The hairy upland cotton, with short fibre, is the common crop of the Cotton Belt. Its "staple" is less than an inch in length, and correspond ingly thicker than that of the Sea Island. Of this prevailing species, a number of varieties have been developed, adapted to different situations, soils, and other conditions.
Attempts have been made to lengthen the fibre by seed selection, cultivation, fertilizing, and by hybridizing. These efforts have already improved the quality of the different varieties, and it is but a short time since they were begun. The future will carry the work forward much more quickly, for the Government experts are teaching the farmers how to use improved methods in all phases of cotton culture.
India has two native species of cotton, one a tree, the other a bush. The latter is the field cotton of India, inferior to our upland species in size of boll and length of staple. Tree cotton is not grown as a field crop anywhere.
Seed cotton is one third lint and two thirds seed. The gin separates the two. The farmer loads his crop into the wagon and drives to the gin. Here a suction elevator conveys the load to the gin, which drops the seed below, and blows the lint away to a receiving place, the lint room, from which the compresses bale it into a dense package, covered and roped for storage or shipment. The modern cotton bale weighs about soo pounds. Its destiny is the mill, where the lint is spun and woven into cloth.
Until a few years ago the cotton seed was an accumulation of waste, that the gin-owners had trouble to dispose of. They built their gins over streams, so that the current would carry off the seed as it fell. If the cotton seed was treated so to-day the cotton-growers would be losing in a single year $1oo,000,000 worth of valuable ma terial. Instead, not far from the gin stands the oil mill, and the seed is saved as carefully as the baled lint at the gin. In the market it is worth $16 a ton.
The seed goes first through screens that clean it of bolls, dust, and sand. The next machine is the linter, which strips the seed of the short lint the gin leaves on. This fuzz is used in paper mills. The seeds next pass into the huller, a machine set with knives that chop the seeds fine; the hulls are screened out of the meats which fall, being heavier than the hulls.
The hulls may be stored in bulk as they come out of the huller, or pressed into bales for more convenient handling. The meat fragments are crushed and cooked; then the oil is pressed out, and the residue molded into cakes. These cakes are usually ground before the molding that puts them into the form we see oil cake in use.
The oil goes to the refinery, after separation from its sediment. Refined, it is ready for use in cooking, as food adulterants, as medicines, and for miners' oil. The oil needs no apology. It is a pity that it has come into use as an imitation of other oils, including butter.
The farmer takes his seed to mill and sells the oil for which he has no need. He keeps the hulls and the meal, which contain the most valuable feed and fertilizer for his cattle and his land. The nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash in one ton of cotton seed is worth $12.75. A ton of cotton-seed meal contains the three plant foods named above, in about double the quantity, so that its market value is $25. The farmer who keeps up his farm's fertility must count the cost of commercial fertilizers very carefully. His decision is to bring back the seed, in one form or another, sparing the oil only, for that has no value when it is fed or put upon the land. With constant cropping the land will be impoverished, and the crops constantly poorer, unless feeding the land is practised.
The best form of fertilizers is barnyard manures. The wise farmer raises cattle, feeds them the hulls and meal left after the lint and oil are taken from his cotton crop and sold. The cattle grow, and the milk, butter, and beef arc marketed in due time. The manure is spread on the fields, and so the fertilizers are better prepared to enrich the ground at once than if the seed had been spread, and the crops had to wait until decay released the plant foods.
Cotton has often been grown at a distinct loss, and the people, white and black, are only recently lifting their heads in hope, in the Cotton Belt, realizing that the grower may have the comforts of life as well as the broker and the manufacturer. Wisdom is spreading where ignorance once pre vailed to keep the hard-working people in a form of slavery to worn-out methods on worn-out land.