the cotton
machinery the elders then planned. What Herod-
otus reported as to equipment was practically the
same as that which Marco Polo found, and there
was no change from the time of Marco Polo to that
of Arkwright.
Across the Himalayan “Palace of the Snow,”
from the Hindoos is China; and it was not a great
while after India began to use cotton before the
Chinese put it into their gardens and sang of it in
their poems—evidently treating it, however, as a
rare and beautiful, rather than as a useful, plant; so
that even in the sixth century after Christ it was a
matter of marvel and record with the scribes of that
day that the Emperor Outi had a rare robe made of
cotton; and it was five hundred years later—in the
days of Kubla Khan—before the manufacture of
cotton among the Celestials became at all extensive.
Since that time, however, cotton has been largely
used for clothing the “heathen Chinee,” and he has
not only used his own product for this purpose, but
has imported liberally from India and the Burmese
provinces.
COTTON 15
USE IN EGYPT AND INTRODUCTION INTO EUROPE BY
THE MOORS
As to the culture and use of cotton by the ancient
Egyptians, there are differences of opinion among
the doctors; but the weight of evidence indicates its
use to a limited extent. :
Into Europe the cotton plant was brought a thou-
sand years ago, the Moors having introduced its cul-
ture in Spain “when the caliphate of Cordova was
at the height of its power and magnificence.” But
the Spanish Christians looked with such disfavor on
everything having to do with the Moors, or gave
so little attention to it, that it was long before cot-
ton found favor in the eyes of the Pope’s subjects.
In the fourteenth century it was at last given a
chance to rejoice beneath the sunny Italian skies,
and from there its culture spread to France and
Greece.
FOUND IN THE NEW WORLD
In the New World cotton has been grown and
used from the dateless past—certainly in clothing
Peruvian mummies which had slept the sleep of
death for centuries even before Pizarro came to
disturb the dreams of the Incas; and among the
treasures which Cortez wrested from the Mexican
Montezuma and sent to Charles V. were “exquisite
cotton fabrics dyed in various colors.” In the West
Indies especially cotton has always flourished.
“In a word,” says Mr. R. B. Handy, “everywhere
between the parallels of 40° north latitude and 40°
south latitude, with the exception of our
present American ‘Cotton Belt,’ cotton, either in
16 COTTON
its wild or cultivated state, was known and used at
the date of the settlement of America.”
EARLY INDIAN WEAVING
So much for the history of cotton production.
As for its manufacture, we have already seen that
the crude Indian plan of spinning and weaving
was invented before the Christian Era; and this
system followed the culture of cotton as it spread
through Europe and Asia. So crude is the Indian
equipment—a distaff for spinning and a loom com-
posed of “a few sticks or reeds which the Indian
carries about with him”—that the total value is
only a few shillings. It is thought likely that the
Flemings learned the art of using cotton from the
Turkish crusaders, and that cotton manufacture
was introduced into England in the fifteenth cen-
tury by artisans who fled from Flanders. And be-
fore leaving the subject of Indian weaving, it ought
to be said that so wonderful is the skill of the Hin-
doo that our finest machinery does not make goods
equal to that which he produced with his primitive
equipment. So fine and gossamer-like were the
muslins of Dacca that they were called “webs of
woven wind.” Tavernier, writing in 1660, says of
some Indian fabric, that “when a man puts it on,
his skin appears as plainly through it as if he was
quite naked; but the merchants are not permitted to
transport it, for the Governor is obliged to send it
all to the Great Mogul’s seraglio, who use it to make
the sultanesses’ and the noblemen’s wives’ shifts and
garments for the hot weather, and the King and
the lords take great pleasure in beholding them 4 in
these shifts.”
A MONARCH THAT BROOKS NO RIVALS.
Our cotton exports exceed in value all other exports combined—the total value
of all other products from every American farm, ranch, dairy, fruit farm, stock farm,
and garden, North, South, East and West.
“
PART OF OUR $410,000,000 IN COTTON EXPORT VALUES
An ocean steamer taking on three bales of compressed cotton for export to
English mills.
COTTON 17
THE BEGINNING OF ENGLAND'S GREATEST INDUSTRY
Our English ancestors, late in taking up the man-
ufacture of cotton, even after beginning it allowed
the industry to grow slowly. Spinning was done on
the distaff, or at best on the one-thread spinning-
wheel; and for weaving the hand-loom had known
but little improvement since the days of the Caes-
ars. Nor was there any kind of co-operation,
any division of labor; each individual family at-
tempted to carry on the entire process of spinning
and weaving the cloth.
But about 1760 we see the beginnings of a revolu-
tion. ‘The Manchester merchants then began to
furnish cotton and linen yarn to weavers, paying
a fixed price for spinning and weaving the product
—and so the industry, hitherto primitive and cha-
otic, began for the first time to take shape as a defin-
ite, well-planned organization.
Very soon after this the export of English goods
began on a small scale, and with surprisingly satis-
factory results from the very beginning. Prices
were high, and the call for larger supplies insistent.
But as the demand grew, the English spinner grew
in desperation. Here was a world outside demand-
ing that England clothe it; and yet, for two seem-
ingly inexorable reasons, England could not.
In the first place, while she could get yarn enough
for the warp of the goods, she could not get enough
cotton for the weft.
And even if she could get cotton enough, she
could not find labor enough to spin it. Doing her
best with her one-thread wheel, she was spinning
only as much as 50,000 of our modern spindles now
turn out.
18 COTTON
But these problems hardly began to be urgent be-
fore they were solved. Hargreaves, Arkwright,
Watt, Cartwright and others with their now fam-
ous inventions, showed how to make one man’s
labor yield more than that of ten men had done
before—and succeeded, even if the mad mob did
scour the country in search of the new machines
they believed would take the bread from the mouths
of the laborers.
AMERICA BEGINS TO SUPPLY ENGLAND'S WANTS
And just as the English spinners learned how
to spin and weave cotton fast enough, just then
America answered her question as to where she
could get the raw material.
Cotton, on a small scale, was grown in America
from the time of the earliest settlements. In 1621
the first planting was made in Virginia. The first
permanent settlers in North Carolina in 1664 grew
cotton as one of their principal crops, and forty
years later cotton furnished one-fifth of the cloth-
ing used by the people of the State. South Carolina
began cotton culture in 1766, and Georgia early in
the eighteenth century.
“Barrels of cotton” and “bags of cotton” soon
began to be mentioned as articles of export to Eng-
land, and in 1751 it appears that one Henry Han-
sen shipped “in good order and well conditioned,
in and upon the good scow called the Mary, where-
of is master under God, for this present voyage,
Barnaby Badgars, and now riding in the harbour
of New York, and by God’s grace bound for Lon-
don—to say, eighteen bales of cotton wool, being
marked and numbered,” ete. In 1786 Liverpool
COTTON 19
imported 800 pounds of American cotton, in 1787,
16,350 pounds, in 1788, 58,500 pounds, and in
1792, 138,328 pounds.
By this time it was America rather than England
which was wrestling with a problem—and our prob-
lem was how to separate the seed from the lint in
quantities sufficient to supply the British demand.
Eli Whitney solved it—just how and when we shall
consider at greater length in a subsequent chapter.
It is enough here to say that the year Whitney
invented the cotton gin the South grew the equiva-
lent of 10,000 400-pound bales; a hundred years
later we grew 10,000,000 400-pound bales,
CHAPTER II.
ACREAGE AND PRODUCTION: WHERE THE WORLD’S
SUPPLY IS GROWN
Of the 17,782,440 bales making up the 1904-5
cotton crop of the world, it is estimated that the
United States grew 13,420,440 bales, the East In-
dies 2,960,000, Egypt 1,187,000, Brazil, etc., 215,-
000.
In India, the oldest of cotton-producing coun-
tries, the total yield of late years has been de-
creasing. In 1893-94 India grew 2,993,000 bales
(she had grown more than 3,000,000 three years
before) and in 1903-4 she produced only 2,634,400
bales. The soil of India is well adapted to cotton
growing, but the climate is largely unfavorable—
too wet in some places, too dry in others—and the
average yield per acre is hardly more than half
the average American yield.
EGYPTIAN AND INDIAN PRODUCTION
;
The abnormal demand for cotton during the Civil
War stimulated Indian production, but “when the
final result of the contest between America and
India became apparent, America had gained com-
mand of the market, and India was considered only
as a supplementary source of supply, resorted to
mainly in the event of a short crop in the West.”
(20)
COTTON 21
But if India’s interest in cotton growing seems to
be waning, Egypt is even more surely awakening
to her advantages as a cotton-producing country.
In 1894-95 the land of the Pharaohs produced only
650,000 bales; in 1904-5 1,187,000 bales. Much
of this increase is undoubtedly due to the great
irrigation improvements of which the world has
heard so much; but even without these the same
steady growth which has marked the course of
Egyptian cotton farming since its beginning
would doubtless have been maintained. Egypt is
the only country whose cotton trade did not decline
when the South after Lee’s surrender resumed her
old place as the home of the fleecy staple. Maho
Bey, aided by a Frenchman named Jumel, turned
the attention of Egypt to cotton farming in 1820
—whence the name “Maho” and “Jumel” for
Egyptian cotton—and she has taken no backward
step in the 80 years since she began by sending
5,323 bales to Liverpool.
THREE-FOURTHS OF WORLD'S SUPPLY GROWN IN
THE SOUTH
After all, however, the world gives little thought
to India or Egypt or Brazil or Russia, when it
comes to reckon on the next year’s cotton supply.
For more than three-fourths of this supply it must
look to twelve American States and Territories, in
ten of which it is the chief farm product. We have
already seen that half our agricultural export val-
ues is in cotton. On more than 1,000,000 American
farms cotton is the principal source of income.
Every foot of the surface of seven of our smaller
States—land and water, hill and dale, field and
22 COTTON
forest, marsh and barren—might be planted to cot-
ton without equalling the area which the South an-
nually plants to this favorite farm staple. And all
this is in the face of the fact that cotton, more
largely than any other American crop,is dependent
upon hand labor. The increased cost by reason of
this fact, however, naturally leads to correspond-
ingly greater profits, so that in 1899 24,000,000
acres planted to cotton (and at prices very much
lower than now obtain) produced $323,000,000
in values, while the wheat crop from more than
twice this area was worth only $369,000,000, and
the value of the corn crop from about four times
the cotton acreage was only $828,000,000.
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WORLD’S PRODUCTION OF COTTON.
1901-02.
1904-05. 1903-04. 1
COUNTRIES. ; Bales.
Bales. Bales.
United States 11,020 | 10,380,380
2,475,230
1,292,443
265,896
10,51
East gates * 400 2,787, al
1,1
329, "390
14,746,687 | 14,413,949
14,436,589 | 14,414,908
290,098 a9s9
2,672,068 2,673,027
2,962,166 2,672,068
17,782,440 | 14,059,341
5,506,225 | 14,010,428
2,776,185 48,918
3,011,079 2,962,166
5,287,264 3,011,079
Surplus from year’s crop.
Visible and invisible stock :
September 1 beginning year..
September 1 ending year
* Includes India’s exports to Europe, America and Japan, and mill consumption in
India increased or decreased by excess or loss of stock at Bombay.
+ Receipts into Europe from Brazil, Smyrna, Peru, West Indies, etc., and Japan
and China cotton used in Japanese mills.
a Deficiency in the year’s mew supply.
The above statement indicates in compact form the year’s supply of
cotton (not including Russia) in each of the four years, the amount con-
sumed, and alse the extent to which visible and invisible stocks were
increased or diminished.
COMMERCIAL CROP BY STATES.
| Mississippi
N. Carolina, etc. .
South Carolina..
Tennessee, etc...
1904-05
Bales
1,470,000
905,000
89,000
1,975,000
1,100,000
1,777,000
"5,000
1,200,000
691,000
Tex. & Indian Ter} 3,584,000
Total crop, bales|13,566,000
1903-04
Bales
1,000,000
105,000
55,000
1,325,000
824,000
1,387,000
563,000
825,000
451,000
2,876,000
10,011,000
1902-03
Bales
1,050,000
1,000,000
55,000
1,470,000
884,000
1,404,000
575,000
950,000
509,000
2,831,000
COTTON STATISTICS.
(Courtesy of Latham, Alexander & Co. )
10,728,000 -
1901-02
Bales
1,200,000
820,000
54,000
1,525,000
880,000
1,375,000
550,000
925,000
359,000
2,993,000
10,681,000
COTTON
23
STATISTICS WHICH SHOW THE DEVELOPMENT OF
COTTON GROWING
I do not know that in any way we can get the
subject more clearly before the reader than to give
herewith the statistics of production by years for
seventy years past, and the acreage and average
yield by years since 1888:
Season
1888-89
1889-90
1890-91
1891-92
1892-93
1893-94
1894-95
1895-96
1896-97
1897-98
1898-99
1899-00
1900-01
1901-02
1902-03
1903-04
1904-05
ACREAGE AND YIELD SINCE 1888
Acres Planted
19,362,073
20,171,896
20,809,053
20,714,937
18,067,924
19,684,000
21,454,000
18,882,000
22,341,000
24,071,000
23,572,000
22,583,055
25,558,000
27,532,000
27,450,000
28,907,000
31,730,371
Net
Crop Pounds Net |Pounds} Bales in Crop
3,260,996,300
3,472,861,786
4,092,678,381
4,273,734,267
3,182,673,375
3,578,613,258
4.,792,205,484
3,414,054,042
4,177,548,828
5,398,397,108
5,513,396,760
4,757,062,942
4,958,252,000
5,176,016,000
5,188,050,000
4,885,283,000
6,695, 108,281
6,938,290
7,311,322
8,652,597
9,035,379
6,700,365
7,549,817
9,901,251
7,157,346
8,757,964
11,199,994
11,274,840
9,436,416
10,383,422
10,680,680
10,727,559
10,011,374
13,565,885
Net
Weight
Bales
Per
Acre
qoooooococoooqooocoooo
we 09 69 OF & 09 CO > 09 09 > 09 69
09 Or OO = BOAO OD O10 DD
24 COTTON
CROP, EXPORTS AND PRICES FOR SEVENTY YEARS
| Bie
United State a
Cro nited States =35
Consumption paki aa g lg
Eases
Years Bales Bales Bales Cents
1832-33 1,070,438 194,412 867,000 12.32
1833-34 1,205,394 196,413 1,028,000 12.90
1834-35 1,254,328 216,888 1,023,500 17.45
1835-36 1,360,725 236,733 1,116,000 16.50
1836-37 1,423,930 222,540 1,169,000 13.25
1837-38 1,801,497 246,063 1,575,000 10.14
1838-39 1,360,532 276,018 1,074,000 13.36
1839-40 2,177,835 295,193 1,876,000 8.92
1840-41 1,634,954 267,850 1,313,500 9.50
1841-42 1,683,574 267,850 1,465,500 7.85
1842-43 2,378,875 325,129 2,010,000 7.25
1843-44 2,030,409 346,750 1,629,500 7.73
1844-45 2,394,503 389,000 2,083,700 5.63
1845-46 2,100,537 422,600 1,666,700 7.87
1846-47 1,778,651 428,000 1,241,200 11.21
1847-48 2,439,786 616,044 1,858,000 8.03
1848-49 2,866,938 642,485 2,228,000 7.55
1849-50 2,233,718 613,498 1,590,200 12.34
1850-51 2,454,442 485,614 1,988,710 12.14
1851-52 3,126,310 689,603 2,443,646 9.50
1852-53 3,416,214 803,725 2,528,400 11.02
1853-54 3,074,979 737,236 2,319,148 10.97
1854-55 2,982,634 706,417 2,244,209 10.39
1855-56 3,665,557 777,739 2,954,606 10.30
1856-57 3,093,737 819,936 2,252,657 13.51
1857-58 3,257,339 595,562 2,590,455 12.23
1858-59 4,018,914 927,651 3,021,403 12.08
1859-60 4,861,292 978,043 3,774,173 ii be
1860-61 3,849,469 843,740 3,127,568 13.01
1861-62 } 31.29
1862-63 2 : 67.21
1863-64 Cloccccct te War period 00. aulss eter 101.50
1864-65 | | 83.38
1865-66 2,269,316 666,100 1,554,664 43.20
1866-67 2,097,254 770,030 1,557,054 31.59
1867-68 2,519,554 906,636 1,655,816 24.85
1868-69 2,366,467 926,374 1,465,880 29.01
1869-70 3,122,551 865,160 2,206,480 23.98
1870-71 4,352,317 1,110,196 3,169,009 16.95
1871-72 2,974,351 1,237,330 1,957,314 20.48
eee ee
COTTON
25
CROP, EXPORTS AND PRICES FOR SEVENTY YEARS
(Continued)
Crop United States
Consumption
Year | Bales Bales
1872-73 3,930,508 1,201,127
1873-74 4,170,388 1,305,943
1874-75 3,832,991 1,193,005
1875-76 4,632,313 1,351,870
1876-77 4,474,069 1,428,013
1877-78 4,773,865 1,489,022
1878-79 5,074,155 1,558,329
1879-80 5,761,252 1,789,978
1880-81 6,605,750 1,938,937
1881-82 5,456,048 1,964,535
1882-83 6,949,756 2,073,096
1883-84 5,713,200 1,876,683
1884-85 5,706,165 1,753,125
1885-86 6,575,691 2,162,544
1886-87 6,505,087 2,111,532
1887-88 7,046,833 9.957, Q47
1888-89 6,938,290 2,314,091
1889-90 7,311,322 2,390,959
1890-91 8,652,597 2,632,023
1891-92 9,035,379 2,876,846
1892-93 6,700,365 2,431,134
1893-94 7,549,817 2319, 688
1894-95 9,901,251 2,946,677
1895-96 7,157,346 2,504,972
1896-97 8,757,964 2,847,351
1897-98 11,199,994 3,443,581
1898-99 11,274,840 3,589,494
- 1899-00 9,436,416 3,665,412
1900-01 10,383,422 3,588,501
1901-02 10,680,680 3,988,501
1902-03 10,727,559 4,161,374
1903-04 -10,011,374 3,946,219
1904— OEE I saeohbacindings Rani isa aap FRM ALUN SA onto aC aici 13,565,885 4,445,650
Exports
Bales
2,679,986
2,840,981
2,684,708
3 234,244
3,030,835
3,360,254
3,481,004
3,885,003
4,589,346
3,582,622
4,766,597
3,916,581
3,947,972
4,336,203
4,445,302
4,627,502
4, 854, 573
4,996,543
5,783,101
5,868,545
4,410,524
5,360,318
6,926,025
4,751,384
6,088,521
7,674,065
7,452,116
6,055,874
6,639,931
6,715,793
6,766,378
6,109,755
8,767,180
uplands in New
| av. price per
Ib. middling
York
|
—
=
26 COTTON
THE LIMITS OF PROFITABLE COTTON PRODUCTION
IN THE SOUTH
Stretch a line from Norfolk to Memphis, Lit-
tle Rock and Dallas, and you have the Cotton Belt
fairly outlined—though cotton has been grown to
some extent north of this line. It was first culti-
vated in Virginia. One hundred and twenty years
ago it was found on farms in parts of Delaware.
“At the time of the Revolution the home-grown cot-
ton was sufficiently abundant in Pennsylvania to
supply the domestic needs of the State.” Three
Maryland counties grew the crop largely up to
eighty years ago. In Civil War times Nevada and
Illinois also figured in cotton production.
Of late years, however, the production of cotton
in all States beyond the borders of the old Southern
Confederacy has steadily diminished. Kentucky,
Missouri, Tennessee and Virginia each showed a
declining yield for the last census decade as com-
pared with the preceding decade.
For fifty years now the median point of pro-
duction has been within a radius of about 75 miles
from Jackson, Mississippi,—in the earlier period
northeast of Jackson, but in the last twenty years
carried northwest by the increase of the Texas
crop and the opening up of new lands in Oklahoma
and Indian Territory. The cotton section west of
the Mississippi grew 84 per cent. of the crop in
1879, 38 per cent. in 1889, and 43 per cent. in 1899.
The next census will probably show the center of
production as having for the first time crossed be-
yond the Father of Waters.
CHAPTER III.
DOES FOREIGN COMPETITION THREATEN THE SOUTHS
SUPREMACY ?
The figures we have already quoted and the ta-
bles of statistics we have given leave so little to be
said about the subject of acreage and production
in the South that we now proceed directly to the
inquiry which is doubtless uppermost in the minds
of most of our readers:
Is the South likely to maintain its present su-
premacy as the world’s chief source of raw cotton?
For it is really the South against the field, and
all the countries that now make cotton on a small
scale are interesting in this respect only as we re-
gard them as a combination which might eventually
rob America of its prestige.
ENGLAND'S EFFORTS TO BECOME INDEPENDENT OF
SLAVE-MADE COTTON
It is not anew subject. Before us now is a bulky,
time-worn volume, bearing on its title page the
legend, “Cotton is King: and Pro-Slavery Argu-
ments,” and one of the weighty problems which
engrossed the attention of its compilers was the
effort England was making to free herself from
dependence on slave-made cotton. I have also dis-
(27)
28 COTTON
covered in this musty volume some extracts from
the London Economist of 1859 which—except for
their direct references to slavery—might well have
appeared yesterday. The Economist Editor com-
ments on the fact that Brazil, Egypt and the West
Indies all grow cotton and might grow more, “but
as an immediate and practical question of supply,
it is confined to America and British India.”
To India, however, he looks very hopefully.
The situation, he says, “invests the subject of
Indian cotton growing with enormous interest.
sii In some important respects the
conditions of supply from India differ very much
from those which attach to and determine the sup-
ply from America. In India there is no limit
to the quantity of labor. There may be said to be
little or none to the quantity of land. The obstacle
is of another kind; it lies-almost exclusively in lack
of cheap transit.” Therefore he finds new hopes
in the “railways which are being constructed
‘ to bring in the abundant labor of millions
of our fellow subjects in India to cheapen and in-
crease the supply of cotton.” No English consul
or cotton manufacturer in our own time has had
a severer attack of Mulberry Sellers optimism than
did this Economist writer of fifty years ago.
“HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL ”
Writing later in 1859, the Editor of the Econo-
mist lauded in the highest terms the continued
efforts to make England independent of Southern
cotton. “We cannot well conceive of stronger con-
siderations than those which are moving English-
men to action in this particular,” he says; and this
time he also lays stress on the opportunities in
COTTON 29
Africa. Missionaries from various sections also
believed that West Africa and the Niger countries
would relieve the situation; and Lord Palmerston
shared the enthusiastic faith that Great Britain
would “find on the West Coast of Africa a most
malmuable supply of cotton 2...) =) cotton
districts . . . More extensive than
those of India.”
If Alexander Pope were alive to-day he could
ask no stronger confirmation of his famous dictum
that “hope springs eternal in the human breast”
than the persistence with which English manu-
facturers still hug the delusion that Africa and
India will enable them—as their fathers and grand-
fathers fifty years ago hoped it would enable them
—to get a large part of their raw cotton from
Old World districts.
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE CRUCIAL TEST CAME
We all remember how on one occasion Uncle
Remus was telling the Little Boy of one of Brer
Rabbit’s hair-breadth escapes. ‘The pursuer was
almost upon Mr. Cottontail and in another moment
might have had him in his furious grasp. “And
right then Brer Rabbit he clumb a tree,” said
Uncle Remus.
“But rabbits can’t climb trees,” protested the
Little Boy.
“Never mind,” replied the old darkey, “Brer
Rabbit this time was obleeged—Jest obleeged—to
climb the tree—en’ he clumb it.”
Well, in 1862 the English spinner reached the
same inexorable crisis that confronted Brer Rabbit
—the time when he knew he was “jest obleeged
to climb the tree.”
30 COTTON
And he didn’t climb it. *
SOME STATE'S EVIPENCE
Let the British edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica tell the story. Let us hear this piece of
State’s evidence as to the crisis which came when
war so nearly stopped cotton production in the
South:
“This great source of supply, when apparently
most abundant and secure, was shortly afterwards
suddenly cut off, and thousands were for a time de-
prived of employment and the means of subsistence.
In this period of destitution the cotton-growing
resources of every part of the globe were tested to
the utmost; and in the Exhibition of 1862 the rep-
resentatives of every country from which supplies
might be expected met to concert measures for ob-
taining all that was wanted without the aid of
America. The colonies and dependencies of Great
Britain, including India, seemed well able to grow
all the cotton that could be required, whilst num-
erous other countries were ready to afford their co-
operation. A powerful stimulus was thus given to
the growth of cotton in all directions; a degree of
activity and enterprise never witnessed before
was seen in India, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Italy,
Africa, the West Indies, Queensland, New South
Wales, Peru, ‘Brazil, and in short wherever cotton
could be produced; and there seemed no room to
doubt that in a short time there would be abundant
supplies independently of America. But ten years
afterwards, in the Exhibition of 1872, which was
specially devoted to cotton, a few only of the thirty-
five countries which had sent their samples in 1862
again appeared, and these for the most part only to
COTTON 31
bear witness to disappointment and failure. Amer-
ica had re-entered the field of competition, and was
rapidly gaining ground so as to be able to bid de-
fiance to the world.”
AFRICAN AND INDIAN EXPERIMENTS NOT A SUCCESS
An even more vivid picture of the inducements
to foreign competition which England held out
during the Civil War period is furnished by the
1869 report of the Cotton Commissioner of India.
So immense were the profits that the Indian cotton
farmers received, he says, that they committed all
sorts of absurdities: “Silver plowshares and tires
of solid silver for cartwheels made their appear-
ance here and there; fancy prices were paid for
bullocks of a favorite color or possessing some
peculiarities of tail, and enormous sums were
squandered on marriage ceremonies.” And yet in
spite of the enormous subsidies (virtually) which
were paid, and the energy with which the experi-
ment was prosecuted, it was found impossible even
with artificial inflation to carry the Indian crop
beyond 3,000,000 bales.
As to Africa, the experiments there have never
been at any time anything but inglorious failures;
and it is said that the cotton made in the Niger
territory has cost 50 cents a pound. A West Afri-
can correspondent of the London Times says that
the much vaunted “colonies of Lagos, Southern
Nigeria, Gold Coast, Sierra Leone, and A
under the most favorable circumstances
will not be capable of producing more than 350,- -
000 bales, and these figures will not be attained for
many years, if ever.”
32 COTTON
WORLD'S DEMAND WILL GROW FASTER THAN FOREIGN
PRODUCTION
It is not likely, of course, that all these attempts
to grow cotton outside the South will fail utterly;
but what does seem sure is that the world’s demand
for cotton will grow much faster than the foreign
supply, and that therefore our country will be called
on in the future, as heretofore, for a constantly in-
creasing crop.
And in support of this opinion the writer will
quote just three opinions, and then pass on to other
subjects.
First, our own National Department of Agricul-
ture in its Crop Reporter for December, 1905,
makes this conservative statement of fact: “The
organized efforts of powerful associations of cotton
manufacturers in Great Britain, Germany, and
France to establish and stimulate cotton production
in the colonies of these countries, which began early
in 1903 with a large capital subscribed for promo-
tion, have so far resulted in no perceptible addition
to the world’s cotton crop, and there are no present
indications of a competition of new fields of produc-
tion which will materially affect the foreign market
for the upland cotton of this country for many
years.”
LOWER SOUTH AMERICA ALONE CAN COMPETE WITH
THE SOUTH
Even more interesting is the opinion of the late
Edward Atkinson, as given in an article in the
Manufacturers’ Record in 1903. During the Civil
War Mr. Atkinson imported cotton from India,
Egypt, China, West Africa, Peru and Brazil, and
his conclusion is that nearly all the foreign cotton
COTTON 33
is as unsatisfactory in quality as it is deficient in
quantity. None of the countries mentioned, he
says, have a congenial climate such as ours. The
Indian fiber is “short, rough and unsuited to any
but the coarsest fabrics;” the Chinese fiber he found
“only about a quarter of an inch long;” the cotton
from West Africa “wholly unfit for use as a sub-
stitute for America;” and he did not think Peru or
Brazil could compete with the South. Summing
up, Mr. Atkinson declared that while he should
like to believe otherwise, he was forced to the con-
clusion that the South would have a virtual monopo-
ly for fifty years. “There is but one section of the
earth’s surface, where, in my judgment, there can
be competition with our Cotton States in growing
cotton of equal quality, and that is on the high
pampas of the Paraguay and Parana Rivers, suf-
ficiently elevated to be free from tropical condi-
tions, endowed with a soil of wonderful fertility and
capable of unlimited crops of cotton and wheat
sats Therefore our Cotton States have an
unwholesome but practical monopoly of the cotton
of commerce. They are not, therefore, under the
wholesome stimulus of prospective want, and there-
fore their method as a rule, subject to conspicuous
exceptions, in dealing with their land, their cotton
and their cotton bale, is as bad as it can be, as I have
often said when face to face with my friends in the
South.”
ENGLISH AUTHORITIES FINALLY ADMIT THE SOUTH’S
SUPREMACY
Lastly I come to the most striking testimony of
all—direct evidence given by “our friends, the ene-
39
my. It is the report of the Commissioners sent
34 COTTON
out by the British Government to investigate the
cotton-growing possibilities of East Africa; and
with this parting shot we shall drop the question of
possible foreign competition with the Southern
States:
“All efforts to raise cotton successfully elsewhere
than in the Southern part of the United States have
failed. This is the home of the cotton plant, and if
it will grow and fruit elsewhere to the extent that
the staple have a substantial commercial value, the
fact is yet to be demonstrated. It was experi-
mented with under different suns during and after
the American Civil War, and all the experiments
failed. Providence has given the Southern farmer a
monopoly of the indispensable cotton crop, and he
need not take fright when the price soars and there
are heard threats of turning Africa, Egypt or other
countries into cotton fields and making them furnish
the world’s supply.”
‘sayeq “qT O0¢
(SALV.LS AW) 0061 NOLLOO tO NOLLOAGOYd
ING. LAND FOR EGYPTIAN COTTON.
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BREAI
cht wel! have been taken the day that Moses led the Israelites out into the promised
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This pic
Canaan.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MEN WHO MAKE COTTON: WHITES AND
BLACKS; PLANTERS AND TENANTS
Unique in many other features already men-
tioned, cotton is also unique among American staples
in that it is the favorite crop of the negro farmer
and that in its production a larger number of ten-
ants are employed than in any other crop.
WHY THE NUMBER OF TENANTS INCREASED IN 1890-
1900
Of the farms in the ten Cotton States in 1900
48.3 per cent. were operated by owners, 20.3 per
cent. by cash tenants, and 31.4 by share tenants-—
showing a decrease for the decade of 15 per cent. in
proportion operated by owners, a gain of 12 per
cent. in the proportion worked by share tenants, and
a gain of 33.1-3 per cent. in percentage operated by
cash tenants. Of share tenants there are several
classes. Some rent land only, paying therefor
one-fourth of the farm product; others are fur-
nished land, stock, tools, and one-half fertilizer,
and receive one-half the crop, while still others are
content to furnish labor only for one-third the yield.
The relative decrease in number of farms op-
erated by owners during the last census decade must
be attributed to the emigration of farm owners to
(35)
36 COTTON
towns, as a result of the depression in cotton prices.
Sir Guilford Molesworth estimates that between
1872 and 1894 prices of general commodities fell
50 per cent., while cotton prices declined 70 per cent.
With the turn in the tide in prices, one now finds
abundant evidence of a similar turn in the tide of
migration.
NEGRO'S IMPORTANCE IN COTTON PRODUCTION PROB-
ABLY OVERESTIMATED
As to the negro in cotton production there are
probably conflicting impressions and delusions. “A
regular ‘cottontot’”’ as he has beencalled, the negro,
the mule, and the cotton patch are inseparably
linked together in the public mind. In 1899 little
more than half of the Southern white farmers grew
cotton, while 84 per cent. of the negroes were faith-
ful to their favorite staple.
And yet it is more than likely that the
average reader has overestimated the negro’s
importance as a factor in_ cotton-growing.
It is so picturesque to have the black negro
in the white cotton field that in about ninety-
nine per cent. of our book, magazine, and
tourist pictures it is the son of Ham and not the
white man who is laboring with the fleecy staple.
As a result of all this, the average Northern reader
would probably be surprised to learn of hundreds
of thousands of small white farmers with their fam-
ilies who make cotton from planting to picking al-
most or entirely without negro labor. On many
farms a negro is never employed; on many others,
negroes are called in only for a few days’ work in
the height of the busy season.
COTTON 37
Of the 1,418,000 cotton farms reported in 1900,
849,000 were operated by whites. White farmers
cultivated 14,616,000 acres, and negro farmers,
9,650,000 acres. (Of course, though, much negro
labor was hired to assist in cultivating the white
farms. )
THE SHIFTLESS NEGRO TENANT FARMER
Of the negro farmers more than four-fifths are
tenants—or about 500,000 of the nearly 600,000
negro farmers. “Clearly the central feature of the
Southern farm life of the negro race,” says Prof.
W.E. Du Bois, “is the tenant class—this half mil-
lion black men who hire farms on various terms, and
a large proportion of whom stand about midway be-
tween slavery and ownership.”
One hardly knows whether to say that the negro’s
indifference, his contentment with this lot, makes
the situation more or less tragical. “Take ye no
thought for the morrow—what ye shall eat, nor yet
for your body, what ye shall put on,” is one Bible
commandment which the negro literally obeys.
And his other favorite commandmentis like unto it:
“Multiply and replenish the earth”—taking equally
little heed for the morrow of the niggerkins them-
selves, unless Topsy-like, they “just grow.” As an
old negro whom the writer used to know would say,
“If I’ve got a peck of corn meal in the bar’l, I
ain’t got nothin’ to worry about.”
“The one-room cabin” says Prof. Du Bois, “is
still the typical farm home of the negro,” and as
for his food and disposition:
**Oh, I gits my stren’th from white side meat,
I sops all de sorghum a nigger kin eat,
I chaws wheat bread on Saddy night
En’ I ain’t no han’ to run f’um a fight.”
38 COTTON
Let us look for a minute at our typical negro
tenant. He moves in December to a new farm, we
will say—for he has a roving instinct that prevents
his remaining long at any place. He probably
rents horse, land and tools from the farm owner,
taking half the crop for his labor, and the farmer
stands his security for supplies at the nearest store.
Or he may rent land only, paying one-fourth the
crop for the land, and mortgage his unplanted
crop to the merchant for advance supplies. At
any rate, the negro’s recklessness, coupled with the
exorbitant “time prices” charged, leads him perhaps
to buy more than his crop pays for—so that the mer-
chant’s reckoning when the negro brings in his
three or four bales of cotton in the fall, has been
pretty accurately set forth in the popular couplet:
**Naught’s a naught, figger’s a figger,
All for the white man, and none for the nigger.”’
Heretofore it has been true in most cases per-
haps that the negro actually ended the year owing
the merchant a balance on the year’s supplies—the
merchant not allowing the balance, however, to be-
come more than just large enough to insure the
negro’s becoming his bondservant for another year.
If, however, the negro finds himself burdened
with an unexpected cash surplus after paying his
debts, he probably relieves the burden aforesaid by
buying an organ (which no member of his family
can play) or a calendar clock (the dates of which
he can barely read) or a magnificent range (on
which his wife will experiment with side meat and
corn bread until she becomes disgusted and goes ~
back to the family fire-place).
HOW THE NEGRO TENANTS LIVE.
The pictures show typical homes of negro croppers and renters of the poorer
class. The houses
, however, are being steadily improved.
NEGRO PICKERS AT WORK AND AT HOME.
hing the day’s harvest, the basket supported by a
(B) a negro cabin.
(A) Favorite method of weig
fence rail borne on the shoulders of two men.
COTTON 39
A DIFFERENT TYPE OF NEGRO FARMER
Such is our typical negro—“light-hearted, good-
natured and aisily lynched,” as Mr. Dooley says—
typical, but not the only type. A by no means in-
considerable number of negroes are acquiring
property, building better houses, and adopting im-
proved methods of farming. Many negroes once
tenants have bought portions of the farms where
they formerly worked. For example, take Deal
Jackson, a Georgia negro cotton grower, who every
year for seven years past has beaten every one of the
110,906 white farmers of his State in getting the
first bale to market. Less than twenty years ago
Deal was a tenant. He borrowed $1,000 to buy a
run-down farm, mortgaging the place as security.
Then like that proverbially modest man who
wanted each year to buy just the land “j’inin’ his,”
so Deal continued to buy adjoining tracts until he
has 2,000 acres of fertile land, operating, with his
tenants, forty-five plows.
WHEN LOW PRICES CRUSHED BOTH WHITES AND
BLACKS
Nor should we forget that it is not the negro
alone who has struggled year after year, Sisyphus-
like, with the burden of debt. Thousands of white
tenants, and of white farm owners as well, have
had the same experience. In fact, unless the farmer
earried some surplus savings into that long period
of low prices from 1891 to 1901, such an experience
was almost unavoidable. With any reasonably
high standard of living, cotton was then below the
cost of production. No wonder farm owners moved
40 COTTON
to towns and mortgages became almost as common
as they were in the West in the days of low-priced
corn. ‘Ten-cent cotton then seemed an iridescent
dream, and men talked of it as the feature of some
Golden Age gone never to return.
CHANGES RESULTING FROM HIGH-PRICED COTTON
Of course, with the coming of higher prices for
cotton, important changes are taking place. The
mortgage and the crop lien, with all except the
hopelessly shiftless class, are disappearing like snow
before a summer sun—unless we except the mort-
gage given by the aspiring tenant in his ambition
to become a land-owner himself.
As to the future, one must not predict too lightly,
for it is easy to see that the present high price of
cotton will make itself felt not in one direction only,
but in counter currents.
As one result, more tenants wish to buy lands
for themselves; as another result, land is increasing
in value so that it requires greater savings to buy
it. On the whole, however, it is now relatively easier
to become one’s own landlord, and with high prices
the tenant class is likely to decrease.
As one result, too, more people are attracted by
the old plantation system; as another result, labor-
ers find it so profitable to work for themselves that
labor is much more expensive than it used to be.
But as the negro works better in groups, the large
plantation has at least this advantage in its struggle
to reassert itself.
With high prices then, the one sure thing—
whether the proportion of tenants increase or de-
crease, whether the plantation system decline or
COTTON Al
flourish—is that a larger proportion of white people
will engage in cotton production. If labor can be
had few town occupations are more profitable. And
as for the man who has his own labor, who must have
his own children at work, how much better for
health, safety and comfort, as well as profit,
to have them on the cotton farm instead of in the
cotton factory!
Already many cotton mills are beginning to suf-
fer for labor because the tide is turning back to
the farms.
CHAPTER V.
A 25,000,000 BALE CROP: WILL THE SOUTH BE
READY WHEN THE WORLD DEMANDS IT?
Thirty years ago the South grew only 4,000,000
bales of cotton; twenty years ago 6,000,000 bales;
ten years ago, 8,000,000 bales; the last three crops
have averaged more than 11,000,000.
And the end is not yet. Cotton is not only sup-
planting other fabrics (we have seen how rapidly
wool production is decreasing), but the demand for
the great Southern staple is increasing as a result
of the constant raising of our standards of living
and of comfort, and as a result of the advance of
civilization among peoples heretofore barbarous.
The time will soon have passed when “the lady in
middle Africa may cavalierly inform the agent of
the American cotton mill that clothes are of doubt-
ful propriety amongst the aristocracy of the Con-
go Valley anyhow.”
THE WORLD WILL DEMAND 42,000,000 BALES
“Tt is estimated,” says the United States Depart-
ment of Agriculture, “ that of the world’s popula-
tion of 1,500,000,000, about 500,000,000 regularly
wear clothes, about 750,000,000 are partially
(42)
COTTON AB
clothed, and 250,000,000 habitually go. almost
naked, and that to clothe the entire population of
the world would require 42,000,000 bales of 500
ounds each. It therefore seems more than likely
that the cotton industry will go on expanding until
the whole of the inhabited earth is clothed with the
products of its looms.”
And it is the opinion of the authors that the South
will increase her production just as fast as the world
increases her demands. We have yet a shamefully
low average yield; we are depending yet on fear-
fully mistreated soils; we are yet planting miserably
selected seed; and we have very inefficient tools and
machinery. Necessity, that mother of invention,
will help us reform these abuses—just as necessity
brought about the new inventions in cotton spin-
ning, and just as necessity brought about Whitney’s
cotton gin. When it becomes necessary for her to
furnish the world 25,000,000 bales of cotton, the
South will furnish it.
OF SOUTHERN LANDS ONLY ONE ACRE IN SEVEN-
TEEN NOW IN COTTON
Even if we were not going to double the yield
(and unless the boll weevil interferes, men now liv-
ing may see that result), we have enough available
idle land to make 30,000,000 bales with the present
low average yield per acre. Of the twelve Cotton
States only one acre in seventeen is now planted
to the fleecy staple, and only one acre in eleven of
the cotton-producing counties. Only two-fifths
of the farm lands of the South are yet improved for
any sort of crop.
The great trouble is that we have so long allowed
the bulk of our cotton lands to be butchered by
4, COTTON
negro slaves and negro tenants that we do not yet
appreciate the marvelous possibilities of scientific
cotton farming. Just take the bald statement of
Dr. H. J. Webber: “The average yield of cotton
in the United States is only about 190 pounds of
lint per acre, while on many large tracts carefully
cultivated a yield of 500 to 800 pounds per acre
is frequently obtained.” Here in itself is material
for a book of sermons.
SEED SELECTION MAY INCREASE YIELD 30 To 50
PER CENT.
For one thing, the seed for the cotton crop are
probably selected with less care than are seed for
any other farm crop that men grow. Your cotton
farmer will carefully select the largest and best-
formed ears for his seed corn; he will pay high
prices for improved seed or oats; even his water-
melon seed are selected from the most luscious and
reddest-meated specimens of last summer. But
when it comes to seed for his cotton crop he is
strangely careless. The average farmer gets his
seed haphazard from the general supply at the gin
—good, bad, indifferent; early, late, medium; tall,
bushy, and ordinary, varieties all mixed.
With such conditions there is indeed abundant
reason for believing that the average cotton yield per
acre could be increased one-fourth by only five
years’ wise selection of seed. We know a farmer
now who by selecting seed from the most thrifty
stalks and having the seed ginned separately, in
two years so improved the crop from the selected
seed that the improvement was easily noted and
became a matter of comment by persons passing on
COTTON 45
the road. We know another farmer who by a few
years’ seed selection has increased the yield of cot-
ton thus improved from 400 to 600 pounds while
seed selected in the old way grown on similar land
and under similar conditions still makes its bare 400
pounds an acre. Fifty per cent. increase from
four years’ selection of seed!
Of course, where a special type of cotton has been
nurtured and improved through a long period of
years’ seed selection has increased the yield of cot-
results can be obtained than with ordinary farm-
bred seed; and when our farmers come to a proper
appreciation of this fact, a long step toward the
doubled yield will have been made by this one re-
form. Thus one of our State Departments of
Agriculture, speaking of a five-year test of cotton
varieties (with practically the sameconditionsof soil,
fertilization and cultivation), declares that in 1900,
in a test of eight varieties the difference between
the variety yielding the largest amount of seed cot-
ton per acre, and the one the smallest, was 565
pounds; in 1901 and 1902 in tests of seven varieties
each, the differences were 520 and 790 pounds re-
spectively; in 1903, 662 1-2 pounds when nine
varieties were incorporated; and 725 2-5 pounds
difference in 1904 in a test of twenty-one varieties.
In other words, one man uses intelligence in seed
selection; another man does not; both work equally
hard; both have land of equal value; both expend
the same amount for fertilizers—but the scientific
cotton farmer gets from 500 to 700 pounds more
per acre than the thoughtless clodhopper.
So much for what we may accomplish by seed
selection alone.
46 COTTON
CORN SEVEN TIMES, WHEAT TWICE, AS EXHAUSTIVE
AS COTTON
But it is not alone in our reckless disregard of
the ancient laws of breeding that we have succeeded
in bringing down the yield of cotton far below what
it should be; like a Prodigal Son, wasting his sub-
stance in riotous living, we have also been guilty of
inexcusable folly in dealing with Nature’s greatest
gift to the farmer—the soil itself. Land-starved
for ages, our forefathers came from Europe to our
Southern States and reveled in mad intoxication in
the seemingly unlimited areas of virgin soils they
found. Before the Civil War it was customary to
clear up land, grow a few crops of cotton on it,
then “turn it out” to broomsage and gullies, and
clear up more new lands for the cotton crop. The
old fields of the South probably cover an area as
large as five of the New England States. So it was
not mere poetic sentiment, but the deep recognition
of a damning economic sin that moved Sidney
Lanier to say:
‘*Upon that generous rounding side
With gullies scarified
When keen Neglect his lash hath plied
Yon old deserted Georgian hill
Bares to the sun his piteous aged: crest
And seamy breast,
By restless-hearted children left to lie
Untended there beneath the heedless sky,
As barbarous folk expose their old to die.”’
Really, as we shall see further on in this book,
there is less reason for the abandoned field in cotton
growing than in any other kind of farming. An
average crop of wheat requires twice as much plant
food as an average crop of cotton, and an average
crop of corn nearly seven times as much.
COTTON AT
Or to put the matter in even more striking form,
it appears that if through feeding and manuring,
the wheat straw, corn stover and cotton seed of
these three crops respectively are each returned to
the soil, wheat requires nineteen times as much of
the great fertilizing elements as cotton, and corn
thirty times as much.
Sooner or later the Southern farmer will learn to
apply this doctrine; the farm paper, the agricultural
text-book in the public school, the agricultural col-
lege, the Farmers’ Institute workers, all are ham-
mering away at the idea. And then when the cotton
farmer gets this double-jointed idea: first, that he
has the finest stock food in the world; second, that
with this by-product properly utilized he has the
crop that is of all crops the kindest to the soil—and
a practical monopoly of this crop—why, then, we
shall have a new era in Southern agriculture; and
as Dr. B. T. Galloway says, “a system of land-
robbing will give way to a system of land-building.”’
THE MECHANICAL COTTON-PICKER
But, some one reminds us, in this day of labor-
saving machinery cotton is still the one crop most
fully dependent on hand labor. It is said that
within fifty years the time of human labor required
to produce a bushel of corn has decreased from four
hours to thirty-four minutes, and for a bushel of
wheat from three hours and ten minutes to ten min-
utes, while it is doubtful if the time of human labor
required to produce a pound of cotton has been di-
minished even one-third. What then—when the
world has begun to demand 25,000,000 bales of the
South, even though we have so improved our seed
48 COTTON
and so built up our lands as to find no difficulty
here, shall we not nevertheless be hopelessly balked
by lack of labor for chopping and picking the crop?
This problem, in our opinion, is another one that
is likely to solve itself when inexorable circumstance
demands that it do so.
As for hoeing the cotton, that problem is already
solved. Within two miles of where this book is
written, some of the finest cotton in the county was
grown last year entirely without hand-chopping—
simply by the right use of the peg-tooth smoothing
harrow and the cultivator. The cotton was thinned
and kept free from grass entirely by these tools.
And instead of the average yield of 200 pounds of
lint per acre, this land made 700 pounds of lint per
acre!
A much more serious problem is the mechanical
cotton-picker. There are many lions in the path.
Cotton does not open all at once, but irregularly
through a period of several weeks. Cotton does not
have the uniformity of corn or wheat in size or
position, but is irregularly placed in the rows, its
limbs grow all over it, and the plants vary hope-
lessly in size; the limbs furthermore are easily
broken. Finally, the lint should be free from dirt
and trash, and many have thought that only the
human hand could select the lint from the open bolls
without adding a ruinously large quantity of dead
leaves and dirt.
Clearly, therefore, the making of a mechanical
picker is a hard task, and yet so fertile is the human
imagination and so enormous are the rewards await-
ing the man who succeeds in making an effective
picker—the wealth of Croesus may be his—that
we expect it to come, and to come not very many
COTTON 49
years hence. Writing of this matter in a farm
paper early in 1904, we said: “The present labor
crisis in the Cotton Belt is certain to bring the mat-
ter to the attention of inventors. We _ have
long thought of the cotton picker as an impossi-
bility, because the bolls are irregularly placed,
ripen irregularly, and must not be mixed with
limbs and leaves in picking. But the suggestion
now made puts the matter in a new light. Instead
of a harvesting machine on a big scale such as we
have for grain, a small machine carefully guided
and watched over by an operator, would be put to
the task of taking the cotton from the open bolls.
It does not look as if this should be wholly impos-
sible. And as there are millions in it for the man
who succeeds at it, it is likely to be done if it can
be done.”
THE LOWRY COTTON PICKER DESCRIBED
Within the last few months the South has seen
this “small machine carefully guided and watched
over by an operator, . + consult tor the
task of taking the cotton from the open bolls.” It
is the Lowry Picker, and its mode of operation has
been fully described as follows; the photographs
given herewith making the matter still plainer:
“The machine is not entirely automatic, as the
arms that carry the little wheels which gather in the
fleecy staple must be directed by human hands to
the open bolls. The arms carry a chain with
hooked teeth, adjusted like the chains of a bicycle.
When the machine is in operation this chain re-
volves rapidly and the curved hooks gather up the
staple the instant it touches the open boll, and
50 COTTON
carries the cotton upward until it is deflected off
into a receptacle, by a revolving brush. The ma-
chine carries four operators and-a driver, for each
of whom a comfortable seat is prepared. There
is no necessity for any bending or stooping on the
part of the operator, and all he is required to do
is to direct the well-balanced and nicely-adjusted
arms of the machine. It is claimed by the inventor
that when finally perfected each arm should gather
up one boll per second, at a very low rate of speed,
making 480 bolls per minute for the four opera-
tions, or 28,800 per hour. As the bolls early in the
season average 60 to 80 in the pound, one machine
could pick from 3,600 to 4,800 pounds per day of
ten hours. One of these machines with four boys
and a driver could do the work of twenty average
pickers.”
Some who have seen the Lowry Picker ask:
“And what shall it profit the cotton farmer to have
this machine, since even with it the human hand,
or what is virtually an extension of the human
hand, must be directed to each individual boll?’
The advantage lies in the fact that the man who
operates the mechanical hand at least saves (or
should save) the time required in bending over
each new stalk and the time required in drawing
his hand back and forth in putting each separate
handful into his picking-sack—and this is more
than half the time required in picking.
Others who think Mr. Lowry has invented a
practical device for picking the cotton say that he
has hampered its success by putting it in connec-
tion with a motive power which is not satisfactory:
in other words, he is sacrificing a good invention
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COTTON 5]
of great possibilities by yoking it with a motive-
power invention absolutely worthless.
Whatever the difficulties, we may be sure that if
Mr. Lowry’s basic principle is right, it will sooner
or later be separated from all entangling alliances
and set to the service of a great need. And sup-
pose it succeeds simply in doing the work of four
men? Or suppose it reduces the cost of picking
by just half? Picking now costs $100,000,000 a
year—think of saving just $50,000,000 annually
to the South! Or to put it differently, “To pick a
crop of 11,000,000 bales, at an average of 150
pounds of seed cotton a day per picker, means that
for a picking season of three months, consisting of
twenty working days each, somewhat over 1,880,-
000 people must be kept at work. Hence the basis
for the claim that a picker doing the work of four
men would reduce 1,500,000 people to other in-
dustries for a fourth of each year.”
Indeed, there are millions in it!
Norre.—Of course many other pickers besides the Lowry have been
brought before the public, but the Lowry is clearly the one that now
gives most promise of success. We know an old man who twenty
years ago invented a picker and still has faith that his idea will work
into a success. An incorporated company, the Dixie Cotton Picker Co.,
of Chicago, is also at work upon the problem, and we are indebted to
them for the pictures of their machine appearing herewith, and for the
following description of how it works:
‘*The two large wheels of the machine travel in the furrows between
the rows, the plants being gathered into the front of the machine between
the two points of the gatherers; and, as the bushes strike the apron,
they are gently bent over to the ground so that the picking spindles
enter the same while the plants are held between the skirts running
parallel with the machine. There is continually entering the bushes
during the progress of the machine forward about 60 revolving picking
fingers. It is evident, also, that much cotton will be picked even
though it be lying upon the ground, because these picking fingers with
every vertical thrust downward reach clear to the ground. Each of
these picking fingers, while in the plant, makes 22 revolutions and con-
tinues revolving about their own axes until they have disappeared into
the machine; at which time they cease revolving, and a stripping wheel
52 COTTON
cleans the cotton by traversing the full length of each spindle. This
stripping wheel is better termed a slotted wheel which revolves rapidly
in the opposite direction to that which the spindle or picking fingers are
traveling; and after clearing the cotton from the fingers, it is carried
up to a point where a set of doffer wheels clears the slotted wheel of its
load of cotton, throwing the same into a basket which rides on the rear
of the machine. The machine weighs about 1200 pounds, has a raising
and lowering device upon it which is essential in getting in and out of
the cotton field as well as in turning around.”’
CHAPTER VI.
COTTON: WHAT IT MEANS AND WILL MEAN TO THE
SOUTHERN STATES
Cotton!
To every boy born and bred in the Southern
States it is a magical word from the time he is big
enough to roll in its billowy heaps in the “cotton
house”’ or go out into the June cotton field to find
the first white bloom for his father, or ride to the gin
on the big two-horse wagon-bed which the hands
have packed with the snowy fleece new-gathered
from the autumn fields. White or black, if his
father is not of unusual wealth, he early learns to
labor with his own hands in making the crop; and
the entire process of cultivation is familiar to him.
EVERY SOUTHERN BOY KNOWS COTTON FARMING
Long before he leaves off knee pants he learns
to plow the cool, fresh earth in early spring; helps
haul out the great loads of manure from the barn;
brings in the malodorous loads of fertilizer from the
nearest village; helps “roll” the planting seed in
wet ashes, so that the dry lint may not hold them
together in bunches. For planting time is now at
hand: the dogwoods are blossoming; the first “tur-
tle-dove” has been heard; the fisherman has begun
to tell of satisfactory catches in the nearby streams;
“Uncle Isaac” and “Black Bob” dispute wisely
as to whether this phase of the moon portends warm
6
54 COTTON
or cool weather, wet or dry. For the cotton seed
must be ready to “come up” as soon as all danger
of frost is passed; and now the rows, ridged and
waiting, are opened, and fertilizer and seed dis-
tributed. Then the long green line of two-leaved
plants, bursting the hard seed-covering they have
pushed above ground—and the grass that will not
let them be and that we have always with us. Chop-
ping then—white and black, old and young, every-
body strong enough to handle a hoe. And the
plants flourish under the summer sun; now “hoe-
hands” report that some plants have “seven leaves,”
then that limbs have come, and squares—and finally
the anxiety as to which farmer in the neighborhood
shall report the first bloom, or which one in the
county shall send the first one to the editor of the
county paper. Weeks, then, of budding and bloom-
ing and growing, the thrifty branches bedecked with
white blooms that opened this morning and red
blooms of yesterday, and becoming heavy now
with green and growing bolls. Then on the lowest
stalks the bolls begin to open—and who now will gin
the first bale? The women in the towns begin to
tremble for their negro cooks, and employers of
colored men also begin to scent danger. For the
coronation of King Cotton is at hand; and all the
sons and daughters of Ham must dance attendance.
Cotton-picking has an irresistible attraction for all
negroes, especially when the picking is done in
groups, and though they stay in town even through
the watermelon season, cotton picking is hkely to
lure them back to farms.
“The real depth of feeling,” as some one has said,
“the sheer abandon and the proper stage setting
does not come until September has touched the cot-
ton fields, and the great hearts of the maturing bolls
COTTON 55
burst with joy. That is the supreme moment, and
the beautifully blended voices of the negro cotton
pickers of the South is a sound, once heard, never
to be forgotten. One cannot find any adjective to
express the wild untutored beauty of it. It is a
chant of inexpressible rhythm, with a note of sad-
ness and mingled hope and regret, and one cannot
stop without burdening it with that indefinable
qualification—and calling it weird . . . these
days and nights filled with song and laughter, and
the nimble plying of fingers set to music that is per-
haps a lone relic of a long-forgotten Congo.”
IN DIXIE COTTON IS REALLY KING
All this the Southern man knows from his youth
up; it is his inheritance and a part of his life. For
whatever it may or may not be to the rest of the
world, in “Dixie” cotton is really king. Here
cotton is the life blood of commerce, its condition,
the thermometer of trade. Every man talks cotton;
every man has an opinion as to the size of the crops;
the weather conditions in Texas and throughout
the Cotton Belt are subjects of general interest;
the Government crop report is read with more in-
terest than anything else a newspaper prints.
When cotton prices drop, every Southern man
feels the blow; when cotton prices advance, every
industry throbs with new vigor.
We can see then what it means to the South when
we say that for the last five crops for which the fig-
ures may be given, she has received nearly $1,000,-
000,000 more than for the preceding five crops—
twice as much money as is invested in all our Ameri-
can cotton mills. For the crop of 1904 and 1905
she received $341,000,000 more than for the crop
56 COTTON
of 1899—which sum if equally divided, would give
a surplus of $240 to each of the 1,418,000 farms
growing cotton, of $21 each to every one of the
16,000,000 inhabitants of the Cotton States.
ASTOUNDING SOUTHERN PROSPERITY
Small wonder that Southern railways report
heavier increases in earnings than lines in any other
section of the country.
Small wonder that the assessed valuation of
Southern property is now increasing three times as
rapidly as in the decade 1890-1900.
Small wonder that savings and bank deposits in
the Southern States from 1900 to 1905 increased
more than 100 per cent. while the increase for the
rest of the United States was only 50 per cent.
Small wonder that it is no extraordinary affair
a Sampson County, North Carolina, farmer re-
ported to us when he said last week that a farm he
bought four years ago for $57.50 per acre would
sell now for $100; another farm bought then for
$3,000 was recently sold for $8,000; land values in
his county have increased 33 1-3 per cent. within a
year, a total increase of a million dollars for this
one cotton county. ( We know of two South Caro-
lina cotton farms, one of which in three years has
increased in selling price from $3,000 to $8,000 and
another from $7,000 to $20,000.)
Small wonder that Dr. Walter H. Page declares
in the World’s Work that we “are in sight of the
time when the cotton grower in the old Slave States
will become the most prosperous tiller of the earth.”
It is, in fact, a new South that we have. The
factory, the bank, the church, the school, the news-
paper—all are benefited by the increase in prices
COTTON BOLLS: FIBERS OTHER THAN COTTON.
The bolls are typical (1) Asiatic, (2) Sea Island, (3) American Upland; (B) rep-
common hard fibers other than cotton; (C) soft fibers; flax, hemp, and jute.
Ye ea
‘yueultisdxe s,Aueduioo
ODedIYO B ‘IYI VixIq] OY} JO SMATA OA\4 OIE 4S 94} Ye !payord sey 41 prey @ jo Javed Surmoys ‘YOM 4B JayxoTq AIMO'T 9G} 998 OM 459] OY} FV
‘YdMOId NOLLOO 'IVOINVHOUW FHL
COTTON 57
paid for the South’s great staple crop. The archi-
tect will tell you that he is building better houses
than ever before; the furniture dealer will tell you
that he is shipping more furniture than ever before;
the manufacturer of implements and machinery will
acknowledge that Southern progress astounds him;
the schools report record-breaking openings; the
newspaper subscription gains threaten to overtake
the circulation manager’s estimates; and even the
preacher joins in with the story that for once his
salary is paid promptly and in fuil, and that a ser-
mon on foreign missions is now unprecedentedly
effective.
IT MEANS THE COMING OF THE NEW SOUTH
These things cannot fail to have the most far-
reaching influence upon every phase of Southern
life. Prosperity will bring more education, more
travel, greater contentment, more liberal thought—
in fact as Sidney Lanier said nearly thirty years
ago:
“One has only to remember that whatever crop
we reap in the future—whether it be a crop of
poems, of paintings, of symphonies, of constitu-
tional safeguards, of virtuous behaviors, of religious
exaltations—we have got to bring it out of the
ground with palpable plows and with plain farmer’s
forethought, in order to see that a vital revolution
in the farming economy of the South, if it is actu-
ally oceurring, is necessarily carrying with it all fu-
ture Southern politics and Southern relations and
Southern art, and that therefore such an agricul-
tural change is the one substantial fact upon which
any really New South can be predicted.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE ORGANIZATION OF COTTON GROWERS AND WHAT
IT MAY ACCOMPLISH
“The great secret of success,” said Lord Beacons-
field, “is to be ready when your opportunity comes.”
One might go far and not find a better illustra-
tion of the truth of Disraeli’s assertion than is af-
forded by the career of Hon. Harvie Jordan,
President of the Southern Cotton Association. His
opportunity came in December, 1904, when the
Government ginners’ report, indicating a crop of
12,000,000 bales, startled the country—electrified
the bears, and hopelessly dazed the bulls. Cotton
prices went toppling, dropping two cents a pound
almost immediately.
WHEN HARVIE JORDAN'S OPPORTUNITY CAME
For severalyearsJordan had been fitting himself
for a time like this. At the head of the nominal
Cotton Growers’ Protection Association which he
had organized and which his personality had largely
kept together, his voice had been as that of one cry-
ing in the wilderness; and always, Raven-like, his
song had borne one burden—the need of a farmers’
organization for the purposes of self protection.
When the crash came, and turned everything in
the Southern States topsy-turvy, serene Harvie
(58)
COTTON 59
Jordan sounded the same bugle-note which South-
ern farmers had hitherto refused to heed.
Now they heard him.
A call was issued for a great mass meeting in
New Orleans January 24-29, 1905.
One of the most pathetic pictures in history is that
of the faithful remnant of the old French nobility
crowding around poor King Louis when his star
had almost set, thrilled again by a deep loyalty to
the ancient throne then tottering, and passionately
swearing allegiance once more to their hapless
king, while the touching strains of “Richard, My
Richard, All the World is Leaving Thee!” floated
through the ill-fated Parisian palace.
It was with some such earnest loyalty, but with
confidence the exact opposite of the French despair,
that the followers of King Cotton met in New Or-
leans that January day. What they said and did
it is not our purpose to record here in detail. They
did resolve that the South should reduce her acreage
20 per cent. as compared with the previous year,
and they organized the Southern Cotton Associa-
tion to carry this resolution into effect.
With a manifest overproduction, with cotton
selling at the time for six or seven cents, and with
five-cent prices confidently predicted by the bear
leaders of the New York Cotton Exchange, it took
considerable courage for the New Orleans Cotton
Convention to declare that the remainder of the
1904 crop should be held for ten cents.
Such a resolution, however, was almost unani-
mously adopted. And within six months the ten
cent figure was reached—largely as a result of the
success of the movement for reducing the cotton
acreage.
60 COTTON
HOW ORGANIZATION HELPED ACREAGE REDUCTION
It is easy to say, of course, that cotton prices hav-
ing become unsatisfactory, the cotton acreage would
have been reduced without the aid of the Cotton As-
sociation; but it would certainly not have been re-
duced to such an extent. For if the farmer in the
Carolinas had felt that the farmer in Texas was re-
ducing his acreage on account of low prices, the
Carolina farmer would have thought it a good time
to increase his own crop—and vice versa. For “that
air same Jones” who figures in Sidney Lanier’s
poem is but the type of thousands and thousands of
cotton growers; and we all recall how he read the
arguments for reducing cotton acreage and diversi-
fying crops—
And presently says he: ‘‘ Hit’s true;
That Aisley’s head is level.
Thar’s one thing farmers all must do,
To keep themselves from goin’ tew
Bankruptcy and the devil!
**More corn! more corn! must plant less ground,
And mustn’t eat what’s boughten !
Next year they’ll do it : reasonin’s sound :
(And cotton ’ll fetch bout a dollar a pound,)
Tharfore, I’ll plant all cotton! ”’
With Texas and Carolina alike pledged to a 25
per cent. reduction, however, and with each section
feeling in honor bound not to take treacherous ad-
vantage of its neighbor’s fidelity, the cotton farmers
of the South were moved by a common purpose,
worked together earnestly to a common end—
and succeeded. When we attended the meeting
of the Southern Cotton Association in Asheville in
the fall of 1905, not ten cents, but eleven cents, was
fixed as the price of the crop then maturing.
COTTON 61
DEMORALIZING CHANGES IN PRICES
If it had no other object the organization of the
cotton farmers would find ample justification in
the opportunity it affords for co-operation in keep-
ing the cotton acreage limited to the apparent de-
mands of commerce.
Very large and very small crops are alike demor-
alizing to every cotton interest. These lead to
fluctuations in value which make the manufacturer’s
hair turn gray as he tries to fix a fair price for his
product, and which make the cotton farmer the prey
of speculators and the sport of chance.
Take the difference between seventeen-cent
prices in May, 1904, and seven-cent prices in Janu-
ary, 1905, eight months later, meaning on a 10,-
000,000 bale crop the difference between $350,-
000,000 and $850,000,000.
The remedy for all this lies in a more systematic
plan of marketing—the entire cotton crop must not
be rushed pell-mell upon the market in the ninety
days of the picking and ginning season. Almost
invariably prices the following spring are very
much better than during the fall; and this is natural,
—in fact, inevitable.
BUYERS MAKE FALL PURCHASES ONLY WITH ODDS IN
THEIR FAVOR
If he must buy during the picking season before
the size of the crop becomes known, the spinner
buys on the assumption that the larger estimates of
yield are correct—and he must then allow himself
a full margin of safety, else it were better to keep
his money employed in something else and buy later
with less risk and with less outlay,
62 COTTON
In a word, it would be bad business, an unsound
economic policy, for buyers to take cotton while
the size of the crop is uncertain except upon the
basis of the maximum reasonable estimates—which
must in any given series of years be materially
higher than the correct estimates.
Selling in the fall, therefore, the cotton farmer
must dispose of his crop with the knowledge that
the odds are against him, and that the buyer could
not afford to take a supply of millions of bales in
excess of his immediate needs, if the odds were not
in the buyer’s favor.
MORE REGULAR MARKETING SURE TO COME
Whatever plans may be discussed, the one essen-
tial, fundamental thing in marketing is more regu-
lar distribution of sales; and even if the warehous-
ing system does not become general, cotton growers
are likely to break away very rapidly from the old
plan of selling cotton as fast as harvested. In the
first place, every “lien farmer,” every farmer with
a mortgaged crop, has had to put his cotton on the
market immediately. This class, as has been said,
is now rapidly decreasing. Then, too, other farm-
ers, hard pressed by adversity in the period of low
prices, were unable to hold their product, even if
confident of a rising market later on. With better
prices, therefore, inevitably comes greater freedom
and more gradual marketing.
LEAVING COTTON EXPOSED TO THE WEATHER
If there is anything more foolish than the policy
of rushing the entire crop upon an unwilling mar-
ket in the ninety days of the ginning season, it is
the way we handle the little cotton we decide not to
sell during these ninety days. It has been said—
COTTON 63
and with too much truth—that the average farmer
takes no more care of his baled cotton than if it were
a grindstone. “But,” said Mr. J. T. Dargan, of
Atlanta, at the New Orleans Cotton Convention,
“the farmer is not so big a fool as you think in leav-
ing his cotton out in the open on the farm. It is not
only safe there under his eye, but, if it rains too
much, he can put it under a cheap frame shed in-
stead of taking it to town to pay storage charges
to the warehouseman, unless he can get more bene-
fits than now exist with the average cotton ware-
house. What is more important to the cotton
grower is, he has long since known that a bale of
cotton will lose some ten or fifteen pounds by drying
out if stored in a warehouse in comparison to when
it is left in the open with a few planks under it to
keep it out of the mud. Then, again, bright sunny
weather as a rule prevails in the South until about
Christmas, by which time most of the cotton grow-
er’s cotton has been sold to the spot cotton buyers
intown. Thefarmerdoes not mean to act fraudu-
lently by letting his cotton remain in the open to
absorb moisture, but as some farmers do it, others
are in self-defense compelled to follow suit, and I
don’t blame him for it at all, for he increases there-
by the weight of his cotton and saves storage
charges.”
This assertion of Mr. Dargan’s, however, does
not affect our contention as to the folly of leaving
cotton out in the weather; it only shifts the folly
from the farmer’s shoulders to those of the buyer
who does not take the dampness and damage into
his reckoning when buying the staple.
More and more, however, buyers are now coming
to an appreciation of this fact; and the advantages
64 COTTON
of storing cotton in dry places is recognized by the
payment of higher prices—both on account of the
better fiber and on account of the fact that with the
dry cotton the buyer knows he is purchasing cotton,
while in the latter case, it is a mixture of cotton with
an extra quantity of moisture. A Charlotte paper,
we believe, recently estimated the season’s loss to
its farmers by reason of damaged cotton at $25,000
—and this on a comparatively small market,
NOT A LOW PRICE, BUT A STABLE PRICE, NEEDED BY
THE MANUFACTURER
The organization of cotton farmers, there-
fore, means chiefly a better regulated acreage and a
better regulated system of marketing; and greater
stability in prices is the chief good to be derived
from each of these. To have cotton prices ranging
from five to fifteen cents in a decade, is manifestly
demoralizing to every interest dependent upon the
staple; a uniform price of ten cents, would be
vastly more helpful to all of them. 'To the cotton
manufacturer it matters little whether the prices
are high or low; his profits are perhaps greater when
cotton is fairly high. But what he does need is a
fairly stable price so that he may take an order for
manufactured goods months ahead with some idea
as to what price he must ask in order to have a
fair margin of profit. With the price of raw
material ranging from seven to seventeen cents in
eight months, as we have seen that it actually did
a short time ago, it is of course impossible to make
such an advance calculation with any degree of
accuracy.
GATHERING SAMPLES.
A sampler often gets a hundred dollars’ worth of samples or more
in a season.
5.
An ordinary box-ear will hold about fifty of the compressed and
twenty-five of the other bales.
4
4
SOFT AND COMPRESSED BALI
THE WORLD'S ANNUAL COTTON CONSUMPTION.
1903-04. 1902-03.
Countries.. iS Bales. Bales.
Great Britain ...... aad catcdetee wala sieleluiaie weaniine 088, 3,017,000 | 8,185,000
Continent ..... Merehiaarialeicialeoinie eretre sicieteiereteiere 5,148,000 5,148,000 | .5,148,000
Total, Europe........... aleletatetels seeee| 8,736,000 8,165,000 8,333,000
United States—North......... 2,193,987 | 2,000,954 2,047,801
United States—South.............005 Silaltere 2,116,318 1,907,548 1,967,300
Total, 'Onited Statesss cc .\cccm cscs 4,310,255 8,908,502 4,015,101
1,244,992
516,000
88,534
55,500
Total, India, etc 1,904,926 2,259,152
Other countries, etc. ..........-. aacine bates 32,000 29,424
Total, world 14,010,428 | 14,486,589 | 14,414,908
Average, weekly 298,197 269,431 277,631 277,210
WORLD’S CONSUMPTION OF COTTON.
EUROPE UNITED STATES
CONSUMPTION
500-pound Bales
000s omitted
East Indies
All Others
=
a
vo
s
S
q
°
Oo
BReeIS
TIM DOD
Average 6 years..
1890-91
1891-92...
1892-93...
1893-94...
1894-95. . .
1895-96.
Average 6 years...
COTTON STATISTICS.
(Courtesy of Letham, Alexander & Co. )
COTTON 65
CONSERVATISM IN COTTON ASSOCIATION DEMANDS
On the whole, the cotton farmers’ organization
does not seem inclined to be unreasonable in its
demands. Attending its meetings, we have been
most impressed by themarked conservatism of its
members generally. President Harvie Jordan is
on record as saying:
“Tt will be the part of wisdom for all cotton
producers to discourage speculative interests that
would tend to drive the price of spot cotton above
twelve cents a pound, just as it is imperative that
no farmer should ever again sell a pound of
middling cotton under ten cents per pound. Let
us not encourage inflated prices that will hamper
the mills, curtail consumption of cotton, and en-
courage the growth of this staple in foreign fields.
We hold a complete monopoly of the cotton indus-
try of the world up to twelve cents a pound, and at
that price good profits to the producer can be
realized.”
This quotation may seem to be at a variance
with Mr. Jordan’s advice late in 1905, urging
farmers to hold the remainder of their crop for
fifteen cents, but Mr. Jordan declares that he was
consistent in that the average price for the entire
crop would still have been less than twelve cents,
and this on a short crop.
REDUCING PRODUCTION OR INCREASING DEMAND F
Another way in which the South’s cotton growers
may accomplish much good for themselves through
organization, is by working together to develop our
foreign markets. Civilization demands, as we
have seen, that the world consume 42,000,000 bales
66 COTTON
of cotton. The prices of wool and silk are prohibi-
tive. Only cotton can fill the requirements of
cheapness, and the world is yet only half clothed.
Says Lieut. Richmond Pearson Hobson:
**T have had a great many Chinamen whoworked
under my directions, and whose work I inspected
from day to day, while they were building gun-
boats, and if they were doing that work for you, I
would judge the wages of such hard-working men
to be about forty to fifty cents a day. Now I
investigated this matter thoroughly, and as far
as I could get any information, I found the real
wages of these men to be about five cents a day.
Their families are large, and, of course, they can’t
afford too much for food, clothing or anything else;
and what is the result? The average Chinaman
wears about halfasuit of clothes. They are cotton,
for they don’t wear silk over there. It’s a mistake
to say it is silk, for only the Mandarins can wear
silk. Now there were many of these coolies,
who would come down from the interior, whom
I saw working on these gun-boats, and pretty
soon I would see one come down with a whole suit
on. That wasn’t all. It got a little colder, and I
found that same coolie before long would come
down with two suits of clothes on, the second
pulled over the first. Later, he would come down
with three, four, five, six and seven, the last suit
(the sixth or the seventh) made of cotton, so that
when yousaw him coming downthestreet, helooked
like a walking cotton bale.”’
When China wakes up, therefore, we are likely
to find an enormously increased demand for our
cotton crop in this one country. Properly civi-
lized, China alone, says Lieut. Hobson, with its
430,000,000 people, would consume the present
COTTON 67
cotton crop of the world. Or to put it more
forcefully, we may quote the now famous remark
of Mr. Wu Ting Fang to Senator McLaurin of
South Carolina: “If my people wore cotton like
they do in America, and every Chinaman should
add one inch to his shirt it would consume the
entire cotton crop of the South.”
And China is not the only country where there
are vast opportunities for increasing our cotton
trade. We should decrease our cotton supply,
when it becomes necessary, but a worthier task
is to try to increase the demand, and thereby help
civilize and uplift other nations as well as benefit
ourselves.
CHAPTER VIII.
STOPPING THE LEAKS IN COTTON PROFITS
It is not true, as a distinguished authority has
charged, that our general methods of growing and
handling cotton are “‘as bad as can be;”’ but it is
true that they are susceptible of vast improvement,
and that enormous ee in cotton profits are yet
to be stopped. Perhaps the most serious menace
to cotton farming at this time is the boll weevil,
but as that subject is reserved for a later chapter, 1
shall not discuss it here.
One of the greatest leaks that any industry has
ever known was the utter waste of cottonseed for a
hundred years. Cottonseed used to be regarded
as of so little use, in fact so much in the way, that
cotton gins within the last two generations have
been built over streams in order that the seed
might be easily washed away! In some States
laws have actually been passed requiring ginners,
for the sake of the public health, to remove the
rotting piles of waste seed!
$100,000,000 FROM A PRODUCT ONCE THOUGHT
WORSE THAN WORTHLESS
Now the raw cottonseed are worth nearly $100,
000,000, or about one-fifth the value of the cotton
(63 )
COTTON 69
crop, and so rapidly are we finding new uses for
them—all of which will be considered at greater
length in other chapters in this book—that Mr.
Edward Atkinson was probably not far wrong
when he declared that it would be worth while for
the South to grow great crops of cotton, even if the
plant made no lint at all but seed only. How
varied are the uses of cottonseed—meal, oil, hulls
and linters—has been suggested in the Introduction
to this volume.
The great trouble is that in the new awakening
to the enormous value of cottonseed as a fertilizer,
we have not yet come to a proper appreciation of
their value as a feed also; for, in fact, we may
feed them and still get three-fourths of their fertil-
izing value in the manure from the animals. How
unusually nutritious they are as a food may be
guessed from the fact that for feeding purposes
100 pounds of cottonseed equals in value 116
pounds corn, and 100 pounds cottonseed meal
equals 175 pounds corn. Cottonseed at 25 cents
a bushel or cottonseed meal at $25 a ton is as
cheap as corn at 40 cents a bushel.
_ The folly, therefore, of burying this most val-
uable of cattle feeds—burying it unused to rot in
the soil—must be apparent to all. What should
we think of using wheat bran or corn meal as a
fertilizer for cotton without first having our live
stock extract its feeding value? Yet in the one
State in which the authors live, about $3,000,000
worth of cottonseed meal is used as a fertilizer—
which means that $2,500,000 in feeding values
goes to nothing, and is a dead loss to our agricul-
tural interests.
70 COTTON
FEEDING VALUE OF COTTONSEED NOT YET
APPRECIATED
Moreover, we are learning more and more each
year of the feeding values of cottonseed meal—
learning how to combine it with other feeds and
feed in larger proportions to different classes of
stock. In fact, its use as a human food has been
seriously contemplated, a thoughtful journal re-
cently declaring that “‘if cotton grew in Michigan,
Battle Creek would be marketing a hundred
thousand tons of the cottonseed meal mixed with
wheatflourand putupin pound packages. Itwould
be advertised, and with truth, as the only complete
ration for the human race. A pound of cottonseed
meal contains all the elements necessary for whole-
some, nutritious bread; it contains three times as
much digestible protein as the highest grade of
wheat flour or the best oatmeal; it contains twice
as much oil as oatmeal and ten times as much oil
as wheat flour.”
Whether or not we shall ever have cottonseed
meal breakfast food, the fact remains that in using
it as a fertilizer we are wasting millions in animal
feeding values every year—and this is one great
leak in cotton profits we shall eventually learn to
stop.
WASTEFUL TO BUY NITROGENOUS FERTILIZERS
We are also wasting millions of dollars for the
purchase of nitrogenous fertilizers, when the cow
pea might be made to keep our Southern soils
abundantly supplied with this most costly of all
fertilizing ingredients. Making a rough guess we
should say that the farmers in the Carolinas and
COTTON 71
Georgia spend at least $8,000,000 a year for
commercial nitrogen, when a proper system of
rotation, including leguminous crops, would abun-
dantly supply the soil with this ingredient.
And this is Leak No. 2 which we can stop and
thereby transfer millions to the credit side of
King Cotton’s ledger.
THE BARBAROUS SAW GIN DESTROYS MILLIONS IN
COTTON VALUES
There has been no noteworthy improvement in
the cotton gin since the new-born idea was first
worked out by Eli Whitney; and our baling methods
are also notoriously inefficient. “It is contended,’’
says Mr. Thomas P. Grasty, “that the saw gin
actually wastes or destroys over 6 per cent. of all the
cotton raised in the Southern States—meaning the
destruction each year of nearly $40,000,000 worth
of property belonging to the farmers of the South.”
By its rough handling it is also asserted by the
highest authorities, that the saw gin destroys over
40 per cent. of the initial strength of the cotton
fiber. No wonder one of our American cotton
specialists is on record as declaring cotton to be
“the most barbarously handledcommercial prod-
uct in the world.”’ Besides the waste, the de-
struction of fiber, and the lack of uniformity in
size of bales, gins at present are able to pack
cotton at the average density of only fourteen
pe per cubic foot. Every bale not sold to
ocal mills, therefore, must be sent to some cotton
compress and the size reduced two-thirds before
it can be exported.
A fortune awaits the man who will invent a
compress requiring small horse power, so that the
72 COTTON
bales with one handling at the gin may be com-
pressed tightly enough for export purposes; just
as a fortune awaits the man who will invent a
roller gin for upland cotton or any other econom-
ical plan by which the present wastes and the
barbarous laceration of the fiber may be obviated.
With American inventive talent put to this task,
we may hope before many years to stop this drain
on the wealth of the cotton farmer.
MARKETING AND EXPORTING THE CROP
Another waste in former days was in marketing
the crop, but here there has been in recent years a
marvellous gain in directness and economy. For-
merly the farmer sold to his merchant at the county
seat; the merchant at the county seat sold to the
commission merchant at the State capital; the
commission merchant sold to the dealer at the
seaport; the seaport dealer sold to the New York
exporter; the New York exporter sold to Liverpool,
and Liverpool sold to Manchester. Now all this
is changed—how greatly changed will be seen from
the report of a cotton exporting house which
handles more than 300,000 bales each season.
“The cotton is now bought on the plantations or
at the railway stations throughout the whole
Cotton Belt by the representatives of large exporting
houses and by the mills,”’ said the manager of this
house to us the other day. “Our firm employs
more than 100 buyers for this purpose, and the
cotton is shipped daily to the port where it is
expeditiously sampled, classified, weighed, com-
pressed and loaded upon ships for foreign ports
with almost incredible swiftness. We have had a
train loaded with cotton fifty miles from port at
7 a.m., and at 7 p.m. of the same day it has been
SOUTHERN VIEWS.
Good roads make cotton transportation easy; the second picture indicates the
negro’s easy habits; the third view is that of a typical old-fashioned Southern ‘‘Big-
house.”
MORE SCENES FROM DIXIE.
The patient ox has not been entirely discarded, as the top picture testifies; the
second is a warehouse view.
COTTON 73
stored on board a foreign ship and bills of exchange
drawn and negotiated!”
In view of these facts we may regard this leak in
the export trade as belonging to the past rather
than to the present.
SHIPPING 60% OF OUR COTTON TO EUROPE
Lastly we come to what is perhaps the greatest
leak of all—not to the cotton farmer solely, but to
the Cotton Belt. We are still shipping 60 per cent.
of our cotton to Europe—almost as uneconomic,
as has been said, as it would be to ship our iron ore
instead of turning it into the finished product here.
And in view of the leaks we are to stop and the
great resultant savings that are to enrich the South,
and in view of the prospective remedying of this
last great leak, we cannot better conclude this
chapter than by quoting an extract from an address
by Mr. Richard H. Edmonds, of the Manufac-
turer’s Record, delivered in New York City a few
months ago—not a mere day dream, a flight of
fancy, but a prediction of what actually bids fair to
come to pass within the lifetime of most of those
who read this article:
“It is not to be expected that the South will ever
manufacture its entire cotton production, for, when
it has reached the point where it consumes in its
own mills the 10,500,000 bales which now measure
its average crop, the world will be demanding of
it, and it will meet the world’s demands for,
probably 20,000,000 bales. But the utilization in
its own mills of 10,000,000 bales would mean the
employment of 1,000,000 operatives, the invest-
ment in mills, textilemachinery, building plants and
kindred enterprises, of not less than $2,000,000,000
74 COTTON
and the annual output would be worth $2,000,-
000,000.
‘Then, indeed, would the South, without mon-
opolizing the world’s cotton manufacturing in-
terests, be the dominant factor, the center of the
world’s cotton mill business, producing 20,000,000
bales and consuming at home in its own mills
10,000,000 bales.
“Both will come about in due time. ‘The South
sees before it this prize, rich beyond words to
describe, creating wealth beyond anything which
this section or any other section has known, and
this is the prize—a prize great enough to enrich an
empire—for which it has entered the race. That
it will win admits of no question.”
SECTION II.
THE COTTON PLANT—HOW IT GROWS
AND IS GROWN
(75)
CHAPTER IX.
STRUCTURE AND BOTANICAL RELATIONS
The several species of every plant or animal
known to man have been properly classified and
grouped. It has required untold labor and pains
through years and centuries to make this important
contribution to the total sum of knowledge, but
the result is well worth the effort it has cost.
A discussion of the causes that have entered into
the production of families, species and varieties
would not be in place here, but some of them are so
interesting and so intimately concerned with the
development and improvement of the cotton plant
as to make it necessary to consider them briefly.
The cotton plant is a member of the Malvaceae
or mallow family, and to scientists is known by
the generic name Gossypium. 'The plant is given
to much variation, and a very large number of
varieties are the result. Differences in soil, in
climate, and in environment have been the primary
factors in producing these variations.
INFLUENCE OF HEREDITY
In the perpetuation of any plant or animal the
importance of heredity is recognized by all. It is,
in fact, the keeper of all that has gone before.
Good or evil, helpful or harmful, its influence is to
(77)
78 COTTON
hand down to the future race all the life of the past.
Like surely begets like. Offspring of either plant
or animal inherit the essential characteristics that
were a vital part of the parental stock. These
inherited characteristics, however, are always sub-
ject to change as a result of change in environment.
If any plant or animal were confined to a par-
ticular soil, feeding on the same food, and with un-
varying climatic conditions, then all members of
the tribe or species would grow more and more
similar in type, form, and quality. Only in non-
essentials would differences appear.
The American deer, for example, grown under
the same conditions of habit, food and climate, for
so long a time, has developed the most remarkable
uniformity. Only the most careful observer is
able to note individual peculiarities of form, color,
or outline.
Let the American breeder take this same animal
and place it under a new environment, and a change
will be noticed very early in his breeding operations.
This change of environment gives the law known
as variation an opportunity to show its power and
influence.
The cotton plant has been subjected to this
change in environment. We can neither tell you
when nor how it happened. Mere conjecture
would suggest only a starting point. Still the fact
remains that cotton was early known in India,
Egypt, Corea, China, South America, and the
Lesser Antilles. How the plant got to any of these
countries no one knows, and possibly no one will
ever know. The important fact is this: there are
great differences in soil, climate, and environment
between China and South America, between India
and the South Sea Islands, between Egypt and
COTTON 79
China; and these very differences have given rise
to the many kinds and varieties of cotton we know
to-day.
Besides the factors above considered as influen-
cing the tendency to variation, the cotton plant
responds panee more freely than any other cul-
tivated plant to ameliorated conditions of soil,
climate, and cultivation.
THE COTTON PLANT
To understand its characteristics you must know
the cotton plant itself. Its weed, flower, fiber, seed
and growth are interesting—each and every one.
In growth the stalk assumes a_ herbaceous,
shrubby, or tree-like form. None but these her-
baceous, shrub-like forms are grown to any extent
in this country. You will find the larger and tree-
like varieties grown occasionally, but only as
curiosities, since with them the low mean tem-
perature of the Cotton Belt is unfavorable to the
production of lint of any commercial value.
The cotton plant of the Southern States is a
small annual shrub from two to four feet in height,
always branching extensively. The limbs are
longest at the bottom of the stalk, and short and
light at the top, this top growth in all parts of the
South usually being arrested by frost. ‘The flowers
are white, or pale yellow or cream colored the first
day, become darker and redder the second day, and
fall to the ground on the third or fourth day, leaving
a tiny boll developed in the calyx. This boll
develops and enlarges until maturity when it is
not unlike the size and shape of a hen’s egg.
When matured, the boll cracks and opens the three
to six apartments which hold the seed and the
80 COTTON
fibrous wool known as lint that is now to be gather
ed, ginned, and baled. This lint, when separated
from the seed becomes the cotton of commerce.
COMMERCIAL TYPES
The types of cotton chiefly known in a com-
mercial way are Gossypium Barbadense or Sea
Island Cotton, Gossypium Herbaceum or Upland
Cotton, Gossypvum Hirsutum, also Upland Cot-
ton, Gossypium Arboreum or 'Tree Cotton, and
Gossypium Neglectum or Indian Cotton.
SEA ISLAND Corton (Gossypium Barbadense)
This species is one of the most important grown
and is cultivated most extensively along the coast
of South Carolina, and in Georgia and Florida,
and the off-lying Islands.
The amount of lint produced is less than from
Upland Cotton, but it sells for a higher price on
account of its longer staple and better quality.
“Yarns having the finest counts, as they are
called, are all spun from Sea Island.”’ It has been
shown that a single pound of Sea Island Cotton can
be spun into a thread 160 miles in length. The
acreage devoted to this species is small, consequent-
ly Sea Island Cotton influences the market yield
but little.
UPLAND COTTON (Gossypium Herbaceum)
This is of Asiatic origin, adapted to upland, and
has its botanical name from the character of its
growth.
India is supposed to be the original home of the
herbaceous type, but it has spread extensively until
it is known in China, Arabia, Persia, and Africa.
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HOLDING FOR BETTER PRICES.
Many farmers now refuse to sell in the rush of ginning season, but store and hold
in the hope of getting better prices. Many of the storage warehouses are of enor-
mous capacity.
COTTON 81
The vine cotton of Cuba belongs to this species,
and is peculiar because of its large pods and ex-
cessive numberof seeds. The Long Staple Upland
Cotton grown in America belongs to this species.
UPLAND COTTON (Gossypium Hirsutum)
The hairy nature of every part of the plant gives
this species its name.
It is not greatly different from the Sea Island
group of cotton; in fact it is claimed by some to be
an offspring of the Sea Island. Generally thought
to have originated in Mexico, it has now been car-
ried to all parts of the world. Im a sense it is a
Short Staple Upland Cotton, and to this species
belong nearly all the American types.
TREE COTTON (Gossypium Arboretum)
Its tall-growing and tree-like proportions sug-
gested the name for this India-bred species. In
height it is often as much as twenty feet. The
fiber is short and fine, and clings very tenaciously
to the seeds.
No varieties of this kind are grown on this con-
tinent for commercial purposes, and not even in
India, where it is principally cultivated, is it a very
valuable type of cotton. ‘There it is said to be
perennial, lasting five or six years or more, and is
never used as a field crop.
INDIAN OR BUSH COTTON (Gossypium Neglectum)
This species is also indigenous to India where it
is extensively grown as a field crop. The boll is
82 COTTON
small in size and contains only a small number of
seeds.
It is said that the beautiful Dacca Cotton, from
which the famous muslins are made, is of the
Neglectum type, and so are the varieties from
which the long cloth of Madras is manufactured.
THE COTTON FIBER
The commercial grading of cotton depends al-
most entirely on the ripeness, length, and fineness
of the cotton fiber. The long, fine, silky fibers of
the Sea Island varieties command the highest price,
while the native Indian and Short Upland staple of
America represent the lowest market values.
The following table arranged by Evans shows
the average length and average diameter of the
staple of some of our best known varieties:
LENGTH AND DIAMETER OF PRINCIPAL COTTON
FIBERS
Av. Length Av. Diam.
Variety of Staple of Staple
ol or TN Kol a 6 MORRO ORB See Se 1.61 .000640
New. ‘Orleans. 0 ou: 1.02 .000775
Pex aes 2 A ea a: 1.00 .000763
Uplandinea inion ei. .93 .000763
Hoy pean ee ek 1.41 .000655
Native: Tada) 6c, .89 . 000844
You will see in glancing at the above table that
the longer the staple the less is its diameter, a fact
which must always be kept in mind in any ex-
periments looking to the selection and improve-
ment of the cotton plant.
COTTON 83
When the cotton fiber reaches maturity it as-
sumes a tubelike appearance, somewhat irregular
and flattened.
Three classes of fibers are always found in every
picking—unripe, half-ripe, and ripe. Of course
the time of picking influences the relative percent-
ages of each, though late picking of seed cotton will
not entirely overcome the difficulty, since these
three are differences in maturity of the filaments
on different parts of the same seed.
Unripe cotton is thin and transparent, has little
or no twist, and has little use in manufacture.
This explains why cotton picked too early com-
mands a lower price at the warehouse.
THE COTTON BOLL
The boll is the house of seed and lint. In it are
from three to five apartments or cells (often more
than five in improved types) which hold the com-
mercial product from the earliest formation of the
lint after blooming until it is picked in the fall.
As the seed and lint increase in size and quantity,
the boll likewise enlarges to accommodate its grow-
ing interior. When maturity is reached the
doors of the apartment rooms open, lint and seed
expand, and present the beautiful white, silky
wool that is soon to be gathered and stored.
It is a picture indeed, the full cotton field, white
with its open bolls and ready for the harvest hands.
The plant and the planters have almost ended
their work, and the world now awaits the result
not without interest. ‘The pickers are in the field,
early and late, gathering the white “tree wool’’ as
fast as their hands can pluck it from the bolls.
Here and there all about the picked territory, are
84 COTTON
seen the snowy piles of gathered product, ready for
the owner to weigh and store in some sheltered
place. Cotton picking time has come again, and
spinners and consumers in every quarter of the
earth listen with eagerness for news of the South’s
great annual harvest!
CHAPTER X.
VARIETIES OF COTTON AND THEIR CLASSIFICATION
In a previous chapter we have discussed the
tendency of all plants and animals to vary from
normal characteristics when removed to new fields,
different climates, and changed conditions of
environment. ‘The cotton plant is especially sus-
ceptible to all influences, to such an extent, in fact,
that in our country alone there are now more than
one hundred and fifty varieties listed. Of course
not all of these are true varieties. Often a variety
will have one or more names even in the same
territory. This state of affairs is confusing and
undesirable, but it is not peculiar to the cotton
crop. With corn and wheat, in fact with all the
prominent crops grown in America, we have the
same difficulty, the same multiplicity of names.
This condition usually arises from the fact that
a new character, differing from the normal, is
seen in the plant, leading the grower to think that
he is justified in giving the variety a new name.
With the cotton plant the change may lie in the
direction of increased length and fineness of fiber;
increased yield of lint, or seed, or both; early or
late maturing qualities; a superior character in
boll, or a change in physical growth. Still it
matters not how superior a new character may be,
a local name is not justified until that special
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86 COTTON
feature is fixed as a different characteristic of this
species in the cotton race. When that fact has
been established it is altogether proper for the new
variety to have a new name, just as we should give
a new name to a new kind of apple.
A SIMPLE CLASSIFICATION
The simplest classification of Upland varieties
that we have seen has been made by Professor
Duggar of Alabama. He makes seven distinct
groups as follows:
. Cluster, or Dickson Type.
Semi-Cluster, or Peerless Type.
Rio Grande, or Peterkin Type.
Short Limb, or King Type.
Big Boll, or Duncan Type.
Long Limb Upland, or Petit Gulf Type.
Long Staple Upland, or Allen Type.
Such a grouping as this enables us to place a
given variety as readily as we class horses into
draft, coach, or roadster types. General charac-
teristics in this manner may be readily fixed
without confusion or difficulty.
See eee ane
GROUPS OF COTTON
Following the classification of cotton into these
seven groups we find characteristics more or less
peculiar to each. Of course it is not to be expected
that classification will provide for striking lines of
demarcation for every variety. It does not do this
for horses. The heavy coach horse blends into
the type of the light draft on one hand and into the
roadster on the other. So we should expect some
varieties of one group of cotton to merge into
COTTON 87
another group by imperceptible gradation. But
in a general way the several types may be described
as follows:
I. CLUSTER—DICKSON TYPE
we
No long limbs at base; bolls tend to grow in
clusters; plants tall, slender, and erect; base limbs ©
often*long; and seed usually small; seed covered
with thick fuzz, usually white in color; early
maturing; percentage of lint from 32 to 34.
Important Varieties of Group:
Dickson Jackson
Wellborn Wellborn’s Pet
Jackson’s Limbless
II. SEMI-CLUSTER—PEERLESS TYPE
Base limbs of medium length, and above these
along main stem are very short limbs; stalk erect;
bolls more or less in clusters; seed of medium size,
well covered with fuzz which may be whitish,
greenish or brownish; early to medium maturing;
percentage of lint from 29 to 35.
Important Varieties of Group:
Peerless Hawkins’ Prolific
Boyd Hawkins’ Jumbo
Cummings Herndon
Drake Herndon’s Select
Deering Minor
Norris Tyler
88 COTTON
III. RIO GRANDE—PETERKIN TYPE
Plants well branched and medium in size; bolls
small; seed black, quite small and bare of fuzz
except at tip end; medium maturing; percentage
of lint large, usually 35.
Important Varieties of Group:
Peterkin Texas Wood
Peterkin’s Limb Cluster Wise
Excelsior Texas Oak
IV. SHORT LIMB—KING TYPE
Plants small and well branched at both base and
top; limbs short; bolls small; seed medium in size
and thickly covered with fuzz of brownish (and
sometimes of greenish) shade; quite early maturing;
percentage of lint from 32 to 34.
Important Varieties of Group:
King King’s Improved No. 1
Lowry King’s Improved No. 2
V. BIG BOLL—DUNCAN TYPE
Plants large, heavy and strong; well limbed at
base, but upper limbs short; bolls very large; seeds
large and covered with thick fuzz, whitish in color;
COTTON 89
late maturing generally; percentage of lint from
29 to 34.
Important Varieties of Group:
Duncan Culpepper
Banks Culpepper’s Improved
Christopher Grayson
Truitt Russell
Thrash Lee
Strickland Lee’s Improved No. 1
Strickland’s Improved Lee’s [mproved No. 2
Coppedge Scroggins
VI. LONG LIMB UPLAND—PETIT GULF TYPE
Plants very large; limbs long and straggling;
bolls medium in size and covered with fuzz of
various shades; late maturing; percentage of lint
30 to 32.
Important Varieties of Group:
Petit Gulf Cheise
Gunn Ellis
Ellis’s Big Boll
VII. LONG STAPLE UPLAND—ALLEN TYPE
Plants large and heavy and require good moist
soil; lower limbs very long and open; bolls medium
in size, but long, slender and tapering; seed medium
to large, covered with whitish tint of fuzz; late
maturing; staple long; percentage of lint from 25
to 29.
90 COTTON
Lmportant Varveties of Group:
Allen’s Improved Doughty
Allen’s Hybrid Griffin
Matthews Cobweb
Cook Moon
SELECTING A VARIETY
You must exercise care and judgment in select-
ing a variety of cotton for seed purposes. A
variety which yields well in one place may not do so
well with you where perhaps it may have a differ-
ent soil and climate. A variety may stand at the
very head one year in a comparative test with other
varieties, but fall toward the foot the very next
season. Seasons are not all the same, and they
materially affect the yield of the same variety from
year to year. You must bear this fact in mind and
not jump at conclusions hastily.
It is the largest quantity of seed cotton you are
seeking, and a variety that yields uniformly well
from year to year is a great deal better than a spec-
tacular one that shines meteor-like when the
season is just right.
An honest, average yielder is always safe and re-
liable, and can be improved by selection and care
to suit your soil and climate and environment. In
the end, too, it will become better and better because
it has had time to adapt itself to the home life you
have provided for it. It will reward you for this
attention by obeying every reasonable demand you
make. And these demands you have in mind
should include:
(1) A longer staple; (2) uniformity in length of
VARIETIES OF COTTON.
(A) Peer‘ess group; (B) Peterkin Cotton; (C) Duncan group; The Peterkin is
one of the best known varieties; the Duncan group is very large bolled.
VARIETIES OF COTTON
(A) Dickson type; (B) King type; (C) show; seed and lint of Sea Island Cot-
ton; (D) Allen Long Staple; (E) Petit Gulf.
COTTON 91
fiber; (3) strength of fiber; (4) a greater yield in
lint and seed.
-THE STAPLE SHOULD BE LONG
If you examine the staple in several bolls of any
variety, you will find a certain degree of variation
in length. We all know that the longer the staple
is, the better price we get for it. Hence, every
cotton grower should endeavor to grow a longer
staple. This can be done by going into the field
and carefully examining bolls of the most promising
appearance, selecting for seed purposes such as
have greater length of staple than the average.
This practice should be followed year after year,
whatever the variety you are growing. |
FIBERS SHOULD BE OF UNIFORM LENGTH
Cotton, like wool—indeed like any fiber of com-
mercial importance—is graded according to its
evenness and uniformity of length. And this
practice of grading is not limited to fibers, but goes
out in all directions and includes corn, wheat, and
other field crops.
Consequently seed cotton should be so selected
that the tendency to produce fibers of uniform
length may be bred in the plant.
FIBER SHOULD BE STRONG
Not only length, but strength of fiber also, is a
most desirable quality, and should be considered
in every operation that pertains to the improve-
ment of any variety of cotton. The Sea Island
type is especially noted for the quality of strength,
92 COTTON
and has been selected after years of careful tests
made to develop a variety required for cloth of
durability and strength.
RELATIVE PERCENTAGE OF FIBER SHOULD BE
LARGE
An essential quality for every variety of cotton to
ne is the ability to produce a high quantity of
int in proportion to seed. This quality is funda-
mental, for lint yield is usually the first trait con-
sidered by any grower. In fact, a particular
variety is selected, as a rule, because of the claim
that it is a heavy yielder.
Careful attention, then, at the time of gathering
and selecting seed—making constant effort to
improve by selecting from plants with this tendency
to increase the yield—will prove one of the most
satisfactory ways of adapting the variety to your
environments, and of rendering it reliable as the
breed for your special purposes.
CHAPTER XI.
BREEDING UP THE COTTON PLANT
The average yield of cotton in the United States
is about 190 pounds of lint to the acre. At ten
cents per pound the gross income from a cotton
crop then, is only $19.00 per acre plus the value
of seed. ‘This is certainly none too much when you
consider the cost of necessary fertilizing materials
and the labor involved in all operations from
lanting to marketing. Now to increase the gross
income, but two ways are open to us: either (1)
increase the market price for raw cotton or (2)
increase the number of pounds of lint and seed per
acre.
The latter seems to be most reasonable from an
economic standpoint. Ten cent cotton, under
good labor and crop conditions, is an equitable
a to both producer and consumer. A price
ess than ten cents is unwise because it means
hard living for growers and laborers.
HOW IMPROVEMENT MAY BE BROUGHT ABOUT
The problem before us then is to increase the
production of cotton per acre. How shall this be
done?
The following five reforms will help:
(1) Improve the soil.
(2) Get avariety suitable to your environments.
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94 COTTON
(3) Use improved tools and implements for all
operations.
(4) Manure in such a way as to promote the
physical improvement of the soil.
(5) Use seed that has been improved by
selection, and continue the selection that more
improvement may follow.
Let us discuss the last named suggestion first,
since seed stock is always of primary importance.
None of us can deny the influence of good
breeding. It is only the well selected, carefully
bred trotter or pacer that ever makes a record on
any race track; even in beef for our tables, a scrub
makes a tough, insipid product; and in the dairy,
profit comes only with carefully chosen milk cattle.
Blood tells in men, in animals, in plants. It
tells in cotton—in yield of seed and lint; in length,
in strength, in all other desirable features of the
fiber.
Not to select seed with care and according to
some definite plan, therefore, is wasteful, costly,
unprofitable.
A PROBLEM FOR THE INDIVIDUAL FARMER
The day when any cotton planter can afford to
plant just any variety of any sort of seed has truly
passed. Good farm management in cotton grow-
ing, as in any kind of plant or animal production,
calls for the use of good seed only, seed possessing *
qualities desired by commerce, and the ability
to display these qualities under the individual
grower’s special soil, climate, and conditions.
But to get best results, you will have to investi-
ate for yourself. The Agricultural College and
xperiment Station can determine fundamental
OF COTTON.
(A, B) American Upland, Southern types; (C) Sea Island (Long Staple) Cot-
ton; (D) Asiatic Cotton.
VARIETIES
ECONOMICAL AND EXPENSIVE COTTON MAKING.
The first picture is that of planting with a slow ox—“‘‘free nigger farming”’ it is
called: in the second picture we have cost of cultivation reduced to a minimum by
improved implements.
COTTON 95
facts only. ‘Their application must be worked out
by each individual planter on his own individual
farm.
Nor is this difficult. You must put out of your
mind the idea that seed selection is costly, or that
it involves unusual labor. An axe that is sharp-
ened is an improved axe; a plow that turns a deep
furrow and pulverizes the soil in an efficient
manner is better than one that does not; a hog that
reaches maturity on a given amount of food in
nine months is superior to one of any breed or
class which uses an equal amount of food and
requires ten months for maturity. So a particular
cotton plant which shows a larger number of
desirable characteristics than other stalks underthe
same soil, climate, and other influences is an
improved specimen; and it is simple waste, as has
been said, not to use its powers to the full extent in
furnishing seed for the next year’s crop.
SEVEN POINTS OF IMPROVEMENT
But what are desirable qualities to be sought?
We discussed some of these qualities in a previous
chapter. There are, in all, the following:
(1) Better yield of fiber
(2) Greater length of staple
(3) More uniformity in length
(4) Greater strength in fiber
(5) Ability to resist disease
(6) Increased yield in seed
(7) Greater effort to make the plant at home.
These characteristics are important, all of them.
They must be kept in mind with every effort to
improve the seed.
And next we have only to remember that the
96 COTTON
laws at work in seed production are the same as
those at work in animal breeding:—heredity and
variation.
All horses have some characteristics in common;
in certain respects all cattle are alike; hogs are
never confused with sheep; each species has its own
special characteristics; birds have feathers, bills,
and wings.
Heredity establishes features common to each
class. We class horses into breeds. Some are
heavy-muscled, short-limbed and strong. They
make the draft breeds and appear similar in form,
type, and outline. But some horses are long-
limbed, long and lithe in form and muscle, and
swift in speed. ‘They form the roadster type.
Why do we find these extreme types? ‘The
answer lies in the fact that they have been bred to
do special work and have acquired distinct charac-
teristics that they may do that work more easily.
The change from the normal form or type began
because peculiarities are not absolutely fixed or
made stable by heredity except along essential
lines, and even these are subject to change.
This change in variation is quite noticeable
when you observe minorcharacteristics. All horses
look alike, yet no two horses are exactly the same.
They differ in a hundred ways. So with plants.
So with cotton.
Varieties of cotton are similar in essentials. The
root, the stem, the leaf, the bloom, the boll, the
fiber, the seed, are not to be mistaken. You may
not be able to name the variety, but you know the
plant. In all varieties of cotton these character-
istics are similar, and you are not deceived.
The variation that concerns you most is in the
amount of seed or lint, the length, strength and
COTTON 97
uniformity of staple—qualities which count in the
market place. And as you grow cotton for the
market you must produce what the market de-
mands.
DO ONE THING AT A TIME
You will make a mistake if you attempt the
improvement of your cotton in all directions at one
time. It would be too big a task to undertake,
even though you should devote your whole time
to the work. Work in one direction, therefore:
the one most important to you. When your effort
here has resulted in improvement and becomes
fixed and stable, begin work in another direction,
but on the stock you have so far improved.
Remember it does not require money or much
extra labor to work in one given direction. What
you do expend in this way comes back to you with
rewards a hundred fold. Set yourself to improve
your cotton in one particular quality: always select
plants that will produce most of marketable lint
and seed. This you can readily determine by a
thorough field examination.
HOW TO SELECT SEED
The most productive plants in any given variety
are those that have the largest, best-formed, and
most numerous bolls. The eye will readily detect
these plants. Select one hundred of the choicest
bolls from superior plants for your initial work
the coming season. From this quantity you will
secure from 3,500 to 4,500 seed, which will be
sufficient for planting a seed plot of at least a
quarter of an acre, and this should produce some-
98 COTTON
thing like fifteen bushels of seed at picking time.
This quantity in turn will give selected seed for
fifteen acres the following year.
Continue to select one hundred of the choicest
bolls each year for your seed plot of the succeeding
ear.
i Such a system of seed selection should be
perpetually practised by planters throughout the
South, and should of course improve the seed stock
to a high degree, greatly increasing the productive-
ness and greatly accentuating all the desirable
qualities of the plant.
THE SEED PLOT
Locate your seed plot on a soil offering conditions
similar to those of the rest of your cotton area. To
locate your plot on a sandy soil, for example, if
the main crop is to be grown on a rich, heavy,
clay formation, would be manifest folly.
' Select a type of soil, then, like that on which the
general crop is to be cultivated, but enrich it;
for you will get the best and most vigorous seed
from plants well nurtured and grown under most
favorable conditions. You will make no mistake
in fertilizing well and following with thorough
cultivation throughout the growing season.
STUDY INDIVIDUAL PLANTS
By a study of individual plants you can carry
the selection of your cotton still further. No two
plants are alike in every detail. They vary in a
hundred and one ways. They vary in their
ability to transmit superior qualities to their
progeny. And this is an important consideration.
COTTON 99
The animal breeder calls this quality pre-
potency. It represents the faculty of transmission
of parental qualities to offspring. Some animals
do this to a remarkable degree. Some plants do.
Study your individual cotton plants so that you
may know which plants are pre-potent and which
ones are not. Where this transmitting power is
weak, you will have less desirable breeding stock,
and this you should discard. Preserve seed from
plants only that are able to propagate their in-
dividual qualities and merits; otherwise your prog-
ress will be slow.
Now as to the best way of putting this principle
into effect: suppose you have selected one hun-
dred bolls and these have come from several plants.
You can label the seed at planting time, from every
boll, or at least those from particular plants, and
determine the transmitting power. ‘This makes
more work, but it greatly facilitates the breeding
operations.
SELECTION IS NOT SLOW
Nor is the selection of seed a slow process for
increasing yield of lint and seed. Its practice will
show results even the first year. A good farmer
of our acquaintance last year grew cotton at the
rate of one thousand pounds of seed per acre from
seed of three years’ selection, while the ordinary
seed under the same conditions as to soil, fertilizers
etc., produced only 700 pounds per acre. Similar-
ly, in your field in any growing season there are
doubtless plants which will yield at the rate of five
hundred pounds of seed cotton per acre; others, a
thousand pounds; still others will produce at the
rate of fifteen hundred or 2500 pounds of seed
cotton per acre. LoFc
100 COTTON
Why this difference ?
They are grown on the same soil; moistened by
the same rains; brightened by the same sunshine;
they have enjoyed the same tillage, fertilization and
culture; and yet they differ in many ways.
The solution of the problem is heredity. Like
begets like.
We expect much from civilized races of men;
but less from the untrained, the child-like. In the
vegetable world we can readily apply the same
principle. We will not use for seeding purposes
the small yielders, the little doers.
But this elimination must be done in the field
at picking time. Wecandono mixing. We must
secure seed from the superior plants and keep it
separate from the general lot. It must be ginned
separately, too, else our pains and labor will come
to naught.
By discarding seed from poorly producing
plants, and securing it only from the best, the pro-
cess of improvement will work quickly and surely,
and will reward the planter even more liberally
than he might expect.
This means, furthermore, that we shall abandon
the practice of getting seed for planting at the gin
except from cotton previously gathered from
selected plants and set aside for planting purposes.
SELECT MORE THAN ONE PLANT
The plan of selecting more than one plant for
breeding stock is a good one, since it gives you
better opportunity for the study of the transmitting
power of each individual; and this increased num-
ber of plants for breeding purposes also aids you
greatly in approaching the special type you are
endeavoring to evolve.
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COTTON 101
A plan suggested by Dr. Webber of the U. S.
Department of Agriculture, shows the simplicity
of breeding cotton, and is illustrated in the diagram
below:
1st year (Indundual plant first selected)
General crop
4th veal enter | Eiad a ss
va
General crop ——
Diagram Illustrating Method of Selecting Cotton
PEDIGREED STOCK
The Sea Island planters on the islands off the
coast of South Carolina follow a method of selec-
tion almost exactly like the plan advised by Dr.
Webber.
When first introduced into this country from the
West Indies, Sea Island cotton was a perennial and
quite unsuited to our climatic conditions. A plan
of selection, faithfully executed with the purpose of
using only early-maturing plants, has resulted in
making the Sea Island variety thoroughly at home
in its new environments—so much so that to-day
this variety stands foremost in length and fineness
of staple.
Cotton bred with a definite purpose in the breed-
er’s mind; selected from year to year because of
102 COTTON
merit and worth; adapted to soil, climate, and
methods of fertilization and culture, is “highly
bred”’ cotton in name and in fact, and in every
sense is pedigreed stock.
Such strains are worth many times their cost,
and give ample reward for any additional labor
that needs to be given them.
BREED COTTON TOWARD AN IDEAL
The animal breeder has succeeded in producing
marvelous strains of various classes of farm animals.
He has_ succeeded because he worked toward an
ideal. Some standard of excellence is no less
surely needed that the cotton planter may be
guided in the improvement of his crop.
And in working toward such an ideal, as has al-
ready been suggested, those traits which count for
much in the sale of the commercial product, must
be given first consideration. Those factors are:
An abundance of bolls
A boll of large size
Heavy yield in lint
Fiber of good length
High percentage of lint
Fiber that is fine
Fiber of good strength
Fibers uniform in length.
With these factors and their relative importance
in mind we suggest a score card as follows:
A PROPOSED SCORE CARD FOR COTTON
A. Number of Bolls
15 points
Medium, 10 points
Large, 15 points
Small, 5 points
C. Yield of Lint
D. Length of Fiber
F. Fineness of Lint
G. Strength of Fiber
H. Uniformity in Length
COTTON
A PROPOSED SCORE CARD FOR COTTON
(Continued)
ee 15 points
B. Size of Boll | Medium, 10 points
15 points (Small, 5 points
Heavy, 15 points
15 points { Light, 5 points
2 inches, 15 points
1} inch., 12 points
3 inch., 8 points
i inch., 5 points
15 points
15 points { 25, 5 points
Fine, 10 points
Medium, 7 points
10 points { Coarse, 5 points
Strong, 10 points
Medium, 7 points
10 points ( Weak, 5 points
Good, 5 points
Medium, 3 points
Poor, 1 point
SUN es: points
E. Per cent. of Lint 30, 10 points
5 points
Medium, 10 points
103
CHAPTER XII.
THE KING'S REALM, THE LAND OF SUNSHINE
The great cotton producing section of the
United States lies a little below latitude 37°. This
nearly coincides with a line drawn from Norfolk,
Virginia, to Cairo, Illinois, and marks the northern
limit of profitable cotton culture. (Of course, the
cooler mountain region of this section must be
eliminated.)
Here then is the Cotton Belt of America, and
to this region the world looks for its annual supply
of raw cotton. New areas, favorable to cotton
production, will be developed, as time goes on,
but for all time to come the present cotton-growing
States will likely furnish the greater portion of the
world’s needs.
PECULIAR CLIMATE OF THE COTTON BELT
The Cotton Belt hasasomewhat variable climate.
From its geographical situation it is naturally of
moderate extremes, and favored by the winds that
sweep over its territory. That equable tempera-
ture which characterizes the zone of Gulf Stream
influences has promoted the growth of the various
agricultural and_ horticultural industries. Or-
chards and vineyards thrive in the genial climate;
trucking crops are nowhere better favored; one can
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COTTON 105
grow (and with profit) any agricultural plant in-
digenous to America in almost any State in the
belt. But though other crops are grown, cotton
here is indeed king, and with improved soil con-
ditions and wiser cultural methods will become
recognized as the most powerful plant monarch
in all the world.
For profitable production, cotton requires:—
A relatively high temperature
A long growing season
A moderate and well-distributed rainfall
throughout the growing season
A small amount of rain at maturing time
A great deal of sunshine.
These conditions are found in the Cotton Belt
to a greater degree than anywhere else in the world.
When they are prominent as features of any sea-
son a maximum yield is produced. But let the
growing season be short, the rainfall excessive, the
amount of sunshine small, or the summer cool and
cloudy, and the whole world will know in advance
of the harvest that a small crop has been produced.
RELATIVELY HIGH TEMPERATURE REQUIRED
Broadly speaking the mean temperature is from
15 to 20 degrees higher in North Carolina, Georgia,
Alabama, and Texas than in Massachusetts,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois.
In winter the mean temperature is from 20 to
25 degrees higher in the Southand in summer from
10 to 15 degrees higher. This climatic condition
is especially favorable to cotton culture, since it
means a long season free from frost or low temper-
atures. Cotton enjoys a warm atmosphere, or even
a hot atmosphere provided it is moist and reason-
106 COTTON
ably constant. A sudden change in temperature
bringing on a cold spell is objectionable, for it
tends to check the growth of the plant, ripen its
fruit, and influence its final yield unfavorably.
A LONG GROWING SEASON
At first cotton grows slowly. In a sense it is a
tender plant. A light frost may do little injury;
still it shortens the season and this is an undesirable
risk. An ideal situation with regard to frost is to
have the last spring frost no later than April Ist,
and the earliest autumn one no earlier than Novem-
ber.
The Cotton Belt provides the much desired
long growing season better than any other area of
the earth’s surface when other essentials and con-
trolling influences are taken into account.
RAINFALL PLAYS A PART
More rain also falls in the Cotton Belt than in
the northern section of the country. ‘This excess
varies from 30 to 50 per cent. The total rainfall,
and the time rain falls, have much to do with
successful cotton production.
A moderately well-distributed rainfall is neces-
sary during the growing season. A small amount
is preferable to an excess, since grass is the bane
of the cotton farmer; and grass is favored by much
rainfall. When present it adds greatly to the cost
of culture. The slow growth of cotton while the
plants are young allows grass and weeds to make
rapid headway, and unless costly labor is con-
stantly furnished, the tender cotton plants will be
choked out in the race for growth and sunshine.
COTTON 107
In fact, among planters nowadays, there is a
tendency to delay the planting period because of
this grass menace returning with each planting
season. Where early maturing characteristics are
bred into the plant this practice will prove desir-
able, since it favors grass and weed destruction by
reason of the general cultivation given before the
crop is planted.
The use of harrows and weeders immediately
after planting, and for some weeks later, will
materially assist in the battle which must be con-
stantly waged against grass—against “General
Green,”’ as the Southern phrase has it.
During the early growing period of the plant,
not heavy storms, but rain in frequent showers, —
preferably at night with much sunshine during the
day—is the sort of weather in which cotton
rejoices.
Dry weather during the maturing period, is
especially favorable to cotton production, and
happily for the farmer, this dryness is peculiarly
prevalent throughout the Cotton Belt in late sum-
mer and early fall.
It is probable that the first half of the plant’s
life is the more important half. In the latter half,
drought, excessive rains, insects, shedding of bloom
and bolls, and even other troubles we have con-
stantly. Still if the plant and the crop reaches
July safely and in thrifty growing condition, the
planter is reasonably sure that an average crop
will be gathered.
SUNSHINE OF PRIME IMPORTANCE
Cotton grows only in warm lands where there
is a great deal of sunshine. It is truly a sun plant,
108 COTTON
the darling of Apollo. Wet, cloudy, and rainy
days, except in so far as they are necessary to supply
the comparatively small amount of moisture re-
quired, have no place in its calendar, and are
unfavorable to vigorous, abundant growth and
to the yield of seed and lint.
The blossom itself tells us this. In the morning
of a bright, clear, warm day, it opens to its full
extent to drink in the sun, but as soon as the damp
evening approaches, it closes as if it would keep
cold and dew wholly without. In every way the
plant shows its nature and its longing for warmth
and sunshine. Its green leaves even appear to
turn to the east in the morning, waiting for the
sun to rise, and seem, in a measure, to follow it in
its course until it sets in the west; then they droop—
as if the day’s work were finished—and await the
coming of the sun again.
Climate has much to do with cotton. A native
of tropical lands, it does its best in temperate cli-
mates, and seems unable to venture beyond the
limits of its adopted home. No other staple field
crop in our country is so circumscribed. Other
than grass, corn (our leading crop by acreage and
production) has gone to every part but our western-
most limits: wheat, oats, rye, though all somewhat
choice of soil, yet fear neither heat nor cold; but
cotton, wedded to the Southern sunshine, pines
away and, Rachel-like, will not be comforted, when
taken from its Dixie home, .
CHAPTER XIII.
SOILS AND HOW TO HANDLE THEM
There is no soil typical of the Cotton Belt. Cot-
ton is grown alike on light sandy soils, on loams, on
heavy clay soils, and on strong bottom lands,
though naturally not with equal success on all of
these varieties of soil.
In a general way we may group the cotton lands
into two great divisions—the uplands and the
bottom lands. ‘The former may be sub-divided
into light sandy soils, and red and gray clay soils;
while the latter embrace river-bottoms, basins and
banks of small streams, the prairies and cane-
brakes, and the valleys of the Mississippi and its
branches.
These soils vary greatly in origin, in composition,
in productive power. Like other lands, they are
subject to change; and respond to good treatment
or suffer from inattention and neglect.
In all parts of the South one sees cotton soils
once abounding in fertility, but now so exhausted
that they grow crops hardly worth the cost of
seed, fertilizers and tillage. On the other hand,
other cotton soils which inherited poverty through
generations of thriftless ownership, are now noted
for their high productive power.
Every soil helps its owner in proportion to the
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110 COTTON
owner’s ability to help it. High pedigree, if one
may use this term in this connection, counts for
little, if a poor farmer owns the land. Just as the
canvas reveals the training and the power of the
artist, so the cotton soil testifies as to the intelligence
and skill of the owner.
THE SUPREME TEST OF THE PLANTER
Power to make the soil produce remunerative
crops is the supreme test of cotton farming. With-
out this power, good prices for the staple, an ideal
climate or situation, a propitious season, are of as
little agricultural value as “sounding brass or
tinkling cymbals.”
What then is needed ?
This is needed: Knowledge of the soil and its
management. ‘The cotton farmer must so know
his soil and its proper management that he can
make it yield better crops; that he can permanently
improve it for the generations that are to come after
him; that he can make not two, but five pounds of
lint or seed grow where one grew before. ‘These
happy ends can be achieved only by the most in-
telligent cultivation, and by the application of every
principle of improvement revealed by modern
science.
HELPING NATURE
The soil we know was once rock. Through
countless years this primitive rock has been dis-
integrating and making soil. ‘The great forces of
nature through ages and ages of recurring summer
and winter have been at workon it. And soil build-
ing never stops. Our cotton soils are being made
to-day. But you must help nature in her effort to
make your own soil more productive. You must
COTTON 111
neither check nor discourage her. She wants your
helping hand. If the soil has been robbed of its
humus, you must return this important element;
you must add chemical manures when needed; you
must plow deeply and effectively that a good seed
bed be provided for the tender plants; legumes
must be grown that their strong, deep-growing roots
may add nitrogen and also penetrate and loosen the
sub-soil, and bring to the upper layers the rich
plant food of the fertile mines beneath.
GOOD TILLAGE NEEDED
Our Southern soils possess great possibilities for
improvement. ‘They are not exhausted and dead
as generally supposed. Good tillage will help
many of them as it helps soils devoted to other crops.
The plow will do much to restore virgin fertility.
It will assist nature in making plant food available
for the tiny fibrous roots. ‘The plow will let air and
moisture into the soil that they may do their share
in rendering hitherto locked-up plant food avail-
able for the plant.
Good tillage means more than turning a threeor
four inch furrow, as is the usual practice through
most of the Cotton Belt. It means the gradual
deepening of the root bed until ten or a dozen
inches are turned to the air for purification and
rejuvenation.
CROP ROTATION NEEDED FOR COTTON LANDS
Not only do our cotton lands need more thorough
tillage, but through the greater part of the Cotton
Belt the one-crop system is practiced. From its
very nature it is a ruinous system, leading inevitably
to the deterioration of the land.
112 COTTON
Why is this true?
Because it does the following things:
1. It injures the texture of the soil by making
light soils loose and open, and heavy soils dead and
lifeless.
2. It destroys the humus of the soil; and no
soil can remain fertile if it contains little or no
organic matter.
3. It influences unfavorably the water content
of the soil: light sandy soils with little vegetable
matter are loose and open, and soon lose the
moisture in them; heavy clay soils robbed of their
vegetable matter quickly dry out and bake.
4. It influences unfavorably the amount of
available plant food in the soil. Vegetable matter
itself contains plant food and when used up, with
no additional amount to replace it, the loss is soon
felt. Plant food is lost also by leaching away in
Aes soils or by becoming insoluble in stiff heavy
lands.
5. It draws too constantly on that special ratio
of fertilizing ingredients most needed by the cotton
plant. A crop following after one requiring asome-
what different proportion of nitrogen, potash and
phosphoric acid, does much to restore the proper
balance required for the most profitable cotton
production.
Continuous culture of cotton on any land, then,
is undesirable. Its harmful influence may be over-
come only by a system that involves a change of
crops.
Such a change of crops is suggested by nature
herself. Cut a forest growth and a change of trees
comes on. Pasture lands give way to many weeds
and thistles; bluegrass and Bermuda drive out the
clovers and timothy. Crops do better when fur-
COTTON 118
nished new land and soil new to them. Just as an
animal likes variety in food and a change of pasture,
so the cotton plant wants occasionally, a new and
fresh feeding ground.
A SUGGESTED SCHEME OF CROP ROTATION
In arranging an order of crop rotation that shall
serve best your system of farming, it is well to bear
in mind that plants vary :—
1. As to taste in kinds and quantity of plant
food.
2. Infeeding habits.
3. In the power to add humus to the soil, or
(because of culture) to use it up.
4. In the ability of some, like cowpeas, alfalfa,
and the clovers, to add nitrogen to the soil.
These are only general rules but should be em-
ployed whenever possible because their use will aid
materially in the rapid improvement of cotton lands.
An example of such a rotation is given herewith:
First YEAR | Seconp YEAR|! THIRD YEAR
Summer| Fall \Summer| Winter |\Summer| Winter
Cow- Oats or, Cow- | Rye or
Corn , | Cotton
peas Wheat} peas | Clover
*Planted in corn at last cultivation.
If you examine this three-year-course rotation
you will find that it includes two nitrogen crops
(cowpeas and clover) for soil improvement and hay;
two cultivated crops (corn and cotton) for physical
114 COTTON
improvement of the soil and to kill weeds; two
grain and fiber crops (oats or wheat and cotton) for
money crops; and two stock feeding crops (corn
and clover or rye) for pasture, ensilage or stover.
USE LEGUMES AND COVER CROPS
Good soil management calls for some legumes
to assist in keeping the land fertile and full of
humus. ‘The cowpea accomplishes this purpose
best of all our legumes in the Cotton Belt, because
it grows on every kind of soil, in wet or dry seasons,
and in hot or warm temperatures. Rather than
allow any land to lie idle as a “‘rest”’ year, sow it to
cowpeas so as to furnish both hay for the work
stock and humus and nitrogen for the soil.
A cover crop like clover, oats, or wheat is also a
great help, since it prevents washing of land during
the winter months. We are confident that more
soil fertility is lost by the washing and leaching of
exposed soils during the winter season than the
cotton crop removes from the land during the
whole six months of its growth.
The cotton farmer should include, therefore,
cover crops and legumes in his system of crop
rotation, that these important agents in soil im-
provement, may do the great work they always
stand ready to do for him.
CHAPTER XIV.
BRINGING EXHAUSTED SOILS BACK TO LIFE
We have few cotton soils that are really worn-out.
We merely call them so. We have treated them
badly; so badly that they have become unre-
sponsive to our calls. Some of these were good
once, others were less valuable, but bad treatment,
cruel neglect, and thoughtlessness of their com-
fort, have contributed to making them what they
are to-day.
What shall we do with them?
We can do three things:
(1) Turn them over to weeds and gullies.
(2) Make forests out of them.
(3) Bring them back to productiveness and
beauty.
Of course, we have no desire to give them over to
weeds and gullies. We have already enough of
each. Weeds come as nature’s blessings to those
abandoned fields, but the gully leaves only ruin
and desolation to mark its track.
Perhaps there are many areas where hills and
rocks abound that might be used to better advantage
if turned over to forest growth. ‘Timber lands are
becoming valuable, and with the coming years,
will be still more valuable. Hence, lands difficult
of tillage and cultivation might be better employed
115
116 COTTON
in bringing on new crops of timber for future
generations that are to need them.
Still, the greater part of these so-called worn-out
lands may be reclaimed and brought back to the
fructuous state they were in before the soil-robber
came.
The first step is this: Clean them up and give
them the advantage of good appearance. If
clothes make the man, good looks make the field.
If fields could think, they would doubtless act like
animals and men: to show their value they would
wish to look well. But to be covered with brush
and thickets and gullies and the like is enough to
make them shameful and little-doers.
AMPLE REWARDS IN RECLAIMING WORN-OUT SOIL
Treat these lands liberally and they will brighten
up and respond gloriously. For every cent you
spend on them in the way of better appearance and
clean faces they will return many. Every gullied
wrinkle you remove will bring hope and earning
power to them, and to you; the care and attention
expended in grooming with axe and plow will pro-
duce marvelous changes in appearance, productive
ability, and commercial value.
Possibly you have many acres of this kind of
land. Ifso, reclaim them as youcan. Five acres,
ten or fifty: work in this fashion as far as you are
able. Winter is the time, and there is none better.
You are not busy with details of work: your men,
your tenants, have many, many idle days; your
teams are inactive because winter is on, and no
pressing work is to be done. Make work: emplo
men and teams in these old fields. Cut the thick-
ets, mow the briers and brush; plow the soil deeper
GETTING FERTILIZER FROM THE AIR.
Growing clover or any other leguminous (nitrogen-gathering) crop in rotation
with cotton is the most satisfactory way of keeping up the fertility of cotton lands.
CULTIVATING THE CROP.
The old ridging system of cotton cultivation is going out of fashion. In the
first picture we have the mule and the one-horse plow; in the second the more
modern—and more economical—two-horse cultivator.
COTTON 117
than you have ever done before. Let the one-
horse plow alone. It is useless in these old fields.
A larger, heavier one is needed and two horses or
mules will be required for the work. If you are
able to do this during earlier winter the clay sub-
soil turned up will do no harm. Freezing and
thawing, air and rain, will get things ready for the
crop and no harm will be done.
Have you ever done this work? Have you ever
tried it on your old fields? It may surprise you.
It has surprised us.
THE COWPEA AS AN ALLY IN SOIL RESTORA-
TION
You are now ready for the spring to come. Of
course you will use the cowpea. It will do the
work if any plant in all the world can doit. It will
send its roots down deep into the subsoil below; it
will put nitrogen into the land, humus will be added;
the texture will be improved; the soil will come to
life. You may get only a small growth of cowpeas
the first year. It will depend on how badly the
soil is deteriorated; on how much it is worn out.
You can pasture the cowpeas or make them into
hay, or leave them to mature and die. Suit your-
self in this respect.
And now winter comes on again. Go into
another field. Clean it up in the same way as you
have done the one we have just been consider-
ing. And last year’s section—you must not forget
it. In winter plow it again and put it to peas a
second time and then a third time. That makes
the field. It lives! it is restored to life. Though
weak and tender, still it will go to work bravely and
willingly.
118 COTTON
Let cotton come; the old field is veady, there is
no weariness now; no dragging of feet because
famished by hunger or thirst; no sullen soil in
which the cotton plant must send its unwelcome
roots in search of food; no empty larder from
which it is to turn away disappointed,
FOUR THINGS TO DO
Be reasonable with this soil from this time on. If
you over-work it, evil results are sure to follow.
Treat it properly and it will grow stronger and
better. It will never despair again.
These four things you must do:
(1) Grow a legume of some kind every year or
two
(2) Use cotton only in some rotation
(3) Plow deep and cultivate thoroughly
(4) Keep humus in the soil.
Fertilizers usually can be employed to advantage
in soil restoration. Much plant food is not avail-
able. It is present in the soil, but not in forms that
plants can use. ‘Time, tillage and thoroughness
only will wake this plant food from its sleep and
rest that plants may use it abundantly, and when
they have need for it. Until that time phosphorus
and potassium may be added to the soil to help
the cowpea. Nitrogen is not needed, since the
cowpea attracts the bacteria that build nitrogenous
store-houses on its roots.
This mutual arrangement is especially helpful to
the cowpea, since it is a ravenous nitrogen feeder
and finds an abundance of nitrogen within
reach of mouth and hand. So chemical nitrogen
is not needed as a fertilizer for cowpeas. A mix-
ture of sixteen hundred pounds of acid phosphate,
COTTON 119
and 400 pounds of kainit makes a good combination
of which from 150 to 300 pounds may be used per
acre.
A good growth of cowpeas means the addition
of a great deal of humus and nitrogen to the soil.
It means the employment of the most economical
methods for providing the nitrogenous part of the
cotton fertilizer.
And not only does it furnish the most costly
element of fertilizer; it also furnishes humus
which is the back-bone and the life of the soil,
CHAPTER XV.
COTTON UNIQUE: A SELF-SUPPORTING CROP
Cotton, like other plants, gets its food for life
and growth from the soil, the water, and the air.
Strange as it may seem on first blush, it is from air
and from water that all plants are chiefly derived.
From the air carbon enters the leaves and there
forms the so-called carbonaceous matter of the
plant. Cotton lint is pure cellulose, a material
made from the carbonic acid of the air. From the.
air, too, comes a large part of the oxygen which,
next to carbon, is the predominant constituent of
the dry matter in the cotton plant, as well as in
other plants. Other elements found in cotton are
hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, calcium, sodium,
magnesium, chlorine, iron, aluminum, potassium,
phosphorus, and silicon.
WHAT IS A FERTILE SOIL?
. A fertile cotton soil must contain all the elements
of plant food in sufficient quantities and in available
form to produce productive crops. As a rule, the
soil elements are present in sufficient quantities to
produce paying crops. Nitrogen, phosphorus and
potassium, however, may be deficient, and if so,
must be added through other means, or the crop
will manifest its loss by making small growth and
(120
COTTON 121
diminutive returns in seed and lint. By a de-
ficiency is meant, in this case, an insufficient
amount of plant food available for the use of the
lants.
Really, as we have already seen, there is no such
thing as worn-out cotton soils. There are poor
cotton soils, unproductive cotton soils, infertile cot-
ton soils, but they are so because of improper man-
agement; because the humus has been destroyed;
shallow plowing has been followed; plant food has
been lost or locked up.
Tillage and humus—and these alone—unlock
the door to this treasure-house of old Mother
Earth. ‘The addition of nitrogen, phosphorus and
potassium in chemical forms 1s only a temporary
arrangement to make better crops for the time
being. No permanent improvement of the soil will
result unless tillage and an abundant amount of
humus become the basis of such improvement.
Chemical fertilizers are to be used, therefore, as
supplementary helps, rather than as primary con-
ditions.
We are now ready to consider the feeding de-
mands of the cotton plant in reference to the forms
of plant food usually purchased—nitrogen, phos-
phorus, and potassium.
But first, let us divide the cotton plant into its
parts that we may clearly know the relative quan-
tities of each.
PARTS OF AN AVERAGE COTTON PLANT
Part Per cent.
PERSIE ESS) oe ah ican Ora iancl svc ge Re a 8.80
Be ay Sake yh se ML LL a 10.56
1ST EA CGS Ae aK TERI Gh 14.21
122 COTTON
PARTS OF AN AVERAGE COTTON PLANT
(Continued)
Part Per cent.
SVCEU. oe iss 6 Lice ae eee en 23 .03
Stems. 0.750). ek ee ae 23.15
Totals oon Fo Re ea ae 100.00
Elsewhere it has been stated that 190 pounds of
cotton lint is the average annual yield per acre. If
we use thefollowing table of percentages, therefore,
we find that an average crop of cotton contains:
190 pounds lint;
157 pounds roots;
256 pounds bolls;
364 pounds leaves;
414 pounds seed;
416 pounds stems.
QUANTITIES OF PLANT FOOD REQUIRED
In ascertaining the demands of the cotton plant
in respect to nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium,
wecan gotothe plantitselffortheinformation. Pro-
fessor McBryde has analyzed a great many cotton
plants, and from his work the amount of plant food
used by each part is readily calculated. In this dis-
cussion, the reader must observe that only nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium are considered, since
they are the only elements purchased in commer-
cial forms, the others being usually available in suf-
ficient quantities in the soil. These facts are shown
in the following table;
Phos
San ee oe
THE RESCUE OF OLD LANDS.
Gradually deepening the seed bed—the pasture ground of the roots—is one of the
most effective ways of getting more wealth from cotton.
*spood 009400 OFUT WAAC peeIY} 943 pus ‘puvy Aq peyeed ‘uNds ‘papsvo [[1}s sI—o]wos []PUUS B UO—U04409 SUOTJDaS Moy B JOT UT
‘N€(LLOSYON LEA LON SGOHLAN GANOTHSVA-dTO
, COTTON 123
PARTS AND DEMANDS FOR YIELD OF AVERAGE
ACRE
Quantity and part | Nitro. Phos. Potas.
ONS SUPT Tr ea ee eee 65 19 87
POG POUTCS GE SEEMS 4). 2.062050 6 bo eee 6.08 2.45 5.87
Maopounds: Of TOO. 5... e... .. i.e 1.44 81 2.01
364 pounds of leaves............... 11.70 4.33 6.57
Baa IOUS OF, DONUTS. os oh4)e ae ee eve 6.51 2.47 4.64
MAA pOUNGS, Of SECU). 26.5 se es less 12.96 5.26 4.84
Rotal reesei 39.3 15.51 24.80
Here we find the average cotton crop of 190 pounds
of lint draws from the soil 40 pounds of nitrogen,
16 pounds of phosphorus, and 25 pounds of potas-
sium. But stems, roots, leaves, and bolls are re-
turned to the soil, and are therefore not really taken
from the land at all. Lint and seed are taken
away, and are removed from the land. Now what
draftismadeonthesoil? Letussee,and atthe same
time compare with corn and wheat on the basis of
the average yield of each crop per acre.
We have the following facts:
Crop | Nitro. | Phos. | Potas. Totals
Cotton
Pee lise; 2 ibs 34 Fook |S 65 ag 87
aA ESRI yn cocks ei cere 12.92 5.26 4.84
Totals...5. 13.57 5.45 5.71 24.73
Corn
29.4 bus. grain........ 32.14 12.36 7.06
4000 Ibs. stover........ 41.60 11.60 56.00
Total: ...’: 73.74 23.96 63.06 160.71
Wheat
13.95 bus. grain....... 19.75 7.44 5.1
2300 Ibs. straw........ 13.57 2.76 11.73
Totals 33.32 10.20 16.83 60.35
124 COTTON
COTTON A FAR LESS EXHAUSTIVE CROP
THAN CORN OR WHEAT
This table shows several interesting things. The
most striking fact brought to our attention is this:
Of the three great staple crops of America, cotton
is by far the least exhaustive.
Wheat requires more than twice and corn nearly
seven times as much plant food as does cotton.
Nor is this all. We will suppose that cotton seed,
corn stover and wheat straw are used on thefarm, and
in the end find their way back to the soil. The plant
food they contain will be returned to the land from
whence it was taken. We will now find a still
greater difference in reference to the demands on
the soil made by each crop, as is shown in the table
below:
Crop Nitro. Phos. Potas. Total
190 lbs. lint .... .65 .19 of Liat
29.4 bus. corn.. | 32.14 |12.36 | 7.06 (51.56
13.95 bus. wheat} 19.75 | 7.44 | 5.10 |32.29
In respect then to the amounts of nitrogen, phos-
phorus and potassium required for average acre
yields of cotton, wheat and corn in the United
States, wheat calls for 19 times as much of these
elements as cotton, and corn calls for 30 times as
much as cotton.
RETURNING COTTONSEED TO THE SOIL ESSEN-
TIAL TO ITS PRESERVATION
The greatest demand on the soil by the cotton
plant is for seed production. For the average
COTTON 125
yield 13 pounds of nitrogen, 5 pounds of phosphorus
and 6 pounds of potassium are used.
If seed are sold, cotton is an exhaustive crop,
but still only moderately so. When a rational
system of farming is followed so that seed (orits equiv-
alent in meal) may be used by live stock on the
farm, and returned in manure to the land, cotton
becomes the least exhaustive of all field crops.
The demands on the soil are slight, indeed, when
lint is the only product that goes from the farm.
Wise is the farmer who realizes this, and blessed is
he whose farming methods recognize this practice.
@HAPTER XVI.
BUYING FERTILITY FOR THE SOIL
Thesmall yield of cotton peracre over the greater
part of the Cotton Belt is due to poor management
in maintaining fertility, small quantities of home-
made manures, sale of cotton seed from the farm, poor
tillage, the limited growing of leguminous crops, an
ill-planned tenantsystem, and the lack of systematic
crop rotation in the management of cotton farms.
All these factors have contributed to the small re-
turns in yield and to the constantly increasing de-
mands for commercial fertilizers.
Where attention is given toall these details cotton
growing becomes at once the most profitable of all
kinds of farming in the whole world.
The small farm, as well as the large plantation,
is ever confronted with new phases of management;
the owner is successful in proportion to his ability
to meet these new phases and so adjust them to his
work that they will conduce to his profit and
advantage.
The use of commercial fertilizers has assumed
gigantic proportions in cotton production and calls
for constant discussion.
We have mentioned elsewhere that of the four-
teen chemical elements demanded by the cotton
plant, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are the
only ones likely to be deficient in old soils, and,
(126) t
SEEO CoTTON = LINT COTTON
Pelassivm
Phosphorous)
lassi
Mirogen
Fiospherounsy
felas si
Nifrogent
Folassiwim
Scea/e O=-/4
(Courtesy of Gray’s Studio.)
The diagram at the top shows the relative quantities of nitrogen, potash and
phosphoric acid required for the production of an average yield (per acre) of corn,
wheat, seed cotton and lint cotton—strikingly illustrating the light draft on soil
fertility when cotton seed or their equivalent are returned to the soil. The middle
picture shows crimson clover; at the bottom we see cotton cultivation in its final
stage.
SaaS a SS
ACTUAL F105'c Actin, fae,
1
ACTUAL NITROGEN.
ACTUAL FoTASH
FILLING Not Hart food
TWO WAYS OF FERTILIZING.
the diagram shows its relative
A common fertilizer formula is the ‘‘8-2-2”;
quantities of actual nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash. The second way shows
the cheapest and easiest way of getting nitrogen and humus into the land.
COTTON 127
hence, must be furnished if satisfactory yields are
to be obtained.
How to furnish these elements—in what forms;
at what time; and in what quantity—are problems,
which, like the poor, we have always with us.
That fertilizers pay is attested every year on
nearly every farm and with most emphatic proofs.
That they are often, if not usually, employed
without the attention due their importance is also
certainly true.
The judicious use of fertilizers demands that
every farmer make not only a study of sources and
relative values, but also a study of his own soil and
crop conditions. Fertilizers show their greatest
profit where the farmer practices thorough prep-
paration of land and careful tillage. Here it is, too,
that they can be used in greatest quantities with
most economical results.
NITROGEN
Nitrogen is the most costly element of plant food
that we buy, and for this reason its production by
means of home-made manures and legumes should
be carefully considered.
Four-fifths of the atmosphere is made of nitro-
gen, but unfortunately this atmospheric nitrogen is
in a form not available for plant use. ‘There is a
compensating influence, however, in the fact that
nitrifying bacteria seek out the leguminous crops,
and on their roots store up nitrogen in small
tubercles, ready for use by the growing plant.
SOURCES OF NITROGEN
In commercial forms and factory-mixed ferti-
128 COTTON
lizers, we find several materials for supplying
nitrogen:
Nitrate of Soda or Chili Salt-peter is a white
solid which is mined in the rainless districts of
South America, especially in Chili and Peru.
When prepared for commercial use it contains
from 154 to 16 per cent of nitrogen or 320 pounds
to the ton.
Nitrate of soda dissolves easily in water, and
rapidly distributes itself through the soil where
plant roots can make use of it. The plants take
their nitrogen from the soil in the form of nitrate,
regardless of the source of supply, hence this
material is the most immediately available form .
of plant food found in commercial substances.
When used in large quantities there is danger of
loss because of the ease with which the material
becomes soluble.
Sulphate of Ammonia:—This substance con-
tains about 20 per cent of nitrogen or 400 pounds
to the ton. While quite available it must be
changed first into nitrate form before being used by
plants.
Dried Blood: —Contains from 8 to 12 per cent of
nitrogen and 7 to 14 per cent of phosphoric acid,
and is the richest substance coming from animal
products.
Tankage:—A by-product of the slaughterin
house, contains from 4 to 8 per cent of nitrogen an
‘7 to 14 per cent of phosphoric acid. It slowly de-
composes in the soil, but is a valuable material
for cotton fertilizers.
Dried Fish Scrap:—This substance is a by-
product of the fish oil and canning factories. It
contains both nitrogen and phosphorus, there
COTTON 129
being from 6 to 8 per cent of the former and 7 to 9
per cent of the latter.
Cotton Seed Meal:—Contains 7 per cent of
nitrogen, or 140 pounds to the ton, and is the most
important of the vegetable products used in
commercial fertilizers. It decays very rapidly but
lasts for a considerable length of time. It is much
less quickly available than nitrate of soda or
sulphate of ammonia, and more promptly available
than tankage.
PHOSPHORUS
Experiments tend to show that phosphorus is the
chief element demanded by most cotton soils. As
is true of nitrogen, so phosphorus is necessary to
the full and complete development of all parts of
the plant, but its usual use is in fruit and seed
production. Being a mineral substance, a de-
ficient supply in the soil can be reinforced only
through artificial means.
SOURCES OF PHOSPHORUS
Phosphatic Rock:—These are mined in North
and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and
Florida. They must be ground finely before being
used, and even then are slow to decay. Best
results are obtained by treating the ground rock
with sulphuric acid to make the phosphoric acid
available.
These materials make up the bulk of the phos-
phorus supply in cotton fertilizers. They contain
ae 12 to 16 per cent of available phosphoric
acid.
Bone Fertilizers:—Bone was early used as a
fertilizer and is still popular today. “Ground
130 COTTON
bone,” “fine ground bone,” “‘bone dust,” “‘bone
meal,’’ “‘dissolved bone,”’ are terms to indicate
the mechanical treatment and physical condition
of the fertilizer. Ground bone contains from 2 to 4
per cent of nitrogen, and 20 to 35. per cent of
phosphorus; steamed bone from 1 to 2 per cent of
nitrogen and 25 to 30 per cent of phosphorus; and
dissolved bone 2 to 3 per cent of nitrogen and 12 to
14 per cent of available phosphorus.
POTASSIUM
Potassium, the last of the elements likely to be
deficient in the land, seems to be less urgently
in demand by the soils of the Cotton Belt than
are nitrogen and phosphorus. Its best use is in
connection with phosphorus.
The principal commercial materials that furnish
this element are obtained from potash mines at
Strassfurt, Germany. Potassium either in kainit
or muriate of potash is rapidly soluble in water and
equally available to the cotton plant.
Kainit:—This substance is the one most com-
monly used as a potassium carrier for cotton. It
contains 124 per cent of potassium or 250 pounds
to the ton.
Murviate of Potash:—This is a purified substance
of the potash mines, and is one of the richest
materials supplying potassium. It contains fifty
per cent of potassium or 1000 pounds to the ton.
BUYING COMMERCIAL FERTILIZERS
Commercial fertilizers make up the bulk of our
purchased cotton manures. They are sold under
hundreds of names, but are valuable only in pro-
portion to the amount of plant food they contain.
Of course, one should always be guided in
COTTON 131
buying factory mixed goods by the guaranteed
analysis and not by any particular name or brand.
Nitrogen is usually about three times as costly
as phosphorus and potassium. The prices of
these elements vary from year to year, but in a
general way one can place the commercial value of
nitrogen at fifteen cents per pound and _ phos-
phorus and potassium at five cents per pound.
In computing relative values of different fertilizers
you should bear in mind that 1 per cent means
one pound in a hundred, or twenty pounds in a ton.
It is also a good plan to base your estimate on the
lowest percentage figure, since these more truly
represent the true value; the higher ones are
usually put there to deceive the purchaser.
To show the manner of estimating fertilizers, I
will use two brands commonly sold on the market:
No. 1. Guaranteed Analysis.
Nitrogen 1.60 to 2 per cent.
Phosphoric acid 7 to 8 per cent.
Potash, 2 to 2.75 per cent.
Cost, $30.00 per ton.
When these percentages are multiplied by 20 we
obtain the number of pounds in a ton, and when
further multiplied by the value per pound, we
obtain the value on the basis of a ton.
This is shown below:
Nitrogen 1.60 by 20= 32 lbs. @15c. = $4.80
Phosphorus 7 by 20=140 lbs. @ 5c. = 7.00
Potassium 2 by 20= 40 lbs. @ 5c. = 2.00
Commercial value per ton.......... $13.80
132 COTTON
No. 2. Guaranteed Analysis.
Nitrogen 2 to 2.75 per cent.
Phosphoric Acid 9 to 11 per cent.
Potash 2 to 3 per cent.
Cost per ton, $28.00.
Let us calculate its value as in the case of No. 1:
Nitrogen 2 by 20 = 40 lbs. @ l5c. = $6.00
Phosphorus 9 by 20 =180 lbs.@ 5c. = 9.00
Potassium 2 by 20 = 40 lbs.@ 5c. = 2.00
Commercial Value per ton..........$17.00
In purchasing commercial fertilizers your aim
should be to obtain the largest amount of plant
food at least cost. In the first fertilizer $13.80
worth of plant food would cost you $30.00 while
in the second $17.00 worth would cost you but
$28.00. The difference between commercial value
and selling price is due to the cost of manufacture,
profits, agent’s commissions, etc. With the first
this difference is $16.20 while with the second it is
but $12.00,—a clear saving of $4.20 per ton, and
No. 2 superior to the other in every way, since you
secure 8 pounds more of nitrogen and 40 more of
phosphorus.
You will often find printed on fertilizer bags
analyses as follows:
Ammonia 2 to 34 per cent.
Available phosphoric acid 8 to 10 per cent.
Total phosphoric acid 11 to 14 per cent.
Actual potash 10 per cent.
Sulphate of potash 18 to 20 per cent.
This reduced to its true meaning should read as
follows:
Nitrogen 1.65
Phosphorus 8
Potassium 10.
COTTON 133
In most States, however, it is now unlawful—
and properly so—for the fertilizer manufacturer
to use the “sliding scale”’ in his printed analysis;
only guaranteed minimum figures are allowed.
Ammonia is used in fertilizers because it sounds
as if a little more nitrogen was used, but values are
estimated on basis of nitrogen content. Remember
it is nitrogen you are after. Ammonia can be
reduced to terms of nitrogen by multiplying by
.824. In other words, one pound of ammonia
equals .824 pound nitrogen.
CHAPTER XVII.
FARM-MADE MANURES: SAVING FERTILITY FOR THE
SOIL
There is an old saying that runs,
“No grass, no cattle,
No cattle, no manure,
No manure, no grass,”
which contains so much good sense in a few words
that it should become a memory gem in every rural
school in the land. And it is especially applicable
to cotton growing, for cotton lands need manure
even to a greater extent than grass does. Next to
tillage and good seed, farm-made manures are the
crying needs of the Cotton Belt. ‘These manures
will do these things for the soil:
(1) Add plant food
(2) Unlock stored-up quantities of plant food
(3) Increase the humus content
(4) Improve the mechanical condition of the
and.
The importance of these factors in promoting the
crop-producing efficiency of soils has been shown
in previous chapters, and will be considered here
only as they pertain to the production and use of
farm-made manures, for we are concerned now
with the use of additional plant food in potential
and active forms.
(134)
SOILS AND THEIR IMPROVEMENT.
A gutlied old field at the bottom; at the top a field which has kept its virgin
tertility through proper rotation and the growth of legumes.
*‘qova Ul pourezu0o
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: SLID OD20904
pope fo yore
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uly = ag/00/ Ye?
P22°fs Pee
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wpoes 7? yoy”
COTTON 135
THE FARM A FACTORY FOR FARM-MADE MANURES
Naturally every farm produces some manure.
But as the factory-farm is ordinarily run, only a
small quantity is annually produced. Too little
is made to meet the wants of the cotton farm.
Something is wrong with the factory management,
else more manure would be made.
Live-stock increases the efficiency of the factory.
We will go further and say that live-stock com-
bined with any system of farming will lead not only
to permanent improvement of the land but to the
highest efficiency in the management of the whole
plant as well. This suggests much. It means
diversification; it calls for a rotation of crops; it
increases the animal stock on the farm; it demands
greater skill in management; it means business
farming. And with it all, it means manure.
What becomes of cotton seed now? You bury
them in the soil for fertilizer, or you sell them; but
how few cotton farmers feed them, and thereby get
two profits—one from feeding and one from fer-
tilizing! And by neglecting to save one of these
profits the Southern farmer annually wastes enough
for a King’s ransom.
Plant food is always disorganized material.
Decay must come before plants can feed. Animals
on the other hand, can use only organized material.
Hence, is it not better to feed cotton seed or their
equivalent in meal, and get the feeding value out
of them? After this they may be returned to the
soil in the form of manures. By this practice
nothing is lost and much is gained. We like to
buy fertilizers-in the form of feeding stuffs, pass
them to the cattle, and from them back to the soil.
136 COTTON
They provide a double value for us, and it is only
business to take it.
The cotton farm should be open to live-stock,
then, and the seed or meal produced on the farm
should be consumed there by animals raised on the
farm. At present the Cotton Belt sends cotton
seed meal to all parts of the world, which is just
another way of saying it ships away plant food or
Cotton Belt soil to all parts of the world. Such a
practice leads to soil depletion. It may be followed
for a great many years without bringing its full
penalty on the heads of those who practice it, but
in the end it means death and destruction to the
land.
YOU CAN MAKE FARM MANURES
You are making some home-made manures, but
are you doing your best in this’ respect?
What are your teams doing during the winter
months? ‘lobe sure, most of them are idle. But
they need no rest. Keep them going the whole
winter long, some here, some there, gathering vege-
table matter wherever it is to be found. Haul this
in and pile it deep under horse and cow, and keep
up the work. It is the medicine the cotton soil
needs. No tonic will produce a change so quickly;
no prescription will so rapidly vitalize and build up
the soil system,
THE COMPOST PILE
You can make a compost pile, if you like.
Thousands of farmers believe in it. ‘Thousands
do not. It is one of the knotty questions on the
farm. Perhaps there are two sides to the question;
COTTON 137
at least we are willing to admit that there are.
Still we prefer a direct application to the field.
When you consider the labor necessary for extra
hauling and mixing, it is considerable after all.
How much better it is to use that labor in the woods,
getting and hauling other quantities of leaves and
pine straw for the various pens, stalls and yards at
the barn.
We prefer to haul manure direct to the field and
have it mixed in the soil, so its decay can take
lace there, because as a result of chemical action
it will rot the soil as it rots itself.
SAVE THE MANURE
The American farmer has not yet become skilled
in saving manure. He is rather wasteful in most
things and especially so with farm manure.
Liquid from the stable and yards runs away, be-
cause of too little bedding material, is leached
away in the rain, and is lost never to be recovered.
Again, stables are cleaned, manure is dumped out
of window or door, exposed to sun and rain, and
gradually burned up or washed into the stream.
Do you believe this? Your own observation
will be proof enough.
The remedy lies in but one direction: Save home-
made manures and make more the following year.
If you have no covered barnyard or other covered
place to keep it, haul direct to the fields.
This offers many advantages:
It enables you to keep the stables clean.
You can do the hauling in the winter when men
and teams have little else to do.
The soil itself is benefited by the decay of
manures and is inclined to make active its in-
soluble plant food.
138 COTTON
Where this method is practiced, itcombines easily
with winter or cover crops like clover or rye, and as
plant food is released it is stored in stem, root, and
leaf of the growing plant, thus leaving a wealth of
plant food and humus in the soil for other crops
that come later.
GREEN MANURES
A green crop plowed under offers another quick
way of improving the productive power of the soil.
For this work you can use clover, rye, or cow-
peas. Clover and cowpeas are preferred, since
they add humus abundantly, and at the same time
gather atmospheric nitrogen and store it in the soil.
CHAPTER XVIII.
HOME-MIXING OF COTTON FERTILIZERS: SAVING THE
MANUFACTURER'S PROFIT
Home-mixing of fertilizers deserves much more
attention than it receives. ‘The fact that standard
brands may cost from five to fifteen dollars a ton
more than the commercial value of the several in-
gredients of plant food; the fact that fertilizing
materials are standard articles of trade and may be
purchased as such; and the fact thatthe many manu-
factured brands are only composed of materials
such as the farmer may purchase himself, allsuggest
the wisdom of farm-mixing rather than factory-
mixing.
The claim has been constantly advanced, but
principally by agents of factory-mixed goods, that
home-mixing is not advisable and that the work
here cannot be done properly. This claim is
altogether untrue, so far as the principle of home-
mixing goes. ‘That some fertilizing materials have
been mixed hastily and poorly on some farms,
we have no doubt: but so has plowing on some
farms been poorly done; so have seeds been im-
properly selected; and so has culture of the grow-
ing crop often been neglected, or the wrong prin-
ciples followed. But shall we abandon tillage and
seed selection because someone else is thoughtless
or because he fails? Rather, if the principle is cor-
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140 COTTON
rect, if the practice has proved reasonably success-
fulandif it is amoney-saving method for the farmer,
it should not only be considered carefully, but put
into operation as quickly as means may be found.
The first step in home-mixing is the selection of the
materials to be used. ‘Then these must be brought
together, mixed and bagged. Now you can do
this work, receive big wages foryour labor, and save
money besides. Often many farmers join to-
gether and make their purchases. A better rate
is usually obtained, as the cost for freight is less
for a large lot shipped at one time than if several
lots are separately billed.
WHEN AND HOW TO MIX
The winter season is usually the best time for
mixing fertilizers, since it enables you to get your
materials together and do the work when labor is
available and before you get into the rush and hurry
of the plowing and planting season.
This time is suggested, not because of the great
amount of labor involved, or time required, but
because it may then be done well without haste or
carelessness.
To the fertilizing phase of cotton growing you
should indeed give the same consideration, in
reference to all details, as you give to seed, or
labor, or soil preparation. Hence you should take
it up, study it carefully, and be ready when the
time for action comes.
An excellent place to do this fertilizer mixing
is a tight barn floor. ‘There are times in winter
when this can be given over a few days to this work
without greatly interfering with feeding or any of
the other uses of the barn. You will, however,
COTTON 141
find the wagon box as suitable, and many people
prefer it.
In mixing, spread the materials over the floor
to the depth of five toten inches, putting the bulk-
iest fertilizer first; on top of this, spread layers of
the remaining materials; and then mix thoroughly,
shoveling over several times. When a great many
tons are to be mixed this operation will need to be
repeated often and the material bagged as mixed.
In case you find any unmixed material has become
hard and lumpy in the sacks, first put it in a sepa-
rate pile and break up finely with a maul or shovel.
This done, it is ready for the mixing pile to be
handled as described above. |
WHAT KINDS TO USE
You will, of course, decide what materials you
wish to use, and in doing this you should be gov-
erned by the commercial value rather than by the
name. ‘The State Experiment Station will assist
you in suggesting a formula to use and the materi-
als to buy.
Here are a few general suggestions it is well to
bear in mind in doing the work:
1. Nitrate of soda is immediately available when
mixed with the soil. ‘Therefore it should furnish
no more than one-third or one-half of the nitrog-
enous part of the fertilizer.
2. Sulphate of ammonia is open to the same
objection as nitrate of soda, but to a smaller de-
gree.
3. Cottonseed meal decays slowly, and at the
price for which it can be bought at present, may
be used with economy as a nitrogen carrier.
142 COTTON
4. Acid phosphate is usually our most economical
carrier of phosphorus.
5. Muriate of potash is an economical carrier of
potassium.
6. Kainit, which contains only one-fourth of the
quantity of potassium found in muriate, is usually
preferred in cotton manures because it is believed
to be beneficial in warding off rust.
7. Nitrogen is especially concerned with the
growth of leaves and stems. If your cotton leaves
and stems have been small, therefore, and the
nitrogen supply in the soil has not been increased
by the growth of some leguminous crop, it would
be well to increase the nitrogen content of the
formula you select. On the other hand with
marked growth of leaf and stem, the quantity of
nitrogen in any formula may be decreased or alto-
gether abandoned.
8. When cotton follows clover, cowpeas, or other
legumes, little or no nitrogen will be required in
the fertilizer.
9. When stem and leaf growth are abundant, but
yield of seed and lint below what it should be,
phosphorus and potassium—especially the former
—are needed.
10. In a general way, on average cotton soils
the best results are obtained when nitrogen, phos-
phorus, and potassium are combined in the propor-
tion of about three or three and one half parts
phosphorus, one part nitrogen and one part
potassium—unless the nitrogen be already sup-
plied by leguminous crops.
THE FORMULA TO USE
It is impossible to suggest a formula, or even
COTTON
143
many formulae, that will meet all conditions of
soil and culture.
You must work out this problem
by personal investigation and experiment if you
desire to solve it with any degree of satisfaction.
Formulae should differ with different seasons, dif-
ferent soils, different farms.
average can be considered here.
No. 1.
No. 2.
No. 3.
No. 1.
COMPOST MANURES
Green Cotton Seed...... 100
Stable Manure......... 100
eid, Phosplate..)). 2... 2000
Barnyard Manure...... 1750
Acid Phosphate........ 200
HAE Fees yiatoee ee, 2 50
2000
Barnyard Manure...... 1225
Cotton, Seede 8... . 400
mei phosphate. 22... .. 300
Rami a). Sa), 2 & 75
2000
HOME-MADE CHEMICAL MANURES
Acid phosphate. 4... 5.14000
Cotton Seed Meal...... 700
(CET Ta Re aed TR 200
otal: 6 Rah ieee 2000
Only the general
bushels
bushels
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
pounds
144 COTTON
No, 2. Acid Phosphate.) i... 1000 pounds
Cotton Seed Meal....... 600 pounds
Nitrate of Soda.c 2000. 100 pounds
Kamit...) Vega 300 pounds
Potable ss cael 2000 pounds
No. 5. Acid) Phosphate (0.7.22 850 pounds
ish Sera. heen 700 pounds
Kariba ok eee a 450 pounds
gi Lc) 32 NEED Eee eae hh 2000 pounds
THE QUANTITY YOU SHALL USE
The quantity of fertilizer to use per acre will
depend upon the following conditions:
Beaniane power of the land
Preparation that has been given the land
Kind of crop grown the previous year
Richness of fertilizer
Previous treatment of the soil
Kind of season.
By your own judgment you will have to deter-
mine the quantity to use per acre. Learn your
soil by careful observation, study and experimenta-
tion year after year. All the way from 200 to 1000
pounds of fertilizer are now used per acre. What
is best for your soil and conditions lies doubtless
within these limits.
Try the following plan of questioning your own
land, and the answers will be far more valuable to
you than any foreign advice:
Choose a small area that is reasonably typical of
COTTON 145
your land, and which will contain ten rows of any
length desired.
On rows | and 2, use 200 pounds per acre.
On rows 3 and 4, use 400 pounds per acre.
On rows 5 and 6, use 600 pounds per acre.
On rows 7 and 8, use 800 pounds per acre.
On rows 9 and 10, use 1000 pounds per acre.
In cultivating, treat all soilsalike and give each
the same treatment as you give the remainder of
the field. Carefully observe the plots during the
growing season and at picking time estimate
yields. The results cannot fail to be helpful in de-
ciding what kinds of plant food your land needs
and in what quantities each element is needed.
WHAT WE MUST DO
So much is involved in fertilizing land that each
of us will have to study his individual problems
year in and year out, that help may come to each
of us in knowing how to manage lands and how to
maintain their fertility, wisely and judiciously.
That we may have a few general principles to
guide us along our immediate course, the following
general suggestions are offered:
1. Judicious fertilization increases the profitable-
ness of cotton farming.
2. Fertilizers wisely used hasten the maturity of
the crop.
3. Fertilizers pay best on land in good mechani-
cal condition.
4. Fertilizers respond best for cotton when used
in connection with leguminous crops.
5. A complete fertilizer pays best on old lands.
Where legumes are used or stable manure, the
nitrogen content may be decreased or omitted
entirely.
146 COTTON
6. When fertilizers are used in small quantities,
apply in the drill and mix well with the soil.
When 500 to 1000 pounds are used, apply broad-
cast or make two applications.
7. Home-mixing of fertilizers is the wisest prac-
tice to follow.
8. Adjust the quantities of nitrogen, phosphorus
and potassium as the soil calls for change due to
better tillage or as increased quantities of humus
and organic matter are added to the soil.
9. Broadcast barnyard manure on winter-grow-
ing crops or compost with cottonseed, acid phos-
phate, and kainit.
10. Experiment with your own soil and forget
not its teachings. This will help you with every
crop that follows.
MODERN COTTON MAKING.
Breaking the land with three-horse plows, and shallow and level cultivation
of a growing crop.
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CHAPTER XIX.
THE COTTON FARMER'S EQUIPMENT OF TOOLS
It is doubtful if any factor has contributed
more to the advancement and progress of Amer-
ican agriculture than the improvement of farm im-
plements and machinery. When one contem-
plates the enormous yields of American corn, wheat,
cotton, oats, potatoes and other crops, he is struck
with wonder and amazement. What a record our
farmers have made! But have you thought of the
debt we owe to inventors and to makers of tools
and implements, without which these tremendous
yields would be impossible ?
Unfortunately for him, the cotton farmer has not
had such advantages as his brother farmers in the
use of labor-saving machines and tools. On far
too many farms their use is limited indeed, and
often we find only the one-horse plow and the hoe.
Cotton farming can never be profitable where this
is true. The use of inefficient tools also means
an economic policy at variance with the advance-
ment and progress of civilization, since it restricts
the possibilities of land and labor, and decreases
their potential contribution to the human race.
But where these old fashioned methods exist, they
are now fast giving way to improvements, making
the culture of cotton less laborious, less costly, and
(147)
148 COTTON
the field at the same time more productive, thereby
making cotton growing far more remunerative.
Cotton farming calls for the same variety of
labor-saving tools and devices as does the production
of any other kind of crop. Asa rule, the principal
difference in the equipment of large and small
farms is in number of tools, rather than in kind,
size, or efficiency.
For the information of the reader unacquainted
with terms commonly used in the Cotton Belt, let
us say that “one-horse farm” or “one-horse
farmer”’ is not meant to express derision of the in-
dividual, nor does it refer to social standing. ‘The
term means, on the other hand, just what it says: a
one-horse farm on which all labor is done by a
single animal. ‘The owner may be a one-horse
farmer, and at the same time stand high in the com-
munity, and have a good store of worldly goods.
But the value in land and equipment of a ten-horse
farm in cotton production is just ten times that
of a one-horse farm.
And of what does this equipment consist?
Land, feed, stock, tools, implements, etc. Since
the one-horse plow is the important implement of
the one-horse farm, and since it is so commonly
used on both small farms and large plantations, it
may be called the typical tool of the Cotton Belt.
To be sure, two-horse and even three-horse plows
are used; the sub-soil plow occasionally has work
to do; the disk harrow, the roller, the cultivator,
are now generally known, but the “Dixie” plow
is the one tool that in a measure does the work of all
these and which finds employment on every farm,
regardless of its size or the wealth or standing of its
owner. It serves as soil-breaker, soil-pulverizer
and cultivator for weed destruction and winter
COTTON 149
plowing, and is known in all States and sections
where cotton is grown.
In spite of the popular favor in which this tool is
held, it neither merits it, nor is its use in keeping
with the progress now manifest along other lines of
cotton culture.
THE KIND OF PLOW WE WANT
In the first place, the effective plow mustso throw
the slice ripped from the furrow as to cover all
manure, trash or green crops on the land. Todo
this it must turn the slice entirely over or set it well
on edge. If it does either of these things for you
the first aim is achieved.
In the second place, the plow should go deep into
the ground. This must be done for two reasons:
First, deep plowing enables the soil to drink in and
hold more water against a day of drought; second,
deep plowing gives cotton roots a wider pasture.
In the third place, the effective plow must pul-
verize the slice it throws out. It is not enough
that your plow turn the soil; it must break, fine
and mellow it.
A plow that does not do these things is a poor
plow. Measure your one-horse plows by this
standard and you readily see why the greater num-
ber of them should be thrown with your pile of
scrap iron, and from there carried to the junk shop
to be melted and remade into larger and more
effective tools.
The one-horse plow is sometimes defended on
the ground of economy. Really, however, it is not
an economical plow. ‘The two-horse walking plow
will not only prepare cotton lands better, but will
DEQ): COTTON
do as much work as two one-horse plows and
thereby save you the labor of one man.
Where money is scarce or where labor is also
scarce or insufficient, it is always economy to use
the best tools on the market. The two-horse walking
plow or the two-horse sulky plow ought soon to
find a place on even the smallest farms. ‘The
disk plow has already been used on some cotton
farms. It pulverizes well, and covers in an effec-
tive manner, and goes deep into the soil. It is
not practicable, however, for use in stony lands.
TOOLS FOR COMPLETING THE SEED BED
The harrow follows the plow. Commonly this
tool is used in connection with the roller to com-
lete that pulverization of the soil which has been
hugh by the plow. And this is necessary. You
have observed that the cloddy spots, even in
fertile fields, make a poor harvest. In_ these
places bad mechanical condition of the soil forbids
it holding moisture, hardens up plant food, and so
brings about lack of fruitfulness. ‘The harrow and
the roller will correct this trouble. A single kind of
harrow will not do for all soils nor forall seasons of
the year.
A fine peg-tooth smoothing harrow should find a
place on every cotton farm. It levels the land and
disintegrates the larger particles of the soil. You
may use it also to advantage in harrowing cotton
after planting.
The spring-tooth harrow you should have also.
It comes in nicely where you have leveling and
smoothing to do, or where a heavy rain has com-
pacted the surface too much just before planting
time.
COTTON 151
In addition to these you should have either a
disk or cutaway harrow, for crushing and for com-
pleting the pulverization begun by the plow.
Where clods are left on top of the soil, the
wooden drag or roller will be the next implement to
use. The wooden drag grinds the clods and
lumps, and is also a good implement for leveling
urposes.
The fertilizer distributor is another economical
tool, doing its work evenly and satisfactorily.
Following the fertilizer distributor comes the
cotton planter, and drops the seed in a continuous
chain. While our planter as now used serves its
purpose, it is far from being ideal. It must do
better work. It is not enough to drop the seed; it
must drop the right quantity and in the place
where wanted. When this end is achieved, seed
will be tested for vitality and germinating power,
and the planter regulated for dropping seeds to
suit the requirements of each particular soil.
This will largely do away with “chopping,” now
a laborious and costly burden to the cotton farmer.
The cultivating tools required in cotton culture
serve three purposes: they kill weeds, provide a
mulch so as to conserve the moisture in the soil,
and release plant food.
The old one-shovel plow is fast giving away tothe
shallow cultivator with several shovels.
And the one-horse plow—do you use it for cul-
tivating purposes? Up and down the row it goes,
breaking roots, increasing labor bills, lessening
profits. Let us again express the hope that im-
proved cultivating tools will soon replace it
throughout the South.
For the early work of cultivating young cotton
plants, perhaps no implement is more useful than
152 COTTON
the weeder. It runs shallow; its many teeth des-
troy or cover all weeds; it thins the cotton; its
complete soil-stirring makes a fairly effective
mulch. You can use the weeder two or three
times in cultivating the cotton crop, and if you do
not have it, then use the smoothing harrow.
We have many kinds of cultivators: some single,
others double; some are shallow-goers while others
creep along the surface slightly deeper. All of our
improved cultivators are good. Do not hesitate in
securing such as are needed, for they will quickly
repay their cost in increased returns.
And finally, the hoe: is it needed ?
Once it was thought that every gentleman
needed a sword, then a pistol. We may have use
even today for the pistol and sword, but not for
every-day clothes. So we have use for the hoe in
cotton culture, but not until after the weeder and
fine-tooth harrow have done their work. In some
fields, some seasons, the hoe may be needed until ,
the perfect planter comes; until cultural methods
are more studied; then the hoe may go, with
knighthood and chivalry, and be one of the things
of memory,
CHAPTER XxX.
CULTURE FROM SEED TO BOLL
In the romance of cotton the climax is reached
in that scene which has to do with its culture. All
that has come before is concerned with stage set-
tings properly to introduce the chief actor, and
what follows in the disposition of the crop is but
the natural conclusion expected before the final
curtain falls. In this growing scene the seeds
awake from their sleep in the soil, the tiny two-
leaved plants peep through their surface screen
and come forth into sunlight and growth, now to
engage the attention of a vast army of men and
women through long months of watchfulness and
care.
THE BED IS MADE
Sometime before planting time the land is
“bedded up” as a final preparation for the seed.
This custom seems to be almost an universal
practice, wherever cotton is grown. While it
involves extra time and labor, its warming influence
on the soil, especially in cool or wet weather,
is sufficiently helpful to modify any objection to
the practice.
The plan of bedding up is this: the row is
opened and in it the manure is placed (or if a
fertilizer drill is used, the work is done by a single
operation) ; then the as run back and forth,
154 COTTON
heaping the top soil to the center, which leaves
the row two to three inches higher than the soil
on either side of and between the rows.
In bedding up many people who grow cotton
wisely include simple tillage operations as well. It
is not enough to make the bed only; the entire
surface of the soil must be plowed and then
harrowed and re-harrowed until the idealseed bed
is obtained. Only when this is done are you
ready for bedding up the land. Se 2k ;
MAKING COTTON WITHOUT HAND CHOPPING.
By the use of cultivators, harrows, ete., farmers are enabled to make good crops
entire'y without hand chopping—a great saving in cost. The bottom picture is
that of a field in which cotton has been grown for fifty years.
COTTON 201
YIELD OF COTTON
(Continued)
Year Production, Product per acre,
in bales pounds
1900 10,425,141 193
1901 10,701,433 186
1902 10,758,326 192
1903 10,123,886 170
1904 13,556,841 207
1905 10,697,013 205
No one needs to be told that these fluctuations
were due to natural causes. The same farmers
tilled the same kind of land, used the same kinds
of fertilizers, followed the same methods of culture,
picked the fiber inthe same manner, during all these
years. There is some fluctuation in acreage, to
be sure, but we are now referring to the yield per
acre. ‘The difference in yield between 1903 and
1904, for instance, is thirty-seven pounds per acre,
or a variation of more than twenty per cent. In
this case acreage did not influence the yield, since
it was greater the year the largest area was planted.
Neither smaller productivity of the land nor the
grower’s carelessness in culture could possibly have
influenced these results unless they acted in keeping
the differences within closer limits. The same
wide difference is noted when the years 1898 and
1899 are compared, only here the variation is even
greater—51 pounds, or a difference of more than
thirty per cent.
This inability on the part of the cotton farmer
to control his output acts immensely to his dis-
advantage not only in estimating his yearly ex-
penses, but in marketing his crops as well.
Quite different is it with the man who buys cot-
ton and manufactures it.
202 COTTON
He is able to calculate with more accuracy. As
a rule, he knows what his raw product will cost.
He estimates what his operating expenses will be
and sells his product, including his many items of
expense, at a profit as great as competition will
permit. While he has troubles to bother him,
they are small indeed when compared with those
of the farmer—troubles that begin even before the
ae is started and only end when the last bale is
sold.
The mere fact that the quantity fluctuates, is
enough to show that the farmer deals with factors
beyond his control.
Let us suppose a cotton factory produced one
year 10,000,000 pounds of product, the next year
12,000,000 pounds, the next year 7,500,000 pounds,
and the next 9,000,000 pounds, all unexpected
results, not in the calculation of the management:
do you think if such results were produced, the
manufacturer could make any very close estimate
on the cost of 1,000 pounds of product; or do you
think he could remain long out of bankruptcy,
unless his profits some years were very great
indeed ?
But the manufacturer may even sell his product
before he makes it. If he can arrange with his
labor, and purchase his raw material, he knows
within close limits just what his business will do
during the year. With the farmer this can never
be the case. He knows not twenty-four hours
ahead that some insect may not damage his crop, or
that some disease may not destroy it in part; nor
does he know that wet weather may not come and
injure bloom and boll and plant, or give him trouble
with his ever-ready enemies, weeds and grass.
One day he may be glad and rejoice for what his
COTTON 203
crop may do for him, but on the next, hope and
expectancy may have departed.
With exactness he cannot calculate—he can only
anticipate, hope, plan for the best.
The point is, the cotton farmer cannot estimate
at the beginning of the year just what his total
outlay for his crop will be; nor can he bargain on
final yields or results. ‘This, however, the manu-
facturer can do, and he does so with advantage to
himself.
It follows that the farmer is entitled to the right
of considerable margin as to cost of production
when compared with the price it shall bring on the
market. ‘These risks which he has to encounter all
along the growing route are just as legitimate for
use in the final calculation as waste of fiber, vari-
ation in cost of power, strikes, depreciation in
equipment, etc., are essential factors in considering
the final cost-estimate in the cotton factory.
NATURAL CONDITIONS THAT INFLUENCE
PRODUCTION
Were it not for uncertain natural conditions
cotton farming would be more stable in its ability
to produce certain and constant results, and the
farmer also would be able to calculate his profits
on his labor and equipment in advance, and with
reasonable accuracy.
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COTTON 245
This individual may be green, an innocent rural
“lamb,” or a bold manipulator, securing prey on
territory not even his; on the very floor of the Ex-
change itself he may go and operate in his unrea-
sonable, unreasoning way. It is unnecessary to
repeat the story. Chance may favor him with a
step in line with the unchanging law, but once at
cross-purposes with it, though ever the “corner”
is scented, he topples, is sacrificed, and lost.
WHERE THE REMEDY LIES
To eliminate the foolish manipulator (small or
mighty though he be) or even the principle of spec-
ulation itself, is impossible; nor can we abolish
trading in contracts on the ground of illegality.
They are with us, a part of our commercial meth-
ods, and with us they will stay.
What then can be done looking to regulation,
that justice may be given the producer and the
consumer: and protection even to those who will
indulge therein? ‘The following reforms may be
helpful :
1. Complete publicity of past and probable pro-
duction should be had that supply and demand
may be accurately known and correctly interpreted.
2. Remedy the over-trading feature of the Cotton
Exchange.
3. Abolish the system of monthly deliveries.
4. Increase the amounts required for margin.
5. Grade and sell cotton according to the prac-
tical requirements of consumption.
Publicity:—In order to save the ignorant specu-
lator from himself, as well as protect legitimate
trade, only the most complete publicity will suffice.
The producer can receive no value from his prod-
246 COTTON
uct, unless there is a spinner to use it; hence, both
are factors in this trade and both are entitled to
information as complete as statistics are able to
give—first to the producer, that he may know what
supply and demand may do to help him with his
sale: second, to the spinner that he also may know
these facts and so protect himself in his purchasing
Then, too, publicity will assist the otherwise
ignorant players with the ticker that they may keep
away from ruin, and by having reliable information
thrust before their very eyes, not fly into the face
of things as they are.
Over-trading:—Over-trading in the cotton mar-
ket, as is the case with exaggeration of any other
kind, means that the trade inevitably gets on
false ground. It provides the opportunity for the
“knowing ones,”’ the strong, the mighty, not only
to wrest cotton investments from the weak and
immature, but it puts into the hands of the mighty,
the power necessary to rob the weak of all their
possessions, and to bring ruin to them and their
dependents.
When this abuse is checked, the day of such ex-
treme fluctuations as we have known heretofore
will have passed and much of the evil of trading
in contracts will have ended.
Monthly Deliveries:—Here is one of the unrea-
sonable features of the Cotton Exchange machinery.
Only the law of supply and demand has a right to
determine real value to him who wants a com-
modity. Yet at three o’clock on the last day of
any month as the contract now operates, cotton
may sell one, two, and even three and four cents
higher than a minute after that time of the same
day, or at ten o’clock the day following.
This is nothing but a trick, a fictitious condition
COTTON 24:7
both unreasonable and illegal, and merits the same
penalty that the usurer gets—or deserves.
Marginal Amounts:—Trading in cotton futures
is stimulated and abetted because of the small
margin required to enter the ring. Of course, this
admits an army of ignorant, unthinking people.
It is a game of chance with them—a gambling
game, no higher in ethics than shooting craps or
playing poker, and the chances many times more
against their ever coming out unburned. What
chance is there for mere strength and awkward-
ness in such an arena with mighty, well-trained
gladiators (scientifically trained, if you please) to
meet and combat? Of course, this struggle is
short; and the pity is in the home where the sav-
ings of these weaker contestants are needed.
Increase the margin—make it more difficult to
enter and to follow—and the evil will be clipped
at the wings—less able then to do harm here; less
able to cause these violent fluctuations that have
adversely affected both the cotton farmer offering
his holdings and the cotton spinner seeking his
takings.
Grading:—Another evil is in the fact that in the
Exchange sale any sort of cotton may be delivered.
Suppose the farmer buys cattle and when the seller
delivers them, théy may be any sort or all sorts—
suckling calves, weaned calves, scrubs, finished
beeves, ete. It is with just such a policy that cotton
contracts are traded in, since the deliverable cotton
may be all the way from fair to good ordinary.
Right here is where (leaving the morals of the
question out of consideration), the greatest griev-
ance lies, and where it affects the pocket-book of
both producer and consumer. And then these
know that neither one nor the other is responsible,
248 COTTON
although these two factors only are concerned with
commodity—all others are aliens. Cotton should
be graded therefore with a view to consumption.
In selling cattle, calves and scrubs are eliminated
from high market grades, and surely the low grades
of cotton can be eliminated also. ‘The contract
would act with more justice to all were it graded
in the contract from Fair to and including Low
Middling—a reasonable change, and a fair one to
all concerned.
All in all, the Cotton Exchange, like business.
is subject to gross misrepresentations. Much of
the feeling against it is due to ignorance of its
methods or to the prejudice that comes from having
had one’s fingers burned. ‘That it contains much
good there is no question. What its future will
be only time will tell, but with proper reforms
it may play a noteworthy part in the rich kingdom
of cotton.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
STATISTICS: HOW THE WORLD WATCHES WHILE THE
PLANT GROWS
There is a reason why statistics of production
and consumption. of cotton should be made accu-
rately, completely, and frequently. Trade has be-
come so complex since the advent of the Cotton
Exchange—because of the rapid developments of
re-selling on close margins, taking advantage of
fluctuations in prices and dealing in futures; and
using unnatural influences to fix prices by manipu-
lators—that every one interested has come to rec-
ognize the need of some strong disinterested agency
to make reports of actual facts so that all concerned
may be better guided as how to buy or sell.
The producer, the merchant, the speculator, and
the consumer must ever be informed as to the
movement of the law of supply and demand, that
the market of neither the raw product nor the
finished material, may be congested or overloaded.
Let this happen, and not only that form of cotton
immediately concerned, but all humanity, will suf-
fer in consequence of the abnormal condition.
The hope lies in publicity—complete and accurate.
These reports must be made by disinterested par-
ties: not by the speculator who reports a bearish
condition of the market that prices may be de-
pressed, trying to favor his own operations; nor
(249)
250 COTTON
by his rival with his bullish reports given in the
hope that prices may advance to his profit.
It is to the Government we must look for esti-
mates of such a character that they may be de-
pended upon for accuracy and reliability. Besides,
the Government is impartial and aims to protect
both producer and consumer, since both contribute
to its machinery, and for them it partially exists.
WHY THE GOVERNMENT GATHERS STATISTICS
To the Department of Agriculture is intrusted
this work; to no other Department of the Govern-
ment could it be more safely and wisely left; by no
other Department can the condition of the growing
crop be so accurately and completely ascertained.
The purpose of the Government’s cotton reports
is to ascertain the actual facts as to the acreage,
growing condition, and the prospective yield of the
crop. Its general aims may be enumerated as fol-
lows:
1. To give information to producers, consumers
and dealers as to actual yields; also to report as
to the actual conditions of promise.
2. To enable market centers to better balance
supply against demand in defining what prices are
warranted by natural conditions.
3. To insure whatever stability of prices a chang-
ing state of natural conditions allows.
4. To be so certainly authentic and comprehen-
sive and definite for entire crop areas that interested
parties cannot well credit nor warp the figures with
their own estimates, and thus bring about unstable
markets.
5. To enable producers to know the facts as to
the promise of prices for the crop, that false re-
COTTON 251
ports may not mislead them into early sales at
prices wrongfully made too low.
6. To create confidence, that sales and consign-
ments by producers may be made more freely,
that dealers may more safely conduct their busi-
ness with lower handling charges, and that spin-
ners may more freely purchase stocks to hold,
thus adding certainty and stability to business,
that they may work on a less speculative basis, and
thus bring more equitable returns from labor
expenditure to all interested persons.
7. To make reports so frequently and to give
facts so soon after changes in prospective condi-
tions occur, or so soon after actual yields are
gathered, that there may be the least possible ele-
ment of uncertainty, of speculative conditions, to
remove prices from their normal economic place.
HOW COTTON STATISTICS ARE GATHERED
The large body of people concerned with the
gathering of cotton statistics may be grouped into
the five following classes:
1. The State Statistical Agent and corps of aids.
2. Three Cotton Special Field Agents.
3. The County Agent for the Department.
4. The Township Agents for the Department.
5. Individual reports of cotton farmers.
The State Statistical Agent is a paid employee
of the Department who reports to the Bureau of
Statistics the information which he obtains from
tabulations that are sent direct to him by his corps
of aids in the cotton counties of his State. These
aids are selected because of their qualifications as
farmers of judicial mind and individual integrity.
This part of the crop-reporting service is one of
252 COTTON
the best means of securing reliable information.
It should be further extended. The State Agent
should receive a salary commensurate with the re-
sponsibilities of his position, and sufficient to en- —
able him to maintain a well-equipped office and
look after his large body of aids.
Then there are three special field agents who
travel constantly through the cotton territory, each
covering a group of States assigned him. ‘These
men are trained statisticians and selected because
of their wide knowledge and broad information
regarding the cotton crop. They travel systematic-
ally over the districts in their charge, note carefully
the acreage and conditions; keep in close touch
with the best informed opinion as to the cotton crop.
Their knowledge and information is therefore of
the highest value in correcting inaccuracies: and
it is given monthly or oftener to the Statistical
Bureau by mail and telegraph.
To supplement these, information is obtained
from county and township correspondents who
have been selected because of fitness and knowl-
edge; from the cotton ginneries and from corre-
spondents representing bankers, and country mer-
chants.
SCOPE OF COTTON STATISTICS
Cotton schedules are sent to all these classes of
reporters each month of the growing season. The
May schedule is the first of the year and deals with
the acreage and condition of cotton. Following
this are the June, July, August and September
schedules dealing with the condition of the crop.
The August report also deals with the amount of
old cotton on hand; in the November report is in-
COTTON 253
cluded average yield of cotton per acre, abandoned
acreage, and the cost of picking.
HOW COTTON REPORTS ARE HANDLED
All reports dealing with cotton statistics are sent
by telegraph (in cipher) or by mail, so as to reach
Washington, where the Crop Reporting Board
meets, by the first day of each month of the months
in which such reports are made.
The reports of the State Field Agents and State
Statistical Agents are sent to the Secretary of Agri-
culture in specially prepared envelopes, and deliv-
ered to him by the postal authorities in sealed mail
pouches. These as they arrive are placed in a
safe located in the private office of the Secretary,
to which no one else has access, until the day on
which the report is issued. ‘The combination of the
safe moreover, is known only to the Secretary of
Agriculture and the Assistant Secretary of Agri-
culture.
HOW THE REPORTS ARE PREPARED
The reports previously sent in are now opened
and final results made up by a Crop Reporting
Board, composed of the Chief of the Bureau of
Statistics as chairman and four individual members
selected from the Statisticians and officers of the
Department. For each month there is an incom-
ing member, not on the sitting of the estimating
committee immediately previous. On the report
day, this Board with several computors meets in
the office of the Statistician which is kept locked,
no one being allowed to enter or to leave it, All
telephones are disconnected.
When all data has been placed before each mem-
254 - COTTON
ber of the Board, each individual computes sep-
arately his own estimate of cotton for each State.
When this is done comparisons are made and dis-
cussions are engaged in before the final figures
are decided upon. Each and every townshrp,
county, and State is properly “‘weighted”’ so as to
give the arithmetical value which the acreage in
that area demands. On the completion of this
work, the report is ready to be given out, and goes
with lightning speed to almost every part of the
world. \
HOW THE COTTON REPORT IS ISSUED
Reports on cotton thus prepared by the Crop
Reporting Board are issued on the 3d of each
month during the growing season. In order that
the information contained in these reports may
be made simultaneously throughout the entire
United States, and that one part of the country may
not have any advantage over another, they are
handed simultaneously at a given hour (as for ex-
ample, at 12 o’clock noon or 4 p. m.) on report days,
to all applicants, and are given to the Western
Union ‘Telegraph Company and the Postal Tele-
graph Cable Company for transmission to the ex-
changes and to the press. ‘These companies have
reserved their lines at a designated time, and by
use of a flash”? forward immediately the figures of
most interest. A mimeograph statement for com-
parative purposes, containing such estimates of
condition or actual production, together with the
corresponding estimates of former years, is prepared
and sent to a mailing list of exchanges, newspaper
publications, and individuals. ‘The same after-
noon printed cards containing the essential facts
COTTON 255
concerning cotton and the most important crops
of the report are mailed to 77,000 post offices
throughout the United States for public display,
thus placing the information within the farmer’s
immediate reach.
MONTHLY CONDITION REPORT OF COTTON
The cotton crop must be observed throughout
its growing period if accurate conclusions are to be
drawn in regard to its output. Even then only
an approximate estimate can be made. Such an
estimate is helpful to the producer in assisting him
in disposing of his crop; it helps the spinner in
making his purchases. Both depend, in some
measure at least, upon facts not yet accomplished.
Favorable conditions in June do not mean that an
unfavorable season may not disturb growth and
prospects in August or September.
A farmer once planted for twenty bales. Rain
came and brought grass and troubles, threatening
the crop; June had come and scarcely ten bales
were hoped for. But weather during July was
favorable—much sunshine during the day and
little rain at night; the crop flourished, the weed
became strong, and vigorous—and thirty bales were
now anticipated. But more rain came, fairly cover-
ing the ground; unripe bolls began to shed, leaves
turned in color, the big crop was no longer thought
of—a yield of ten or twelve bales would now be all
that might be expected. But better days came in
August—days more favorable to the crop—growth
of weed checked itself to correct proportions, the
old bolls enlarged, and the farmer brightened in
hope and expectation that results might be better
than “things looked at one time.” September
256 - COTTON
with its picking season soon passed, and prospects
for fifteen or twenty bales were now brighter: Octts
ber soon passed and November ended the gathering
of the crop. ‘Twenty-six bales had been secured.
This illustration shows how fickle is the season
and its crop. While in this case better returns fol-
lowed than were anticipated, it is just as often true
that contrary results are realized. Hence, with the
cotton crop you can make no estimate by a hasty
review or a glance from the window of the railroad
car. You must watch the crop throughout its
growing season, and all the while be prepared for
any turn this capricious crop may take because of
some disease or some change in weather.
The table following shows the estimates from
month to month for several years as reported by the
United States Department of Agriculture:
MONTHLY COTTON REPORT
UNITED SraTEs DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
als B
2|8}S) ol a |8| a) gel glalal e
elale/H 3 e|2\a/e| & s| alae Z
Dini slo] 8 lel] aisle] & |] a] 2] Sly] s
Sisiglol we IfisiSiel 3) a) Silene
1905
June. -.......[87/es}ralea 88'87/73,73/69| 73] 87] 84\ssisi1l77.2
July BES CARN aA 88/82|'78|82| 87|83)'72'73'72) '75| 86] 86|83)'79/77
August BREA AY MI 78|80|79|82) 85|79'69|66/71| 68) 80) 85|83/82/74.9
September . . .. ./76/76|75|77| 77/70/68 62/70) 72| 81| 86/82|80|72.1
October ...... ./77|77|74|76| 76|'70/68|59|69| 72) 79] 81\sol78|71.2
1904
Junes;/o pert: 82|84/81/78| 88/80|85/86\84| 84} 85} 82/93/90/83
July ..........|87|90|88/85] 92/85/89 90/89] 90] 89] 89]92/87\88
(Anpust /seo ele 90|93/91|91| 94'90/92'95/91| 93| 92] 90/95|91|91.6
September ..... 88|88'87|/86| 88'84/87/87/77| 88] 88] 87/96|89|84.1
October 223222 82|82'81|78| 82/76|77'78'69| 77| 76] 82|85/83|\75.8
COTTON 257
MONTHLY COTTON REPORT
(Continued)
&| 5 B
2|¢ 2 «|=
#/S|Sle! .|a]e)4| |) 81a lel] s
s(siag/ 2] Sisi2iala3)/d)1a)eisial §
SISl2/8) SIsi|f sisi a1 818 lais| e
Slelalol aIelieliAleldlals |oldl <
1903
J 72|\'74176/75| 81)/73)78|76|70) 76} 83} 83|'72|'76|\74.1
Bay... ...4...| 16/75/7475 84/76/81/80|'79| 73) 80} 74)/67\73\77.1
August RECTAN exas 7678/76/77] 85|79|83|84/82! 76) 82] '78|69|'75|79.7
September .... -|86/83/80/81| 83/84/87/86/76) 81) 91} 81/81/75/81.2
October ....... 77\74'70|68| 70|68}69/71154) 69) 71) 7471/72/65. 1
1902
“Te ee 92/91|9'7|94)100/92/94/96|95| 100/100] 100/96/99)95.1
July.. . |92/93/95|91} 96)84485|85'73| 94) 98] 95/90)89\84. 7
August ....|91/86)88/83) 84/77|80/81/77} 92) 92) 93/94)95/81.9
September .....|80/80/'78/68) 75/54/68/70|53) '75| 82] 73)76|68/64
October ....... 73\68|68/62) 68/52/63/64/47)| 68) 76] 73/65/61158.3
1901
MB ed ek sete: 92'87/80/80| 88/76/82/80/81| 81] 78} 83!88)85\81.5
July.. i -|78|77|70|72| 80|80/86/84/83} 84) 85] 90/91/88/81.1
August...... . |86/73/75|78| 79/82|88/82'74| 69) 70) 71/78/75'177.2
September.. ...-|82/72/80/81| 78/75|88]80|56] 61) 73) 75|68)76|71.4
October...... ..|73/63/67/73) 65/651/66|72151| 51) 60) 61/57/61/61.4
1900
June 94/86/85/89| 88/8'7/85/88]71| 91) 86} 94175|84/82.5
La 90|89/79|74| 78|'70|}64/81/78| 78) 76} '74182)96|95.8
August . we... | 77|80/74/77) '74167/60177|83| 83} '7'7| 84/80/81176
September .....|73/64/60/69] '71164160|70/77| 65} 64) 68)78/72168 .2
October ....... 71\64/57|67| 63/62|56|66/78] 65) 64) 68]79)|'7'7|/67
1899
June..........{/79\87|86|88| 88/86]'78/81/90| 80] 85] 90/81/84/85.7
UV Fo sacs 3 os 86/88/88/85| 90/88/83|85/93} 82] 88} 88/78|91\87.8
August . ...... -|88/83/78/79) 93/84/86/86|/86] 86] 84) 86/80/93|84
September .....|87/73|/66/69| 77!76/78|74/61| 62) 76) 85]/60/53|/68.5
October .|76|66|62|64| 79|'70/69/68/56] 53] 66) '74)/60/46/62. 4
1898
MUM ec als os cs 86/86|/85/89| 76/89/91/89/89] 96} 90} 96/82/80\89
July.. . .|93|87/90/90| 83/91)94/90/92| 93} 92) 8'7/92|89\91.2
August . .|94/90}89/91} 87|85\88}90/91) 93) 9'7} 90)98)94/91.2
September.. ....{91/84/81/80] '73/80)78!76|75| 89} 95] 94)90/98/79 .8
October...... . .|84/76|79/75| 66/76)72/67|73| 84| 93] 93/75|76/75.4
COTTON
bS
Ou
(6:2)
ANNUAL ESTIMATE OF COTTON CROP
It has been the custom of the Department of
Agriculture annually on December Ist to estimate
the yield in cotton for each State and the total for
all the cotton-producing States. This estimate
compared with the report of the Census Bureau
(which is charged with the duty of publishing the
exact amount produced after the crop has been
entirely ginned) forthe last seven years, shows that
the estimates of the Department of Agriculture have
been within an average of one and four-tenths per
cent. of absolute accuracy, which, in view of the
fact that “to err is human”’ is little short of mirac-
ulous.
This fact is shown in the table following:
NUMBER OF POUNDS OF LINT COTTON
Department of Per cent.
A Census Bureau —————
Agriculture Ovennliwades
1899 | 4,320,193,000 | 4,457,097,000
1900 | 4,856,738,000 | 4,846,471,000
1901 | 4,529,954,000 | 4,550,950,000
1902 | 5,111,870,000 | 5,091,641,000 ,
1903 | 4,889,796,000 | 4,706,591,000 | 3.
1904 | 6,157,064,000 | 6,426,698,000
1905 | 5,083,909,000 | 5,389,155,149
Year
MORE FREQUENT REPORTS
The objection to the reports of the Department.
now may be said to lie with their infrequency. So
important is correct and accurate information to
the producer and consumer, and so important too 1s
A
$
i
COTTON 259
the cotton crop to the whole world, that it seems
advisable to have the reports issued more often,
mstead of only once each month as is now the
custom. Were this the case, the fluctuations in
prices upon the appearance of the Government
report would not be so marked, and the market
would remain more stable, and more truly re-
sponsive to the law of supply and demand.
CHAPTER XXIX.
PRICES: THE PUZZLING PROBLEM OF COTTON VALUES
There is an economic principle which applies to
all products of the land and to all products of the
shop: The final utility of the product shall determine
its market value. When a commodity becomes
necessary for any purpose, it will bring in the mar-
ket whatever price is necessary to produce it once or
to reproduce it again.
If it costs ten cents to produce a pound of cotton
and ten million bales are wanted, then if there is
land enough and men enough who will be satisfied
to produce it at that price, ten cents a pound will be
the market price. But if twelve million bales are
needed and wanted, you may or you may not have
a different proposition: all available cotton land
may be already in use; other workers may not care
to engage in the work at the price offered; and if
they donot turn to it, the increased quantity cannot
be grown. What follows? ‘The economic princi-
ple answers: If cotton is in greater dentaid than
other things, then a higher price will be offered for
it in order that laborers may be attracted to it; that
lands now given to other products be given to cot-
ton; that owners of land on which ten-cent cotton
would not pay, shall have the inducement of higher
prices. So the additional two million bales are
produced. On this basis an increase shall be
(260)
a
THE EBB AND FLOW OF COTTON PRICES.
The drawing shows in vivid fashion the fluctuations in prices—highest and
lowest—of spot cotton for each year since 1826.
—
‘M1001 83B104g (qq) ‘M001 Sutuurdg (;)) !saAtyes9do {[Tur U07409 Jo dnois eB (q)
‘ur001eIe A (CY)
“AUOLOVA NOLLOO V LOAOUV ANV NI
COTTON 261
given, and the price we will say is now twelve cents.
But how will this advance in price affect that re-
ceived for the usual crop? It will cause it to ad-
vance also and meet the new scale in price.
It may happen that there are men enough and
equipment sufficient to produce not only the nor-
mal quantity but enough to handle additional acres
as well. When the call comes for more cotton it
may not be met, since all lands that pay at the ten-
cent rate are growing it already. hat happens?
The intensity of the demand will control. If it
is insisted upon, the grower will supply it through
heavier applications of fertilizers and through
increased acreage. But at what price shall he
sell it? He may sell it at the same price as he
has heretofore been selling. But if that grown on
good soil in previous years was produced and sold
for ten cents per pound, which in every sense was a
reasonable rate, then if he now sells this increased
product at the old price,—a product that costs him
more to produce since the yield is less and expense
more—he will sell the increased product at less
than cost, thereby losing in the enterprise.
To meet this condition brought about by opening
up new lands, the grower will have to take from
his normal and usual crop, returns to make good
the deficiency of the new. ‘This the wise man will
not do. On the other hand, this follows in practice:
Since more cotton is wanted, and since other acres
are not so profitable, in order to get the same profit
for the additional land as that received on other
lands before the enlarged demand came, every
grower will expect more per pound.
But the producing power of land does not govern
price—only directs it; it is the commodity itself
that fixes values, hence if twelve cents is paid for
262 COTTON
each pound produced on these less desirable lands,
the commodity in its entirety will bring the same
price, irrespective of the kind of land on which it
was produced. :
It follows then that not the cost of the average
crop, but the cost of growing that part of the crop
produced at the greater cost or greater disadvantage
wul govern the market price of cotton.
He who is so unfortunately situated as to grow
his cotton at the greatest disadvantage gets no
profit at all; while on the other hand profits go
in proportion as cotton is grown with ease and
economy.
THE RANGE OF THE COST
The statement is often made that cotton is grown
now at a cost of from three to four cents per pound,
and hence that there is a tremendous profit in the
business of cotton farming—a profit of as much as
two or even three hundred per cent. This being
the case, we hear further, cotton sells at an un-
reasonable price, and nets the producer a greater
reward than economic conditions justify.
That some cotton may be produced on some land
and during some seasons at three or four cents per
pound there is no doubt; but there is indeed a small
acreage where these conditions obtain. In no way,
we argue, is it justifiable to use these exceptional
seasons as a basis for estimating the cost of produc-
ing cotton or for measuring profits—any more than
itis justifiable to say that since some banking
houses in New York City make annual profits of
from 100 to 200 per cent, that is the profit realized
by all banks throughout the country. The facts are
COTTON 263
that on the basis of present acreage and cost of
production:
3 cents cost per pound represents 1% of acreage.
‘6 ce ce ee ce 66
4 . (24 6%
ee i eee
‘ €¢ 6 ¢
“ ce ee ‘ ‘ 287 ‘ ‘4
« ee ‘ 6 4
i ee € ee 16%
¢ ee “ee ee 66
8 | 0% 3
9 ee ¢¢é € ce ce fi ¢ ‘
74 ee ce “eé ce «e¢ 6¢
10 6%
ee ee [a4 ‘ “ese ee ce
11 3%,
ia 9 6 ¢e ce ee 6 ee
12 1%
(9)
This shows that even today when cotton sells
for ten cents a pound one-tenth of the acreage does
no more (possibly less) than meet the cost of pro-
ducing it. Sixty per cent of the crop costs between
5 and 7 cents to produce on the basis of mere cul-
tivation. ‘Thousands of acres of cotton are grown
annually where the product pays only the rental
and fertilizer bills, the tenant at the end of the sea-
son receiving no compensation at all for his labor
during the period of the growth of the crop. Were
it not for his poultry, his pig, his potato patch, his
few peas, and the extra work he does in the winter
months, he and his family would starve or be
thrown on the State. These are real facts, gath-
ered at first hand from observation and _ experi-
ence. Doubt them if you like; but if you observe
you will be convinced of their absolute truth.
After awhile we shall abandon these unprofit-
able acres; we shall give them over to cowpeas and
pasture, and use for cotton only those cane SO
adapted to the crop as to make it sure that they
will net a reasonable profit.
264 COTTON
NORMAL FLUCTUATION OF PRICES
Eliminating the waste of ignorance which plays
a part in cotton production because of the presence
of the illiterate tenant, when the price falls below
the cost of production because of overproduction,
poor producing lands are dropped from use; those
engaged in cotton farming receive smaller returns
and less cotton is produced until consumption in-
creases so as to use the product as rapidly as pro-
duced. Were one-fifth of the present acreage
to be puttosome other use, cotton would immediate-
ly advance in price: the four-fifths quantity would
yield in value a gross revenue perhaps equal to
or greater than the five-fifths at the present time
and at present prices, consumption remaining the
same all the while. On the other hand, were con-
sumption to decrease one-fifth and production re-
main the same, the price would decline until either
consumption should increase again or enough cot-
ton lands be abandoned to balance supply and
demand.
PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION
This adjustment between production and con-
sumption, as we have said, is regulated by the in-
evitable law of supply and demand, which at times
may be influenced by attachments with other com-
modities that may be or may not be substituted,
thus adding further complications to the situation.
So cotton growing and cotton spinning long have
been working partners; although they have had
their quarrels, they are fairly adjusted so that sup-
ply and demand operate within rather narrow
limits, conditions being in no wise open to serious
COTTON — 265
rupture. Acreage is gradually increasing, but so
also is the number of spindles; so also is the demand
for the products of these acres and spindles.
While during the past twenty-five years there
has been no great change in the price of the raw
product, it is true that the cost of farm labor has
increased with no appreciable decrease in the gen-
eral cost of production; it is true also that manufac-
tured goods have very greatly decreased in price,
while here the cost of production has materially
decreased because of increased skill in manufacture
and the increasingly large number of labor-saving
machines.
PRICES OF COTTON
That the selling price of cotton has not decreased
is seen in the table below; but let it be remembered
that few improved tools and implements have yet
been found of service in cotton production so as
to decrease the cost of growing.
HIGH AND LOW PRICES IN NEW YORK
FOR MIDDLING UPLAND COTTON
Highest | Lowest Highest Lowest
Year cents cents Year cents cents
1826 14 9 1836 20 12
1827 12 8 1837 17 7
1828 13 9 1838 12 9
1829 11 8 1839 16 11
1830 13 8 1840 10 8
1831 11 7 1841 i 9
1832 12 a 1842 9 fi
1833 17 9 1843 8 5
1834 16 10 1844 9 5
1835 20 15 1845 | 83 5
266 - COTTON
HIGH AND LOW PRICES IN NEW YORK
FOR MIDDLING UPLAND COTTON
(Continued)
Highest | Lowest
cents cents cents cents «
1846 | 10 6 | 1876) 188) ee
1847 | 12 7) 1807) 18
1848 8 Bo 1 PSN Wi raieet g4
1849 | 11 6 |) 1879. 4 uae 9
1850 | 14 11. |, 1880) 47°84.) ee
1851 | 14 8 i bSSbo Tes 10
1852 | 10 8 | 1882, |)
1853 | 11 10 |. 1888. | 114 ae
1854 | 10 8 | 1884 | 1127)
1855 | 12 8) 18850) enae 94
1856 | 138 9°11 1886 94 St
1857 | 15% O11 mS8Ri ae 94
1858 | 134 Bi |) ISBB UlLoimae 95
1859 | 122 | 108]. 1889 | 1124 93
1860) | 118. 1 140: - |). 1890). age 94
1861 38 114 1891 94 74
COTTON 267
It is seen here that the variation from lowest to
highest prices has remained quite the same since
1826, with the exception of the period of War and
Reconstruction. Of course this is a significant
fact; for while all other great products of the land
have decreased in selling price, cotton remains
the same (within normal fluctuations) during the
entire period. ‘This fact tells more forcibly than
all others of the kingship of this imperial crop and
the hold it has on all the world—a kingdom that
includes all land and sea in its borders, that num-
bers all people as subjects, and is richer than any
rival crop.
FLUCTUATION IN PRICES
Normally and theoretically, the law of supply
and demand regulates the yearly, monthly, and
daily price of cotton. With the advent of the Cot-
ton Exchange this has to a certain extent been
modified: its machinery has given us a more deli-
cate movement in price fluctuations. It is the
constant anticipation almost every minute—of the
play of this law on the Exchange that keeps the
“ticker” busy in suggesting movements and es-
tablishing prices for the staple. At times some
force, with little or with much power, may work
counter to this law with such intensity and
strength as to force the price up or down, but
_only for the time being, the pendulum of prices
shoving back, showing by its act its determination
that the law shall not long remain disturbed. It
is this feature of the cotton market that works
to the disadvantage of both farmer and spinner,
creating unstable situations, depressing prices for
the farmer, advancing them for the manufacturer,
268 COTTON
and giving the profit to the intermediary alien—the
cotton manipulator.
THE COTTON CONTRACT IS TO BE BLAMED
It is not our purpose here to discuss the ethical
phase of the cotton contract; rather simply to ob-
serve its practical workings. ‘The small margin
required for operations on the floor of the Exchange
ie into the hands of the speculator an unreason-
le amount of wealth altogether out of proportion
to hiscommitment. Said one of those in the game:
** You get a betterrun for your money than in poker,
in any game of chance, in any gamble.”
To particularize, here is an example: _ It is pos-
sible for a man with but $100 margin to buy or sell
in the office of a broker one hundred bales of cotton
for some future delivery. At the price of ten cents
per pound his tradings equal $5,000—and his cap-
ital $100. From its very nature this is speculation
of the rankest kind. Under this system it has been
shown that “‘a member of the New York Exchange
made contracts for the purchase of 300,000 bales
of cotton, worth at current prices then about $24,
000,000. ‘This enormous commitment was made
without the deposit of any cash guarantee or re-
sponsibility, and when default in the contracts was
announced it was liquidated at a loss of approxi-
mately $3,000,000 to the parties who sold the
cotton.”
Do you doubt that so long as such a system pre-
vails, extreme and unreasonable fluctuations in the
market will occur, and to the great disadvantage
of both producer and consumer? Such fluctua-
tions occur after the cotton has left the hands of the
ee ee ee ee)
COTTON 269
producer; he profits not by the increase in price,
nor does the consumer who must pay it.
WILL THE SELLING PRICE OF COTTON DECREASE?
Only the law of supply and demand will estab-
lish in the long run the selling price of cotton. This
law is no respecter of persons or of occupations.
Get production ahead and out of reach of demand
and prices will inevitably sink; get it below demand
and prices will advance just so far asthe commercial
safety valve will permit. A supply that is greater
than can be immediately consumed will depress
the price, regardless of the cost of production.
There is no respite; the law in the end will enforce
its own decrees.
The question now arises, “If supply and demand
are properly regulated and adjusted, will the nor-
mal price of cotton decrease ?”’
We think not, for the reason already discussed
in our consideration of those economic principles
that govern the cost of the raw product. It is true
that improved tools and implements will come;
fertilizers will be used more judiciously, and with
more economy ; improved methods will be adopted;
wastefulness and carelessness will be eliminated
more and more; and the cotton picker will probably
come to gather the cotton more cheaply—all will
contribute to the lessening of the expense now
prominent in cotton production. But these savings
will not be deducted from the selling end—they
will go to the producer. And why?
1. The laborer or tenant, negro or white, is more
poorly fed, lives in a shabbier home, has fewer
comforts and luxuries, receives a smaller wage,
than the laborer or worker in almost any other
270 COTTON
form of industry in this country. Hence, as profits
are increased because of savings in production, the
laborer and tenant will receive better compensation.
2. The cotton planter will receive his proportion
as a légitimate reward for his labor and capital.
Itistrue that many cotton farmers are making
money ; they are improving their lands, their houses,
their stock and their equipment; they are building
better churches and educating their children. As
these increase, they call for better incomes to sup-
port them; so the saving in cost will go to the plant-
er for greater comforts for himself and his family
and for reasonable luxuries as well.
TEN CENT COTTON IS NOT UNREASONABLE
Most arguments one hears about the price of cot-
ton are in the main to the effect that cotton sells
for more than it is worth.
There are many stages of profit from lint on the
farm to cloth in the retail store. Nowhere, how-
ever, is profit discussed except in reference to lint
on the farm. Here are the facts in the case: A
one-horse farm of twenty acres produces 4,000
pounds of cotton which sells at ten cents. This
gives the farmer a gross income of $400. Looking
at this from the most optimistic viewpoint, that
farmer did not clear on this twenty acres more than
$80, and out of this must come interest, mainte-
nance and accumulative gain. ‘The manufacturer
takes that cotton and from the 4,000 pounds he
manufactures 16,000 yards of calico, which sells
for $800 gross. ‘Take it that there is but a small
fraction of profit on the yard, when considered in
connection with the great quantities handled, his
profit is no small amount. From the manufacturer
a a
COTTON 271
the goods go to the jobber, and at last to the counter
in the dry goods store. What are profits here?
Sixteen thousand yards at 5 cents per yard cost
$800; that number of yards sold at 74 cents brings
gross $1200—a profit as great to the retail merchant
as the price the farmer receives for his entire crop.
THE CONTROL OF PRODUCTION
Is it right for the producer to control the output
of his commodity? Why not? So long as supply
is more than demand, is 1t wrong in principle to
waste capital, and energy and life in producing it ?
More than this, 5,000,000 people are directly in-
terested in the production of cotton crops. When
you flood the market with raw material, and send it
forth in larger quantities than spindles can use,
you disturb the stability of trade and menace the
peace and happiness of these five million souls.
Is there noinjury here? Greater evils, moreover,
sweep over the land—even in other directions—if
more cotton is produced than can be used by a
consuming world. It is good business, good prac-
tice, good morals, to move supply and demand
along together, as they now move, and this can
continue only by controlling the supply, for the
present, increasing it as demand calls for more.
So long as the manufacturer, the broker, the
merchant live in costly houses; so long as the spin-
ner, the weaver, the clerks enjoy comforts in dress
and live easily, so long should no one complain
that the cotton farmer and his tenant likewise have
similar comforts and luxuries.
SECTION IV.
MANUFACTURES AND BY-PRODUCTS
l
CHAPTER XXX.
COTTON SEED: ONCE AN OUTCAST NOW A PRINCE
When cotton is gathered it consists of both fiber
and seed. ‘These two products grow together, the
fiber out of the seed, and remain together until the
gin separatesthem. Up tothis point the combined
products are known as seed cotton. From the gin,
lint or fiber (or cotton as it is now called), leaves in
the bale to be returned to the farm, or goes direct to
the market for immediate sale.
The seed, however, are still the property of the
farmer, and may be carried back to the farm,
where they are valuable for feed or fertilizer, or they
may be sold to the oil mill. As a matter of fact,
about one-third of the cotton seed supply is now
sold to the oil mill, to be converted into oil, meal
and hulls, and the remaining two-thirds are car-
ried back to the farm for feed, fertilizer, and a
smaller quantity for seed for the next year’s crop.
At one time cotton seed were altogether wasted:
manurial value was not considered; and as afeed they
had never a thought. In many places in the old
days cotton gins were purposely built on streams in
order that the water might carry away the great ac-
cumulations of supposedly worthless seed; and in
(275)
276 COTTON
some States laws were passed requiring ginners to
clear away the seed, the rotting piles otherwise be-
coming offensive to the neighbors!
Now, however, the value of this part of the crop
has assumed enormous proportions, and offers a
revenue to the Southern farmer not inconsiderable,
even when compared with the value of cotton lint
itself.
Seed cotton contains about one-third lint and
two-thirds seed. The crop of 1905 of 10,697,013
bales of cotton would mean about 5,850,000 tons
of seed. This valued at $16.00 per ton, a reasonable
estimate, gives us a commercial value of $88,600,000
intheraw state, while this value of course is greatly
increased in the finished product.
And to think that this product as we have just
said once rotted at the gin or was washed away in
creeks and rivers—forever lost to the soil and to the
world!
WHAT IS IN A TON OF SEED COTTON
Only an estimate can be made, since the pro-
portion of lint to seed varies with different varieties
and different soils; but taking the general rule that
*‘cotton thirds itself,’ in one ton of seed cotton
there should be 665 pounds of lint and 1335 pounds
of seed. This seed would yield when prepared
and manufactured about 489 pounds of meal, 18
pounds of linters, 187 pounds of oil, 561 pounds of
hulls, and 80 pounds of waste material such as
water, dust, and sand.
With the exception of the waste, all of these are
commercial commodities, and to-day find markets
wherever fertilizers are used, live stock are grown,
or civilized people are known.
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COTTON SEED HULLER.
The hulls are used for cattle food, the oil extracted from the meats, and the
meal kept for feeding and fertilizing. ‘‘If cotton made no lint, the seed alone would
justify its culture.”
ee CO Cr CC CTC Ch CU
COTTON 277
WHAT A TON OF SEED CONTAINS
Clearly to understand the value of cotton seed,
we must consider the products made from them and
the forms available for market use. ‘These factors
are obtained from the actual results ofthe oil mill.
When treated for manufacture we get thefollowing:
COTTON SEED—2000 POUNDS
(A.) Linters—27 pounds.
(B.) Hulls—841 pounds.
(1.) Bran—Feeding Stuffs.
(2.) Fiber—High Grade Paper.
(3.) Fuel—Ashes and Fertilizer.
(C.) Meats—1012 pounds.
(1.) Cake—732 pounds.
(a.) Meal.
(1.) Feeding Stuff.
(2.) Fertilizer.
(2.) Crude oil—280 pounds.
(a.) Soap Stock—soaps.
(6.) Summer Yellow.
(1.) Winter Yellow.
(2.) Salad oil.
(3.) Cotton Lard.
(4.) Cottolene.
(5.). Miners’ oil.
(6.) Soap.
THE OIL MILL AND THE FARMER
It has been shown that the farmer may either
sell his seed to the oil mill or use them at home.
Certainly they can be profitably used on the farm.
Cotton seed are not like such perishable products as
fruits or vegetables,—which must be sold quickly
278 COTTON
leaving the farmer to take such prices as are offered
without regard to the cost of production. In this
case you can use your seed, if you cannot sell them
on the market for what they are worth.
The fertilizing value is one measure of value and
a governing principle in estimating the worth per
bushel or the basis of exchange for meal.
Estimating values of cotton seed and cotton-
seed meal on the same basis as the cost of the in-
gredients in regular fertilizing materials used on
the cotton farm, we get the following:
One Ton Cotton Seed
Ammonia, 75,1bs:(@ 13. 5e) 4. ae ee ee $10.13
Phosphoric Acid, 26 Ibs. @ 5 cts; 1.238 1.30
Potash; 24 Tbs::(@) 3:50¢.) (0). os See 1.32
Fertihzing \Value;...).'. 9: sce ae $12.75
This represents the actual worth of the potential
plant food in one ton of seed. Allowing the same
values for cost of the several ingredients in cotton-
seed meal we get the following:
One Ton Cottonseed Meal
Ammonia, 150 lbs. @ 13.5: .5.a) ae $20.25
Phosphoric Acid,: 56:lbs. @ 5e..o....ee 2.80
Potash, 35 Ths: @sS:5e) 2). «2h ee ee 1.95
Fertinzing Value: 0... 3.02 ae $25.00
Putting this in form of a proportion we have
$25: 00) SIS TOV cx Pee
Or,
Value of meal : value seed :: 1.9 : 1.
In other words, cottonseed meal when sold for
COTTON 279
$25.00 a ton contains just about twice as much
fertilizing value as cotton seed. On a basis of 66
bushels of seed in a ton the value per bushel of seed
is twenty cents. This price makes an even ex-
change, without allowing the farmer anything for
hauling seed to the oil mill. When you sell seed for
less than 20 cents per bushel, you actually give
more than you get in return. It follows that you
should always receive as much as twenty-five cents
per bushel when meal sells for $25.00 per ton.
ON BASIS OF EXCHANGE
But as a matter of fact you should never dispose
of your seed except on a basis of exchange. Your
soil cannot stand the continual drain upon it, if the
seed are sold and nothing is put back to restore the
fertility they draw from the land. All seed taken
from the soil by the growing crop, should be re-
turned to it either in form of seed, meal, or cattle
manure. Since the oil in the seed has no fertilizing
value, and isof no use to the farmer, he can ex-
change this oil for meal, the product of more
especial value to him. But on what basis of ex-
change? As we have mentioned before, for fer-
tilizing purposes meal is slightly less than twice
as valuable as seed; but you cannot haul your seed
to the oil mill and then haul the meal to your home
without some compensation. ‘This compensation
should therefore be in the form of extra meal. Just
what that amount shall be will depend on the dis-
tance, condition of roads, and the composition of
meal. In a general way it may be said that you
should receive at least 1100 pounds of meal in ex-
change for a ton of seed, and an additional
amount to compensate you for your trouble,
280 ' COTTON
labor, and expense, incidental to making the
exchange.
COTTON HULLS
From each ton of seed about 800 or 900 pounds
of hulls are obtained. These hulls are used for
fuel and for feed for live stock. The increased
demand for the latter purpose practically calls now
for the whole output, although it has been but a
few years since practically all of the hulls were
burned. Everywhere through the South cotton
hulls are fed to cattle and mules, and in many
Co they form the major part of the roughage
actor of the daily ration. Hulls are palatable, and
in one way are nutritious, since they furnish
nutrients that go to make heat and fat. Com-
paratively speaking, their feeding value may be
ranked as being about half that of ordinary grass
hay. In composition they are almost as well-
balanced as this hay, although they contain but a
small quantity of digestible protein—the muscle
maker. ‘The entire oil mill output of this product
readily finds a sale at from $3.00 to $6.00 per ton.
COTTON SEED MEAL
In every ton of seed there are about 732 pounds
of meal, used exclusively for fertilizing and feeding
purposes. Cottonseed meal is the most concen-
trated of our vegetable feeding stuffs. It is ex-
tremely rich in protein, a nutrient of especial im-
portance for feeding all classes of farm animals.
As a feed for beef and dairy cattle, cottonseed
meal is especially popular. Considering the
digestible nutrients it contains, it is the cheapest
aa = i
ee
COTTON 281
feeding stuff on the market today. Sooner or later
this fact will be appreciated and as a consequence
its commercial value will advance because of the
increasing demand for it as a cattle food. This
will also mean a saving to the South, for if the
manure is properly cared for, there is little loss of
fertilizing value from the original raw material.
A PRACTICAL QUESTION IN CONCLUSION
Used as a fertilizer we get but one profit from
cottonseed meal. *
Used as a feed and the manure saved, we get two
profits.
Which shall we choose?
CHAPTER XXXI.
COTTON OIL : THE KING FEEDS AS WELL AS CLOTHES
HIS SUBJECTS
The cotton oil mill does not take simply the seed
and grind them, putting them in better form for
fertilizing and feeding purposes, but it removes
from the seed the property that for these purposes
is more objectionable than serviceable. For oil
in the seed, for feeding to live stock, is unfavorable
to digestion, especially where any considerable
quantity is used; in no sense is it of use to the soil,
nor does it serve as a source of food or show itself
of any use to the plant. Consequently it is of
advantage to the farmer to have the oil extracted
from his seed—the other ingredients being returned
to him—simply as a means of preparing his product
for use and leaving out of consideration the thought
that he is reimbursed for his time and labor.
THE RISE OF THE OIL MILL
The oil mill at first came slowly into favor. A
ood many decades ago attempts were made to
establish mills; for vegetable oils have long been
in demand; and then, too, there was promise of
profits in the business. While at first a few mills
were established by individuals or independent
corporations, the cotton oil business was developed
into large proportions by a single large company.
Naturally, however, ie of this company
Ee
COTTON 283
brought rival companies into the field, and to-day
wherever cotton is grown there are mills of various
sizes converting raw seed into crude oil, meal and
hulls.
THE PROCESS OF MANUFACTURING
Seed are gathered wherever obtainable and then
delivered at the oil mill. Arriving here they are
shoveled into a basket elevator which empties into
a conveyor in the top of the building, and from
thence they are distributed wherever storage room
is available. Seed are now screened so as to get
rid of bolls and other impurities, sand, dust, ete.
This process of cleaning is the first step in the
production of oil. Now seed go to the linters,
where the short fibres are removed; and from here
they go to the huller—a contrivance fitted with
sets of knives that cut the seed into many small
pieces. ‘The heavier part of the seed, the meat,
drops out and goes in one direction, while the hulls
are carried in another. ‘This operation is further
perfected by having all of the droppings pass
through sieves or screens which allow the meats to
go through, but retain the greater part of the hulls.
The hulls are next sent to places where they may
be stored away, or carried to the press for baling.
The meat now passes through a series of rollers
intended to crush the particles and cells. From
here it goes to heaters and kettles, and is cooked,
the time of this cooking varying from 15 to 40
minutes according to the judgment of the cook, and
the condition of the seed.
When this operation has been completed the
meats are placed in a hydraulic press where the oil
284 MN © id MAING Ss
is pressed out, and the other ingredients moulded
into cakes.
The operation now required to complete the
work consists of preparing the crude oil for the
refinery and the cake for commerce. For con-
sumption in our country nearly the whole of the
cake is ground, putting it into a better form both
for feeding and fertilizing purposes.
THE SIZE OF MILL
The cost of transportation and seed storage is
one disadvantage in the process of manufacturing
oil and meal. But this difficulty is now overcome
by the multiplication of small oil mills,—local
enterprises springing up all over the Cotton Belt
and each doing the work of its own community.
And (what is true of few other lines of manufac-
turing) the small oil mill does the work about as
efficiently and economically as the large one.
The small mill in fact has a peculiar advantage
in that it has the interested support of the farmers
of the neighborhood. It should be as much a part
of the community, and should be operated in the
service of the farmers just as much as is the co-
operative creamery or the local flour mill in our
Western States. The community mill will get its
seed almost entirely from the neighborhood, and
meal and hulls will, or should be, entirely used by
the farmers of the community; consequently there
is no freight to pay on seed or on their products.
The item of storage is of considerable conse-
quence, since a chain of delivery can be arranged
that will keep the mill at work, and not require
large quantities of seed to be kept on hand at any
time.
COTTON 285
The small mill consumes all the way from two to
five thousand tons of seed each season and may use
as much as 25 to 50 tons each day. At the promi-
nent railroad centers are mills of larger capacity—
using from 150 to 200 tons of seed daily, or from
twenty to fifty thousand tons each season. These
make large profits since seed can be shipped from
any distance and the product delivered without
great expense to the mill.
As a commercial enterprise, this is all very well,
but the seed is the product of the farm, and should
be consumed on the farm; there is no other system
that is not actual land-robbing. Consequently,
from its nature the oil mill is still a local factor, a
community factor, and a farm factor, and is just as
important in the disposition of this part of the
cotton crop as is the shredding machine or the
threshing machine for the diposition of the corn
or wheat crop, the only difference being that
the mill is stationary and we carry the seed to it,
while shredding and threshing machines go
through the community and work on each in-
dividual farm.
With this idea accepted, it clearly follows that
the cotton oil mill is indispensably connected with
the community, and sooner or later the local co-
operative enterprise must become the rule wher-
ever cotton is grown.
CRUDE OIL
The operations of the oil mill have to do with the
production of cake and hulls on one hand, and with
the production of oil on the other. We may say
that the mill itself came as a means of securing oil
from the seed, and that meal and hulls are a by-
286 COTTON
product of this manufacture rather than primary
objects. But so valuable have these two commod-
ities become that their importance is now even
greater than that of the oil itself.
Oil as it leaves the press is known as crude oil,
and has not a great many uses until it passesthrough
the refinery for the completion of the manufac-
turing process. While we can have a number of
oil mills and while these may be small in size, the
refining mill is so complicated as to be very expen-
sive, difficult of operation, with running expenses
further heightened because costly labor must be
used. But we do not need so many refineries.
The great bulk of the raw seed necessitates a large
number of oil mills, not only because of money
saved in freight, but because of the fact that with
many local mills the farmers can readily dispose of
their seed or secure meal in exchange for them.
Oil, on the other hand, is a very concentrated
product. From a ton of seed something like forty
gallons of oil are obtained. It readily follows that
the oil contained in a great number of tons of cotton
seed can be transported in the same bulk space as is
required for one ton of raw seed.
So from all directions in the State crude oil may
go to some one or more central points to be refined,
and from these points distributed for manufacture
into commercial products.
In the process of getting oil in its crude form two
products result: crude oil proper, and the settlings
or “foots” as they are called. The first named
product is drawn off and goes to the refining tank,
from whence it is barreled for shipment. The
settlings usually go back to heater tanks and are
either pressed again or barreled and shipped as
soap stock.
COTTON 287
OIL IN THE REFINING TANK
Crude oil when taken from the settling tanks
may be either shipped direct to refineries, or if, as
is often the case, a refinery is located in connection
with the oil mill, it may be refined at once.
In the refining process oil is heated gently,
stirred constantly, and treated freely with air which
enters through a perforated pipe at bottom. Im-
purities are still present in the crude oil, and these
are partially gotten rid of through the free use of
caustic soda or potash; this coagulates them,
causing them to collect and fall to the bottom of
the tank. The next step is to draw off the oil and
make the final preparation for its shipment. Be-
fore it can go, however, it must be washed with
water in order that the potash may be dissolved
and removed. Since oil is lighter than water,
separation gradually takes place in the mixture and
the oil slowly rises to the top where it is carefully
drawn off, at last to be filtered and put into barrels.
WHAT IS MADE FROM THE OIL
Refined oil is known as “summer yellow” and of
course, is of a higher commercial value than the
crude oil. Prime summer yellow is known as
butter oil, and is largely used in the manufacture of
oleomargarine, butterine and even as an adulterant
for butter itself.
The highest grade of summer yellow is often
subjected to cold pressure, which gives a product
known as salad oil for cooking, dressing, and other
household products. ‘Then, too, large quantities
of summer yellow have for a long time found their
way into Italy where it is treated, to be sent later to
288 COTTON
all the world as dlive oil. The greater part of
our so-called olive oil now used in this country
bears absolutely no relation to the olive tree, but
is simply high grade summer yellow especially
treated, and labeled as genuine olive oil.
Summer yellow is also treated with bleaching
powder, which removes the yellow color, and it is
then used in the manufacture of compound lard
and like materials. So popular has it become in
this form, that it is now manufactured under its
own name or as cottolene.
Winter white oil is the same product but cold
pressed. It is used in many ways from the manu-
facture of medicinal compounds to oil for the
miner’s lamp.
In numerous other ways does this refined cotton
oil product supply the wants of man; and it seems
likely that we have only just begun to appreciate
its value and that in future we shall have use for
greater quantities, much of the product to be used
in directions not yet even dreamed of.
ITS USE IN ADULTERATING INEXCUSABLE
Cottonseed oil has its own work to do, its own
place to fill. Its value is too great, too important,
too manifest, for us to wish to see it fraudulently
used. There is no line of argument to justify the
sending of cotton oil or any of its manufactured
products into the world under false names save to
ask praise and reward intended for something
else—losing withal the renown and the reward that
its own merits justify.
This adulterating practice has been carried
entirely toofar. Cottonseed oil may make as good
salad dressing as olive oil, but it should be sold
COTTON 289
under its own name and not as olive oil; it may be
made into good “‘butter’’ but since the cow has a
copyright on that name, no other product has
either a commercial or moral right to use it; it may
be as good as hog lard, but it has no right to the
name of either hog or lard.
So this masquerading under names of old estab-
lished products has brought cotton oil into more
disrepute than all its deficiencies have ever done;
or to put it more vividly, cotton oil, with its good
qualities masquerading under false names, its
less useful forms appearing under its own name,
- has thereby surrendered to other products much of
the praise its merits deserve and has kept for
itself all the blame of its shortcomings.
Cotton oil has merits enough of its own to stand
on its own bottom and to fight its own battles. As
soon as those responsible for its evil ways realize
this, the better it will be for the commodity.
THE SIZE OF THE INDUSTRY
Estimating the 1905 cotton crop at 10,697,013
bales of lint the production of seed would be nearly
or quite five million three hundred and fifty thous-
and tons. On the supposition (and this is the
evidence of the past) that two-thirds of these will
go back to the farm, the other third used at the oil
mill, we have nearly one million seven hundred and
eighty-five thousand tons for the mills. On the
basis of forty gallons of oil in each ton we will
have the enormous production of more than
seventy-one million gallons of oil from our 1905
cotton crop. This, when sold in crude form at
twenty cents per gallon brings to the mills of the
South fourteen million two hundred and eighty
thousand dollars for oil alone.
CHAPTER XXXII.
MEAL AND HULLS: KING COTTON ALSO FEEDS
OUR FLOCKS AND HERDS
The correct solution of the cotton seed question
is the use of the cotton oil mill, whether privately
installed or by co-operative endeavor, for every
community. ‘To this mill all seed should be
brought except what is saved for the next year’s
crop, that the oil—otherwise useless and wasted—
may be extracted and put on the market asa com-
mercial product; the by-products—meal and
seed—should then be returned to the farms from
which they were taken. On each farm then there
will be the equivalent of the seed, but now in the
form of meal and hulls, to take the place of the
fertility withdrawn from the soil by the cotton
crop.
The meal and hulls should not be returned to
the soil in their organized and original condition,
however, but first fed to live stock, so as to secure
the finished product-making begun with the fac-
tory, further extended to the oil mill, and now
completed on the factory-farm. For the farm is
a factory: and factory-farming should be your plan
of operating.
HOW THE PLANT WORKS
The cotton plant, you know, feeds from soil and
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COTTON 291
air. It lives on disorganized materials. While it
enjoys a ration in which cottonseed meal forms a
lode yet it does not use this material before nature
as rotted or decomposed its component parts.
The same amount of effort that nature uses in doing
this work, live stock may give, and to their profit.
In other words, what is food for the plant is not
food for the animal; what is food for the animal
is not food for the plant. In other words, just as
the oil mill takes the oil from the seed, and yet
turns back to the farmer all the elements of the
seed that he can _ utilize, so the animal takes
from the seed certain properties useful to it, and
yet returns to the soil practically all the matter
the soil could utilize for its enrichment. Meal is
food for the animal but not food for the plant,
until nature does to it precisely what the animal
does to it. This is to decompose it. The animal
is benefited because it grows and becomes fat in
breaking up the organized forms of meal and fat.
When the animal gets through with its work, it
returns the fertilizing elements to the soil in the
form of liquid and solid excrement.
THE FACTORY FARM
The cattle industry should be a part of cotton
farming; not simply to raise feeding stuffs on the
farm, but to change these from the raw state into
finished forms. ‘That is what any factory does:
the cotton factory, for example, takes raw cotton
and makesit into finished products. Onthe factory-
farm the cotton farmer will take his meal, hulls,
grasses, corn stover and hays, and manufacture
them into such finished products as milk, butter,
cheese and beef, For we lose one of the import-
292 COTTON
ant values of our meal when it is used simply as
a fertilizing stuff: we lose the tissue form that
plants in their growing made.
Now, we use our meal largely as a fertilizing
material. We estimate that value at $25.00 per
ton. But the dairy farmer and the beef farmer
find cottonseed meal an invaluable food at that
price. Hence it must have both a feeding and a
fertilizing value.
Let us see: does butter or milk or cheese or beef
use the fertilizing material of the meal? Surely
not, for in a whole ton of butter, but 48 cents of
fertility is found. In a ton of milk but $2.80
of fertility is found. Does it go in the dairy stock ?
Of course not, else these dairy animals today
would be as large as houses or barns. ‘The
material they used found its way back again
to the soil. First it went into the feed lot, and the
barn-yard, or wherever excrement dropped. But
if not wasted it is in the land. Experiments show
that after allowing for various quantities used by
the animal products, such as butter, milk, beef and
the like, and legitimate wastes that naturally fol-
low the management of cattle, fully three-fourths
of the original fertility may be saved and returned
to the soil.
THE DOUBLE VALUE OF MEAL AND HULLS
We therefore have two values: one for feeding,
and one for fertilizmg. ‘This may be expressed
as follows:
Value as a feeding stuff............ $25.00
Value as: a fertilizer. 2.5.20. 220 18.75
Total: valle’. Soe i ee ee $43.75
SO — ee eee Oe
COTTON 293
When cottonseed meal is used simply as a fertil-
izer, therefore, there is a loss of $18.75 on every
ton thus utilized—$18.75 a ton actually thrown.
away by the cotton farmer who is not thrifty
enough to raise stock and to get all the profits from
his seed. ‘There is no proposition less open to
argument than that on every farm on which meal
is used as a fertilizer, we should first feed that meal
to cattle so as to secure the double value.
And then also bear in mind that our cotton lands
need animal manures, more than fertilizers, for
whenever and wherever used, stable manures show
a greater efficiency than their actual nitrogen,
phosphorus, and potassium content would indicate.
This is because they supply humus so much needed
by all our lands, sick as they are from the one-
crop system.
Much of the meal now produced in the South
finds its way to the dairy farms of Germany,
England and the northern and western parts of
our own country.
Rich in protein, which is the basis of milk pro-
duction, meal is naturally winning much favor as
a dairy ration. A dairy cow with a capacity of
three gallons of milk daily, requires two and one-
half pounds of digestible protein. She can get
this only from the protein of the food she con-
sumes. Oil or starch or fiber will not make pro-
tein. You cannot convert lead into gold by any
process, nor can you take foods like timothy hay,
orchard grass, corn stover, corn and like products,
and make them furnish protein for the milk ration.
Cottonseed meal stands foremost of all vegetable
feeding stuffs in the quantity of digestible protein it
contains. It follows then, that the cotton farmer,
since he produces meal and since he produces the
294. COTTON
most valuable dairy food, should combine dairy
farming with cotton farming. In this way double
profits may be made and cotton lands may be im-
proved.
EFFECT OF COTTONSEED MEAL ON BUTTER
When meal is fed as a part or as the whole of
the concentrate of a dairy ration, it raises the
melting point of butter. As a matter of fact, cot-
tonseed meal makes a harder butter than any
other feed. A number of tests have been made,
and the value of cottonseed meal as a superior
butter-producing food is proved beyond all doubt.
When fed in combination with hulls with no other
feeding stuffs, a relatively inferior butter is pro-
duced, but when combined with such materials
as corn ensilage, corn stover, and cowpea hay,
no better butter can be made by any feeding ration
in the world.
THE VALUE OF MEAL AS A DAIRY FOOD
It is not stating the case too strongly to say
that as a food for dairy cows cottonseed meal is
superior to all others. When compared with
wheat bran, the importance and value of which is
known wherever butter is made, cottonseed meal
increases the quantity of milk one-fifth. When
compared with corn meal, the milk production is
greatly increased. This is evidence enough to
show that the value of cottonseed meal as a dair
food is not yet generally appreciated, and that for
years to come, constantly increasing quantities
will be used by wide-awake dairymen.
MEAL AND HULLS FOR BEEF PRODUCTION
Already the beef industry is assuming consid-_
COTTON 295
erable proportions in the Cotton States, but when
its present condition is compared with its real
possibilities, what we have already done is quite
inconsiderable indeed. Meal and hulls make up
the bulk of the required fattening ration. To
combine these two feeding stuffs, put them about
in proportion of one pound of meal to four of
hulls. As soon as the taste 1s acquired, both feeds
are eaten with eagerness and with relish.
But best results are not obtained by this sort of
feeding. Cattle, like ourselves, enjoy and profit
by variety in food. Meal and hulls should be
combined with other feeding materials such as
ensilage, corn stover, cowpeas, hay, etc.
We cannot go far in this study of the feeding
value of cotton by-products without accepting the
indisputable proposition that the South will never
make the money from its great staple that it ought
to make until we find on every farm feeding steers
and other cattle to utilize the meal and hulls that
we bring from the oil mill in exchange for our seed.
EFFECT OF COTTONSEED MEAL ON STEER FAT
Tests have been made in which cottonseed meal
has been compared with corn and which show that
meal produces a fat having a higher melting point
than that of corn-fed steers. The evidence of
butchers and packers is in favor of cottonseed-
meal-fed cattle.
The best quality of beef and beef fat, however,
is produced when the animals get the meal in con-
nection with other concentrates and roughage
materials.
296 COTTON
EASE OF FATTENING BEEVES WITH COTTONSEED
MEAL
Beef that meets the ideal for the plate must con-
tain lean meat as well as fat. To give the highest
satisfaction it must be marbled—have both lean
and fat. Lean meat comes from the protein of the
food, fat from the fat and carbohydrates of the
food. This being the case, cottonseed meal and
hulls possess the three materials for making beef
possessing these two qualities. It is impossible
to make better beef than when the cattle are given
meal and hulls combined with corn ensilage or
corn stover.
HOW CORN AND MEAL COMPARE AS FATTENING
FOODS
In the popular mind corn represents the highest
ideal as a grain and fattening food. On many
farms meal is exchanged for Western corn, the
owner thinking the latter a superior food, in fact
regarding it as indispensable for live stock of any
kind; and so he disposes of his home grown prod-
ucts rich in digestible nutrients and high in fer-
tilizing materials, buys corn in exchange (with
freight charges and dealer’s profits added) corn
being indeed a food of high quality for fattening
purposes, but very low indeed in fertilizing value.
What are the facts on this point as revealed by
feeding tests ?
In Station tests, one pound of cottonseed has been
found to equal in feeding value—beef producing
value—1.13 pounds of corn meal; in other words,
for feeding beef cattle preparatory to the market,
cottonseed is superior to corn meal.
COTTON 297
When cottonseed meal was compared with corn
meal, pound for pound, it was proved conclusively
that 1.73 pounds of corn meal were required to
produce the same weight of beef as one pound of
cottonseed meal produced.
This shows that in beef production one ton of
cottonseed meal is equal to 1.73 tons of corn meal.
Hence for feeding purposes, when corn is worth
fifty cents per bushel or $18.00 per ton, cottonseed
meal is worth $30.80 in beef production.
Can the cotton farmer longer neglect the cattle
industry, when he has in his own hand the feed
which is most efficient and at the same time the
least expensive and which possesses the richest
manurial effects ?
Cattle raising should go hand in hand with cotton
culture. When so combined, they afford an ideal
system of agriculture and more completely blend
in promoting both profits and the maintenance of
fertility than any other sort of land and animal
management. We cannot too often emphasize the
fact that the opportunity of the South lies in this
direction.
Will you take it up or permit it to pass by, as you
have been doing heretofore ?
Let the idea prevail all the time that fertilizers
can be purchased best in the form of cattle foods;
take a dollar and buy concentrates like meal and
hulls, and first feed these, using the voidings and
waste for the manurial effect on the land. You
must not get away from this fundamental fact that
the meal and hulls contain two values—one for
feeding and one for fertilizing—and that in using
them as a fertilizer alone, you are deliberately
throwing away one profit—$18.75 for every ton of
the meal.
298 COTTON
MEAL AND HULLS FOR HORSES AND MULES
Horses and mules may be fed moderate quantities
of meal and hulls with great advantage. No
danger attaches to the use of hulls, but meal has
always been fed rather sparingly. In recent years
many experiments have been conducted which show
that meal can form a part of the grain ration both
profitably and satisfactorily. From two to four
pounds may be used daily, although it is best not to
make it a constant and regular diet.
COTTONSEED MEAL FOR CALVES AND PIGS
For reasons unknown meal seems not to be a de-
sirable feeding stuff for calves and pigs. For a few
weeks meal may be fed with impunity, but there
soon comes a time when bad results follow—some-
times death.
WE NEED MORE LIVE STOCK
While there is profit today in the razor-back hog,
the long-legged, thin back, scrub steer, and the light
carcassed wether, we need more animals and
better animals.
The by-products of our oil mills are not fully
consumed: we need more catile and sheep to utilize
these materials. Of course, meal and hulls are no
longer wasted ;if the Cotton Belt is unable to utilize
the product, the rest of the world is eager to secure
it. But why should the South permit this? Its
lands suffer, since a ton of its meal when shipped
away, means just so much valuable plant food, so
much actual Cotton Belt soil-richness, sent else-
where to build up lands in some other State. So
COTTON 299
long as butter and cheese and beef come to the
South by express and freight, there is a demand, an
opportunity, for the production of these commod-
ities in Southern territory.
Until every cotton farm possesses foundation
stock for cattle and sheep and swine breeding,
there are too few animals; until enough are raised
to supply local markets, and to consume locally
raised feeds, the live stock supply is short—and the
cotton farmer fails to realize his opportunity for
wealth and prosperity.
WE NEED BETTER GRADES OF STOCK
It is sadly true that the live stock of the Cotton
Belt is extremely inferior. The average cow
produces but 2,000 pounds of milk annually; the
average steer matures in four or five years, and then
only with a weight of 800 or 900 pounds.
Is growing this kind of stock economy?
Do you cultivate your corn with a hoe or with a
cultivator? Do you harvest your wheat with a
sickle or with a harvester? Do you separate seed
by hand or use the gin? Do you even travel long
distances now on horse-back, or do you go on the
steam car?
Surely not. You use the most up-to-date tools
and implements, and follow modern methods in
everything but your live-stock machines: for the old
scrub cow and scrub steer are simply out-of-date
machines.
More live stock then, and better, that the South
may feed its own meal, to make its own butter, its
own cheese, its own milk, its own meat: to get not
only the profit of growing cotton and other feeding
stuffs, but a profit in feeding it by means of the
300 COTTON
manufactured products it makes. So true is this
it requires no one to champion. the reasonableness
of the proposition; rather it should be the effort of
every farmer, whether he possesses a few acres or
many, to try to grow not only cotton, not only
roughage material like peas and corn and meal and
hulls, but live stock as well, that the by-products of
his many crops may combine with others to produce
milk and meat and butter and cheese; and at the
same time produce a large quantity of home-made
manures to rejuvenate and to build-up cotton lands.
This is the great thought in the true philosohpy
of farming; it is the magic key that unlocks the
door to successful effort; it is the introduction to the
throne of agricultural prosperity, and the beginning
of a better and fuller life on the farm.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE RISE OF COTTON MANUFACTURING
From time immemorial cotton has been used in
the manufacture of textile fabrics for man,
furnishing clothing for his body and sundry home
comforts. It was not until acentury or two ago,
however, that its use for this purpose began to
assume large proportions. Many important dis-
coveries had first to be made; many great inven-
tions perfected, before cotton could be manufac-
tured so as to supply human wants at a cost in
labor commensurate with the value of the fabric
made.
But so important a fiber, with such tremendous
opportunities for large production, was not long to
go undeveloped and unused, when man, reaching
that stage in civilization where he should have need
for it, adopted it as a rich find; pressed it into
service at once; put his ever-ready genius to master
the problems of its production, its culture, its
manufacture, until the day should come when to
it, more than to all other fibers combined, attention
and skill and labor should be given.
THE BEGINNINGS OF COTTON MANUFACTURE
The first factory was the cottage home. Long
before the coming of the cotton factory, cotton was
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302 COTTON
known to a limited extent to England and to other
countries of average civilization. Cotton possessed
value as a textile fabric. And that these advan-
tages were early appreciated there can be no doubt,
since it was readily used whenever it could be
obtained. Naturally, however, there could be no
large growth solong asthe supply varied constantly.
We must understand, however, that for a century
or more cotton had been used in a limited way for
the weft or transverse threads of the web;the warp,
or longitudinal threads, being of linen yarn, pro-
duced mainly in Germany and Ireland. Cotton
factories were of course unknown in those days,
weaving being largely done in the homes of the
weavers. This cotton-linen fabric was, during
these times, made in these cottage homes, and later
carried to the market, to which points the city
merchants came and made their purchases.
Sometime about the middle of the eighteenth
century we find the beginning of a new era, when
merchants began to send agents into the country to
develop this embryonic but isolated factory system.
The plan as introduced and carried out, secured
linen for warp, and cotton for weft as had been used
before; but now the merchants (through their
agents) provided the raw materials, and hired the
weavers to do the work. Before this time the
weavers made all their purchases and sold their
products themselves. Now the materials were
furnished and they received wages for their labor.
A radical change, you will see, had been inaugu-
rated which doubtless worked to the common
advantage of both parties.
Up to this time cotton had been spun by means
of the common spinning wheel in the weaver’s
own house—the same spinning wheel whose monot-
COTTON 303
onous roar, gloomy and melancholy as the north
wind itself, may yet be heard on wintry days in
many a humble home of the rural South: if one
cares to study the question further, let him read
Thomas Buchanan Read’s famous poem, “The
Closing Scene.”’ Of course the work of this hand
spinning wheel was—and is—slow and laborious,
and it followed naturally that the product should
berelatively expensive, and the wage of the laborer
small indeed.
THE COMING OF IMPROVED INVENTIONS
The inauguration of the new scheme in manu-
facturing was bound to work to its advantage, and
hasten its development. It was no longer an
individual concern. It now became a community
interest, so governed, controlled and directed.
Singular indeed is it that just at this critical
period a number of improved inventions should be
made, following one another just as men most
needed them, and covering too, such widely differ-
ent fields of human activity. Even the schoolboy
has heard of the epoch making spinning-jenny of
Hargreaves; spinning-frame of Arkwright; power
loom of Cartwright; Watt’s steam engine and
Whitney’s cotton gin.
First the spinning-jenny came in 1767, enabling
from 16 to 30 threads to be spun with the same
facility as one had been spun previously to that
time, and it was subsequently brought to such
perfection that a little girl was enabled to work
from 80 to 100 spindles.
While this invention itself marked a great
advance, it did not go far enough, since the jenny
then in use was applicable only to the spinning of
304 COTTON
cotton for weft or transverse threads, being unable
to give that firmness and hardness which is re-
quired for the longitudinal threads or warp.
But the spinning-frame came a few years later.
A really wonderful machine this was, spinning a
large number of threads of any degree of fineness
and hardness, calling on the operator simply to feed
cotton to it, and to tiethreads that broke accident-
ally. Up to this time the hand loom was required
for all of the work of weaving. That meant, of
course, long, weary days for many, many people.
Now something better was in store. The power
loom was to supersede the work of the hand. And
next, just as power is needed, behold it also comes!
For Watt hassucceeded with his steam engine, ready ~
to supply the manufacturer with a new power appli-
cable to every purpose, easy to control, and read-
ily placed where most convenient, and right in
the midst of an industrious people. |
But what are these inventions without cotton ?
Can cotton farming and manufacturing become
extensive while the seed must be separated from
lint by hand?
It has been said that “necessity is the mother of
all inventions.”’ Surely if cotton goods were to be
manufactured, it was necessary that cotton be pro-
duced cheaply and that it be easily prepared for
manufacturing.
And so finally this brilliant series of practical in-
ventions is completed with Whitney’s cotton gin.
Other inventions leading to the improvement of
those here mentioned or blending with them in such
a manner as to make their work more efficient,
called for increased quantities of raw cotton
which could now be supplied economically and in
quantities sufficient to meet the world’s needs.
COTTON 305
Cotton manufacturing increased in England as
did cotton production in America, and both so
worked together that the cotton industry from seed
to loom assumed large proportions, and has since
continued to grow with every passing decade.
PERFECTING THE INVENTIONS
But these inventions still left gaps between
cotton in its raw and its finished state, and these
difficulties had to be met and gradually overcome.
Of the inventions having direct relation to the
spinning-jenny and the spinning-frame, the most
important was that of the mule. Neither one of
these other machines was complete in itself. It
was left for Crompton to invent the machine which
should retain the drawing out and winding features
of the jenny, and that should have at the same
time the rollers of the old spinning-frame.
It will be seen that this new invention retained
features of both the spinning-jenny and the spin-
ning-frame. It was in this sense a hybrid; and
later, by reason of this fact, it was given the name
of mule, which it has ever since retained.
A marvelous machine it is, called by whatever
name, and it is in every sense one of the most
wonderful and most easily operated machines that
has ever been constructed. At the present time
spinning mules are made as much as one hundred
and twenty feet long, some having 1300 spindles
which spin and wind 64 inches of thread in 15
seconds; and only a couple of persons are needed
to attend to the whole machine. The extremely
fine yarns that are now made are the product of
mule spinning, as well as much of the best soft
thread used in manufacturing hosiery and under-
wear.
306 COTTON
In looms, improvements have also been made
that have contributed to greater ease in weaving.
The old loom necessitated stopping whenever the
arn in the shuttle was exhausted and until a
freshly filled shuttle could be inserted. Now such
improvements have come that the shuttle may be
filled without being removed and without replacing
the shuttle itself, in either case without stopping the
loom at all. ‘This is a matter of considerable con-
sequence since as much as one-half of the labor
cost of converting a pound of cotton into woven
cloth is in weaving.
WHAT BECOMES OF YARN ?
Yarns are used in many ways. In our country
spinning and weaving are usually done by one and
the same establishment. But in Great Britain
and on the continent of Europe, the spinning and
weaving operations are almost invariably separate,
and as a rule bear no relation to each other.
Throughout the cotton manufacturing world a
great part of the yarn goes at once into plain cotton
cloth. It is also used for warp in woolen and
worsted goods, and also for knitting into under-
wear. Considerable quantities of yarn are used
for this purpose.
For sewing thread and the finest grade of cotton
thread for weaving, Sea Island cotton is principally
used on account of its length,evenness and strength.
After it has been spun into yarn it is next con-
verted into thread by doubling and twisting until
it is of the desired thickness and strength.
COTTON MANUFACTURING IN AMERICA
As early as 1787 records show that Great Brit-
ain consumed nearly 23,000,000 pounds of cotton.
COTTON 307
A century later more than 1,650,000,000 pounds
were consumed in making cotton goods, these hay-
ing a commercial value of nearly $400,000,000.
For 1904-05 her consumption is estimated as
1,794,000,000 pounds.
But while England early became noted for cotton
manufacturing and has always led in cotton con-
sumption and in number of spindles operated,
America has had no small part in this wonderful
development. At first progress was made slowly.
Although the Southern States shared largely in
starting cotton manufacturing, the first factory
being in South Carolina, the Cotton States soon
addressed themselves more exclusively to cotton
farming, yielding to New England the supremacy
in manufacturing the goods. One of the earliest
manufacturing plants was established at Slater-
ville, R. I., and as early as 1816 consumed 100,000
bales of cotton, turned out 181,000,000 yards of
cloth, employed thousands of operatives, and
had a E iing capital of many millions of dollars.
The greatest center of cotton manufacture has
been in the city of Fall River, Mass. As late as
1900 the two adjoining counties of Bristol in Mass-
achusetts (in which Fall River is located) and
Providence in Rhode Island contained about
thirty per cent.of the spindles in the United States.
The power loom was first put in use in mills at
Waltham, Mass., from which place, after the ex-
periment had been found successful, it went in
every direction where cotton manufacturing had
gone.
SIZE OF THE WORLD'S INDUSTRY IN SPINDLES
The unit of production in the cotton industry is
the spindle. A large number of spindles is nec-
308 COTTON
essary in any mill, as the quantity of thread pro-
duced per spindle is small. For instance, a mill
with 10,000 spindles manufacturing No. 20 yarn,
will produce in a day from a third to four-tenths of
a pound of thread per spindle or from 3000 to 4000
ounds total output. Yarn cannot be woven,
cloth cannot be manufactured, until spindles first
spin the lint into thread. The steady increase in
number of spindles throughout the world is set
forth in the following table:
Countries | 1861 | 1875 is90 ~=—l|_—Ss«d:900
Great Britain. ./| 30,300,000 | 39,000,000 | 43,750,000 46,000,000
Continent of Eu-
POT eae | 10,000,000 | 19,400,000 | 24,575,000 | 33,000,000
Weelen. 2 oe 338,000 | 1,100,000 | 3,270,000 4,400,000
United States. .| 5,000,000 | 9,500,000 | 14,190,000 | 19,475,000
WORLD'S CONSUMPTION OF COTTON
The average consumption of. cotton throughout
the world may be estimated at fifteen million bales
annually. The leading centers of cotton manu-
facture are not at the source of supply, but
are thousands of miles away, where population
is dense and labor abundant, trained and efficient.
The consumption of cotton for several periods of
manufacturing development is shown in the table
following:
Country 1875 1890 1900
Great Britain. ....... 1,500,000 | 3,384,000 | 3,269,000
Continent of Europe. . . .- . 280,000 3,630,000 4,576,000
miata bo ee ee 290,000 920,000 1,000,000
Riuated Stabest sj i550 .4. 2.2.2 300,000 2,350,000 3,640,000
COTTON 309
For last year (1904-05) Messrs. Latham, Alex-
ander & Co., the well known New York cotton
authorities estimate the consumption of the several
countries as follows:
ESTIMATED CONSUMPTION 1904-05
Great Britain (500-pound bales) 3,588,000 bales
Continent (500 pound bales) 5,148,000 bales
United States (500 pound bales) 4,310,255 bales
Of light weight bales (averaging less
than 500 pounds), the consump-
tion of other countries last year
was as follows:
DE SL en ee er i 1,350,000 bales
es Be 875,000 bales
LE 1 a RS a 130,000 bales
CS el 70,000 bales
0 OES os OO ee a ee 35,000 bales
a pA ee le re 15,506,255 bales
EXTENT OF COTTON INDUSTRY IN AMERICA
Cotton manufacturing did not develop rapidly
inthe United States until the latter part of the nine-
teenth century, when it not only made great growth
in New England, but assumed enormous pro-
portions in the Southern States, the seat of cotton
production.
In the early days of the industry cotton was
carded and spun by machinery but weaving
was done entirely by “the hand loom. This was
true as late as 1815 when the first power loom
was installed, and it was a long time after that
310 COTTON
before the hand loom became an inconsiderable
factor in cotton goods making. Especially in-
rural districts, it had its place, along with the
spinning wheel, in nearly every well regulated
home.
Cotton manufacturing in the United States has
been extended gradually in all directions, increas-
ing in annual output, capital and labor employed,
until it has become one of the great industries of the
land.
This development is seen in the table below:
Item 1860 1890 1900
Number of mills. 801 1,091 324,866 450,682
Number of
spindles . . . 1,250,000 5,235,000 14,200,000 19,000,000
Number of looms 33,400 120,000 325,000 450,000
Consumption of
cotton in bales 180,000 845,000 1,195,000 3,640,000
Persons employed 62,200 122,000 221,585 302,642
Capital invested .} $40,610,000 $98,585,000) $354,000,000| $467,000,000
Value of products 115,680,000} 267,000,000} 339,000,000
CHAPTER XXXIV.
THE COTTON FACTORY IN THE SOUTHERN STATES
“The four Southernmost States make a great
deal of cotton. Their poor are almost entirely
clothed in it in winter and summer.”
So wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1786. Without
doubt his observation was first-hand and authentic.
But where was this cotton manufactured? In a
cotton mill somewhere? No, that cannot be, for
no cotton mill had yet been built on American soil.
The cotton was home manufactured from lint, the
seed having first been hand-picked. This manu-
facturing was done in the home, for the home use
of the inhabitants and the household. With the
coming of the cotton gin, not only did the pro-
duction of cotton increase, but its manufacture
and use increased as well.
Before the Civil War slave women, directed
by their mistresses, largely clothed the plantation
force with “homespun,” as it was called. And it
may be noted that even now, in spite of the cheap-
ness of the manufactured product, many an old-
fashioned country woman still cards her cotton into
rolls, spins the product into thread on the spinning
wheel, and with laborious shuttle weaves the
thread into vari-colored counterpanes for her
beds, into “‘breeches cloth’ for her good man, or
into underclothing for herself.
(311)
312 COTTON
OUR FIRST COTTON MILL
In the year 1787, Mrs. Ramage, widow of a
South Carolina planter, realizing its greater econ-
omy and so anticipating its financial success,
erected a small cotton mill on James Island, near
Charleston. Small in size and operated by horse-
power, this was the first cotton factory erected on
American soil, although a little later in the same
year, another cotton factory, somewhat larger in
capacity, was started at Beverly, Massachusetts.
Then, years later, a second factory was built at
Statesburg. Georgia was the second State to be-
gin cotton manufacturing, but it was not until 1809
that a small factory was erected at Louisville, this
being also operated by horse-power. ‘Two years
later a much larger factory was built in Wilkes
County, this one known as the “ Bolton Factory.’’
This building “was 60 feet by 40 feet, two stories,
attic and basement, and was constructed of brown
sandstone.” It was the first factory of any con-
sequence in Georgia.
In North Carolina no factory was built until 1818
when one was erected in Edgecombe County,
which “‘began operating with 288 spindles, em-
ployed about 20 hands, and consumed 18,000
pounds of cotton, or according to the weights of
those days, about 64 bales.” %
LITTLE INTEREST IN COTTON MANUFACTURING
While a great many cotton factories sprang up in
the Southern States from 1800 to 1860, the South
as a whole, cannot be said to have given manufac-
turing very substantial encouragement. Rather it
was discouraged—sometimes rather emphatically.
INTERIOR VIEW OF COTTON MILL.
(A) Opening room showing openers; (B: carding room showing cards and draw-
ing frames; (C) lap room showing lap machines.
he ee Re ee oe a
COTTON MANUFACTURING IN THE SOUTH.
(A) White Oak Mills, Greensboro, N. C., the largest American factory for the
manufacture of blue denims; (B) Olympia Mills, Columbia, S§. C., one of the largest
in the South; (C) preparing goods for shipping.
COTTON 313
There were objections to the class of people it
would attract; to the unwholesome influence of
cotton factory life. It was argued that the South
could better and more profitably develop the side
of production, and leave the manufacturing to other
places and to other people. It would mean more
wholesome living, freer, purer life combined with
individual independence and National safety. No
doubt there was some ground for these arguments.
The laborer was needed in the fields and could be
ill-spared for the factory and its incidental duties.
Production was to be developed; it was the basis
on which the factory must be built; why cripple it,
to engage in another industry, neither so desirable
nor so profitable ?
As a consequence of this unfavorable sentiment,
comparatively few mills were erected, although
some of those in the South were of considerable
size and importance. In South Carolina, for in-
stance, a factory was erected as early as 1846 which
“contained 8400 spindles and 300 looms’’—not
a large one for our day, but one of no little note at
the time it was built. And in North Carolina in
1844 “it was estimated that 25 mills represented
a capital of $1,050,000, operated 50,000 spindles,
employed from 1200 to 1500 hands, and consumed
15,000 bales of cotton.”’ But for the development
of slavery, Southern cotton manufacturing would
doubtless have overcome all objections of its growth
and have reached its present important position
a great many years ago.
RISE OF SOUTHERN COTTON FACTORIES
As it is, War and Reconstruction demoralized
everything, and the great development in Southern
314 COTTON
cotton manufacturing has occurred during the past
twenty years. Here the Carolinas, Georgia, Ala-
bama make the best showing chiefly by reason of
better climatic conditions and more abundant
water power. The slow development during the
middle of the last century, and the rapid progress
made within the last score of years, is seen in the
following table giving the number of mills and
spindles:
SOUTH CAROLINA | NORTH CAROLINA GEORGIA
_ Year _Mills — Spindles Mills — Spindles _Mills | Spindles
1850| 18 36,500; 28 40,000; 35 51,150
1860; 17 30,890} 39 41,884) 33 85,186
1870; 12 34,940} 33 39,897| 34 85,062
1880) 14 82,424) 49 100,209) 40 198,656
1890} 44 | 415,158)105 | 418,900} 62 465,811
1900)115 |1,908,692/218 |1,428,066/ 107 | 1,016,258
1905/161 |3,171,093/263 |2,207,102/129 | 1,452,668
ALABAMA Other Southern States
Year | Mills Spindles _ Mills — Spindles
1850} 12 16,960) 77 | 119,961
1860} 14 35,740; 69 | 130,352
1870} 13 28,046) 62 | 156,101
1880} 16 49,432) 44 137,737
1890; 17 89,158) 55 | 356,142
1900} 49 | 550,966) 87 | 709,605
1905| 66 | 824,687) 88 | 819,141
RELATION OF CONSUMPTION TO PRODUCTION
An interesting relationship is seen when the
quantity of cotton consumed is compared with the
quantity raised in each of these four leading cotton
manufacturing States.
COTTON 315
SOUTH CAROLINA
Per cent.
Year Bales consumed Bales produced pileroo ned
1850 9,929 300,901 3.3
1860 8,648 353,412 2.4
1870 10,811 224,500 4.8
1880 33,624 522,548 6.4
1890 164,814 859,000 19.2
1900 501,290 743,294 67.4
1905 625,190 1,100,837 56.7
It is seen here that in the thirty years from 1850
to 1880 South Carolina doubled consumption in
proportion to her production; in the next ten years
this increased six times; while in 1900 it had in-
creased 25 times.
NORTH CAROLINA
Per cent.
Year Bales consumed Bales produced be Cranimeed
1850 13,617 73,845 18.4
1860 13,045 145,514 8.3
1870 9,632 144,935 6.6
1880 27,642 389,598 el
1890 140,817 588,000 23.9
1900 408,338 554,032 Tat
1905 602,150 664,934 90.5
In 1850 North Carolina consumed slightly over
one-fifth of her total production of cotton. Ten
years later but one-tenth was consumed. This
change was due not to decreased consumption
but to the fact that the acreage has doubled. It
was not until about 1890 that consumption in-
creased on production, when it reached nearly
316 COTTON
one-fourth; ten years later consumption called for
three-fourths of total quantity produced; five years
later, in 1905, almost the entire quantity produced
was consumed—or its equivalent—within the bor-
ders of the State.
ALABAMA
Year Bales consumed Bales produced eee 4
1850 5,208 564,429 9
1860 11,406 989,955 1
1870 7,085 429,482 1.7
1880 14,702 699,654 1
1890 30,364 1,011,000 3.0
1900 Laiso2 1,021,845 15.4
1905 993.872 1,249,685 17.9
GEORGIA
Year Bales consumed Bales produced of Ge 4
1850 20,230 499,491 A.3 .
1860 30,235 701,840 4.1
1870 24,821 437,934 Pe
1880 71,389 814,441 8.8
1890 164,981 1,310,000 12.6
1900 365,878 1,271,573 28.1
1905 483,335 1,759,000 27.5
= eH ne
COTTON 317
CONSUMPTION AND PRODUCTION IN SOUTHERN
STATES
Per cent
Year Bales consumed Bales produced of Crop
used
1850 80,300 2,469,093 | 17.2
1860 101,688 5,387,052 3.3
1870 83,068 3,011,994 1.9
1880 188,398 5,755,359 2.8
1890 526,856 C402, 01} 3.3
1900 1,570,812 9,142,938 7.1
1905 2,172,992 10,697,013 20.3
This table shows that from 1850 to 1890 there
was little gain in the percentage of Southern cotton
manufactured at home. While the quantity con-
sumed increased all the while, the quantity pro-
duced likewise increased, much of the time in
greater ratio than the increase in consumption.
In 1890, however, as indicated in the table, the
percentage manufactured in the Southern States
was more than twice what it was in 1880, al-
though the production had itself increased as much
as 25 percent. During the past ten years the con-
sumption has grown very rapidly.
SOUTHERN MANUFACTURING FAVORS THE
PRODUCER
Not only has the Southern factory-owner certain
manifest advantages over his brother in New
England, but the cotton farmer is also a gainer in
having the factory at his door. Since New York
and Liverpool are the important market places of
the world, they naturally establish prices, and
consequently the Southern consumer pays prices
318 COTTON
similarly offered at New York. Hence the pro-
ducer practically saves this item of expense of
freight in transportation.
It has been calculated by the Industrial Com-
mission that the difference in cost in marketing
cotton is as follows:
To local mill from farm, 50c per bale.
To Northern or Western mill from farm, $3.00
per bale.
To foreign mill from farm, $5.00 to $7.00 per
bale.
Hence, it is apparent that Southern manufac-
turing helps the producer as well as the consumer.
CHAPTER XXXV.
THE MAKING OF COTTON GOODS
In considering which is our most important
manufacturing industry, you will not be long in |
coming face to face with the fact that next to food,
clothing is a first necessity of mankind. Many
other things which we have come to regard as
necessities might be dispensed with; but according
to the old Bible story, the need of clothing was the
first thing to occur to our first parents after they
had eaten of the tree of knowledge; and from the
primitive fig-tree costume of Adam and Eve in the
Garden, the art of clothing has had a steady and
wonderful evolution, century after century, genera-
tion after generation, year after year. ‘The savage
man has his passion for food, but the desire for
clothing is the first step toward civilization, and
the step which has been reached in attention to
dress will indicate perhaps as closely as anything
else the progress a people has made away from
barbarism.
So it is that in clothing the earth’s teeming
millions, cotton stands forth today King indeed,
wool and hemp having but a small place in com-
parison—Cotton triumphant as the result of a test
running through the ages! And every operation
320 COTTON
from growing the seed to manufacturing the
finished cloth is full of interest to those who watch
intelligently.
The first step in cotton manufacturing, when
cotton arrives at the mill in the form of a bale, is
the opening process which consists of simply re-
moving the ties and bagging (a fabric made of
rope) that enclose the bale. The mixing opera-
tion is next. Were all cotton just alike, and of
the same uniformity, mixing would not be _neces-
sary, but fiber comes from lowlands and highlands,
in long or short staple, of one variety or many
varieties; so, unless thoroughly mixed, goods of
widely varying quality will be produced.
any bales are therefore mixed together, by
hand or by machine, the purpose all the time being
to get a considerable quantity of cotton as uniform
in quality as possible.
From here cotton goes into a large machine that
makes the lap, or gauzy film of cotton—first
sheets of fleece three or four feet wide, but so
very thin that sand, broken leaves and other im-
purities drop from it of their own weight. And
this is one of the reasons why the lap is made—to
rid the cotton of these impurities, else yarn would
be of poor quality. Three or four times this lap-
ping process is repeated, the second and third
machines using the product of the preceding ones.
As a rule, four laps or films of the first machine
pass through the second machine at once. All
the while it is being further cleaned and prepared
for the carding machines.
Up to this point there has been no change in
the form of cotton. It has been opened and the
heavy impurities have fallen out, but it remains
still the white, fluffy, fleecy material—now in rib-
MANUFACTURING.
(A) the Fancy Dobby Loom. (B) cotton commerce calls fer a great many steam-
ers to get the raw cotton abroad.
COTTON FABRICS.
(A) Sheeting; (B) print cloth; (C) sateen; (D) Fancy Dobby Cloth; (E) Jac-
quard Cloth; (F) also Jacquard Cloth.
COTTON 321
bon form ready to go into a large roll or sheet,
known as the completed “lap.”
CARDING
The carding machine receives the lap. Its series
of cylinders covered with wire brush take it around
their course and deliver it at the front of the ma-
chine, now in the shape of a cord of untwisted
cotton known as the slvver.
And here you see a beautiful sight indeed! The
fleecy white lap rushes eagerly into the combs, and as
quickly disappears, soon again coming into view,
- white and spotless as ever, but now changed in
form, for it has become a long round cord that is
by and by to be the thread used in weaving our
cotton fabrics.
Next the sliver goes to the drawing-jrame. Here
a sort of doubling-up work is to be done. Some-
thing like six slivers or untwisted cords are fed into
the machine, out of which comes but one, but that
one is better than the other six, for the fibers, at-
tenuated and drawn out, are now more nearly
arallel, more even and uniform.
While the sliver that leaves the drawing-frame
is but a sixth of the size of all that entered it, it is
still too large and altogether too easily broken;
the cord must be lessened in size and twisted a
number of times that it may be strong and even.
This work can be done only gradually, else mis-
haps will occur and make good thread an impos-
sibility.
- From the drawing frame the sliver goes to the
slubber, which gives it its first twist, reduces it in
thickness, renames it roving, and then passes the
roving on to the intermediate and roving frames,
322 COTTON
which concludes the work preparatory to having
roving spun into thread.
SPINNING
The roving is now transferred to a spinning
machine for the final process of making the yarn
or thread. ‘The purpose sought here is fineness
of the requisite degree and the twisting and wind-
ing of the thread to make it ready for the weaver.
One of two machines may do the work: the mule
or the ring frame, either of which makes a thread
which is used largely without further treatment
whatever.
The mule is used for the finest threads that are
made, and also for soft twisted yarns for knitting
purposes.
The thread is now spun, and only a few things
remain to be done before it may be sent to factory
and used in the loom.
Spooling comes first, a simple process of wind-
ing yarn from spinners’ bobbins on spools by
means of the spooler. ‘This done, it is now passed
on to the warper. ‘Threads are laid in the slasher-
beam that sizing may be done in order to facilitate
weaving. Sizing is made of starch, tallow, and
some preservative to prevent mildew. Finally the
threads are drawn through the harness—for weay-
ing and manufacturing of cloth is begun—an oper-
ation not difficult in plain goods. But as yarns
are made finer and more fancy cloth produced,
the art of weaving becomes quite complicated and
painstaking.
WEAVING
In the weaving room the loom is the all-import-
COTTON 323
ant machine. And here you doubtless recall old
traditions that have come down through your
family of the time when cotton was not only spun
in the home but woven there as well. Now, though
the hand loom and the spinning wheel have al-
most disappeared, they have had their share in
history making.
As has been suggested before, the loom uses two
sets of threads, known as warp and filling. The
set running throughout the length is the warp, and
those threads extending from side to side, make
the filling, weft, or woof.
The loom works on the principle of three move-
ments: the first separates the threads of the warp
longitudinally into two sets, leaving a space through
which to pass the weft; the second passes the
filling through that space, and the third presses
the thread of filling up against the one preceding
it. All weaving is built upon this principle,
though different processes have been employed in
making the different fabrics.
Looms may be divided into three classes: plain
looms, (operated either by hand or power), fancy
looms, and Jacquard looms.
An important part of the power loom is the
harness. ‘This is simply a skeleton frame of rods
placed parallel to one another on which are a series
of heddles, with eyes at the center through which
the warp threads pass. ‘These heddles for plain
goods are generally knit from cotton with an eye
through the center and varnished so as to work
freely through the threads. As the number of
harnesses is increased, weaving becomes more com-
plicated, and produces finer cloth and more costly
fabrics.
Plain looms, as a rule, have but two harness
324 COTTON
shafts, though there may be as many as six when
twills and sateen are made, while fancy looms and
Jacquard looms possess a great many more—
sometimes as many as twenty-five or thirty.
The harness in connection with the hand loom
is controlled by the action of the weaver’s foot on
the treddles. ‘The shuttle is propelled by hand,
and the stroke of the handle or batten, usually
hung from an elevated stand, is also made by
hand.
OPERATION IN WEAVING
In plain weaving all threads are drawn through
the harness shafts. In the middle of each harness
is a small eye, through which each individual
thread is drawn, the thread passing through the
harness shafts alternately. On the front harness
shaft you will find one of these and another on the
back. ‘This enables one-half of the threads to be
raised in one pick of filling. This pick simply
lays in the filling thread, which is accomplished by
the shuttle passing between; the first harness is
lowered while the second harness is raised, and
another pick of filling is inserted. ‘This operation
goes on, one thread at a time, until the desired
length of cloth is woven. ;
By raising the warp threads in the fabric diagon-
ally, we have still a higher step in weaving. ‘This
is known as drill or twill weaving. In drill weav-
ing three harnesses are used usually, and in twill
four or more.
The making of sateen is another step in advance;
here five or six, or even eight, harnesses are gener-
ally used, sometimes as many as twelve or four-
teen. You are familiar with the lustrous appear-
COTTON 325
ance of this style of goods. This is obtained by
covering the intersections of warp and_ filling.
While sateen weaves are derived from twill weaves,
the threads are not raised as in twills.
Standard gingham cloth is made from two colors
of warp and two colors of filling, checked with one
another. ‘They are made in various colors: black
and white, brown and white, green and white, and
in other combinations of colors. These ginghams
are also used as the basis for plaids or over-checks,
so that in this kind of weaving many fancy effects
in colors are produced, requiring more skill for
operation, and enhancing the value of the woven
product. Fancy effects may be made in stripes,
checks, or figures.
Mercerized cloth is also made of cotton, and
both plain and fancy effects may be made. The
silky appearance of the product is obtained by
immersing cotton threads in a solution of caustic
soda, and while thus immersed they are held very
tight. ‘These threads are two ply, that is, two
twisted together. Before being immersed in the
caustic ade solution they are passed through a
gas frame (this being done very quickly, so as not
to injure the thread) to take off the roughness so
that the smooth texture may be obtained. In
weaving fancy goods threads may be drawn through
the harness shaft in any order, depending on the
pattern to be produced.
There are many grades of fancy cloth produced,
depending upon the design, the quality of the
thread, number of harnesses the machine possesses,
and the skill of the operator. Weavers call the
machine that makes fancy goods a “ Dobby.”
A still further advance in the production of
fancy cloth has come with the invention of the
326 COTTON
Jacquard loom, a machine named after a French-
man who was its inventor. The fabrics pro-
duced on the Jacquard vary considerably in extent.
Any kind of animal, vegetable, or floral effect may
be produced upon the cloth. This kind of prod-
uct usually sells at a higher price than any other
fancy cloth. Fancy fabrics, such as shirt waists,
dress goods, table covers, and the like, are woven
by this machine.
CLASSES OF COTTON GOODS
In a general way we may say that five different
kinds of cotton goods are made through the use of
these several kinds of machines.
1. Plain Goods:—We find here print cloth,
sheeting, mull, lawn, Madras, nainsook, tea cloth,
etc. ‘The only difference in these kinds of cloth
lies in the number of threads, picks per inch, the
fineness of the yarn, and the finish given after
weaving. American cotton may be used for all of
these weaves excepting Madras, for which purpose
Sea Island or Egyptian cotton is required.
2. Twills:—These fabrics, having lines running
diagonally across, include different kinds of linings
such as those used for men’s coats, women’s coats,
dress linings, and the like. This weave is also
extensively used for denim, out of which overalls
and other coarse goods are made.
3. Sateen:—This style of fabric is used quite
extensively for shirt waists, dress linings, and
dress goods.
4. Fancy Cloth:—The greater part of the cloth
used for children’s dresses, women’s shirt waists
and dresses, various kinds of trimmings, scrim for
draperies and heavy towels, are included in this
class.
COTTON 327
5. Jacquard Fabrics:—Included in this class are
the most complicated forms of fancy fabrics. They
are also used for cloths suitable for making shirt
waists, dress goods, bed spreads, table covers,
and novelties.
While cotton is used for many other purposes as
thread and underwear, the greater part of it goes
into such commercial goods as have been mentioned
here.
RELATIVE VALUES IN COTTON MANUFACTURING
Of course plain weaving, since it requires less
skill and involves less complication than other
forms, possesses the least commercial value.
Sheeting may be taken as an example. It sells
for five cents a yard, although only one pound of
cotton is required to make three or four or even
five yards of cloth—depending upon the weight. In
this respect then, a pound of cotton bought at ten
cents a pound is sold, when manufactured, at
eighteen or twenty cents a pound.
On the contrary, embroidery, one of the highest
forms of cotton goods manufactured, sells at
twenty dollars a pound. ‘The skill required in its
manufacture, the complications of the various
processes, have made from a single pound of cot-
ton (of the best quality, of course) a pound now
worth twenty dollars. All other cotton goods on
the market have a commercial value ranging in
price from that of the lowest grade of sheeting to
that of the highest forms of embroidery.
WHAT A POUND OF COTTON WILL MAKE
Cotton weaving yarns are made and sold by
the pound. ‘The finer the threads, the greater the
328 COTTON
number of yards in a pound. Hence, any fabric
varies in cost, and in the number of yards made
from a pound of raw cotton in proportion to the
fineness of the yarn from which it is woven.
Taking averages only, one pound of cotton
worth ten cents may be manufactured into:
14 yards of Denim worth 18 cents.
4 yards of Sheeting worth 20 cents.
4 yards of Bleached Muslin worth 32 cents.
7 yards of Calico worth 35 cents.
6 yards of Gingham worth 45 cents.
10 yards of Shirtwaists worth $1.50.
10 yards of Lawn worth $2.50.
25 Handkerchiefs worth $2.50.
56 spools of No. 40 Sewing Thread worth $2.80.
In giving these figures only an estimate of the
number of yards can be made. This will vary
according to the fineness of the yarns, the number
of threads, and “‘picks”’ per inch in the cloth.
The threads that are used in weaving are known
as “numbers” or “counts.” ‘The thinner the
thread the greater the number it will have. This
matter may be stated thus: