35. Ginning and market ing.—Before the cotton can be used for cloth, a machine called a cotton gin separates the fine white fibers from the seeds. Buildings containing cotton gins are scattered about the country only a few miles apart. To them the farmer hauls his cotton to be ginned and pressed into large bales. Through out the autumn and win ter one often sees wagons, loaded with bales of cotton, going from the ginnery to landing.
In the Cotton Belt, there is rain every few days all winter, the roads are often deep with mud, and the farmer's load must be small, unless he happens to live near an improved road.
The cottonseed is also a valuable part of the crop. It is crushed by very heavy rollers. The cottonseed oil that is pressed from it is used for canning small fish like sardines, for making oleomargarine, and for a cooking oil. The cake that is left after the seeds are pressed is ground into cottonseed meal. This is good food for cows, because it helps to increase their milk. It is used in the dairies of many northern states and of Europe.
How many navigable rivers are there in the Cotton Belt? (Fig. 80.) Name them. What ports are at the mouths of some of these rivers? Name some places to which ships go from these ports. (Fig. 21.) 36. Soil. — The Cotton Belt has many kinds of soil. In some places there are wide belts of clay, in others, belts of sand, a strip through Central Georgia having almost no cotton because sand is not rich enough. On this wide belt it is more profitable for the farmers to plant whole fields of peas, pea nuts, sweet potatoes and watermelons, which do well on sandy soil. The melons go in carloads to northern cities in early summer. Northwest of this sand strip is a wide belt of red clay hills. The blacker band on the cotton map shows that a great deal of cotton is grown here. The map shows other areas in central Texas and in central Alabama very rich in cotton. Both of these are extra fine cotton districts, because they have rich black soil made of decayed limestone rock, where the farmers can grow big crops of cot ton year after year. In Texas the limestone belt is called the "Black Land" and the man who owns a farm there is wealthy.
To the east of the Black Land, the land is sandy and often poor, and there fore much of it is still covered with forestsof pine and other kinds of trees.
The limestone belt in central Alabama is called the "Black Belt". The soil is black, and so are most of the people—negro tenant farmers, each renting a few acres of the rich black earth. This land sells for five or six times as much as the less fertile sandy land farther south, which, like the sandy land of Texas and southern Mississippi, is still almost all covered with pine forests. More than half of the area of the whole Cotton Belt is still in forest.
The map shows that a third region hav ing much cotton is close to the Mississippi, on the rich delta plain made by the silt (mud and sand) which the river has been bringing down for thousands and thousands of years. This river-built plain gradually filled up the Gulf of Mexico, which once extended to where the mouth of the Ohio River now is. Each year the river dumps into the Gulf enough silt to cover 278 square miles with a layer one foot thick. It built the land from Illinois to the Gulf. This soil is so rich that cotton has been grown on the same field year after year without wearing out the soil.
There are no stones on this delta plain built of river silt. You can dig down a hundred feet and find only soft earth, or clay, or sand. In New Orleans, which is built on this low, flat plain, the water in the ground is near to the surface. If a big, heavy building were set directly upon this soft earth it would sink, and the walls would crack. To prevent such trouble, piles (the trunks of trees) are driven into the ground, and on these the foundation walls are built.
37. Surface.—The surface of the Cotton Belt helps to make it a region good for farm ing. There are no mountains; only a part of it is hilly; and much of it consists of flat plains, which are very easy to cultivate. In fact, some of this region suffers from being too flat, for where the heavy rain cannot run away the land is swampy. There are many large swamps along the shore, all the way from the Dismal Swamp on the northern boundary of North Carolina to the mouth of the Rio Grande.