724 AGRICULTURE 



require an annual crop of at least 45,000,000 bales. It is therefore 

 eminently desirable that the Southern States of America should 

 meet this demand. Will they do it? 



Present tendencies in the cotton world, at least, seem to answer 

 "No." During the last four years the consumption of cotton seems 

 to be rapidly overtaking the production, with the consequence that 

 many of the mills in the United States, in England, and on the Con- 

 tinent have been running on short time. There are two principal 

 causes which have contributed to this shortage. The most important 

 has been the large increase, amounting now to at least 500,000 bales 

 per annum, in the world's consumption. Of this increase, the greater 

 part was in the Southern States themselves, where the consumption 

 of cotton was doubled within the last ten years. These states are now 

 taking nearly twenty per cent of the cotton produced by them. The 

 second cause of the shortage is the failure of the American cotton- 

 planter to respond to the increased demand, and perhaps a slight 

 falling-off in the yield per acre. In fact there are some reasons to 

 believe that the yield per acre has been slowly but steadily declining 

 for a number of years. 



Although in many sections from 500 to 800 pounds of cotton may be 

 obtained by good cultivation, the average yield of cotton in the 

 United States is only about 190 pounds of lint per acre. There is 

 evidently great room for improvement in the methods of cultivation 

 and fertilization, and especially for improvement of the plant itself. 

 Any one who has traveled through the South will acknowledge that 

 the methods of cotton-culture are the poorest and most backward 

 used with any staple crop in our country. 



Cotton is limited by climatic conditions to that portion of America 

 south of latitude 37. The essential features of the climate in this 

 section are a long, warm season and a peculiar distribution of the 

 rainfall. Statistics show that the fluctuations in the yield per acre in 

 a given section are less in the case of cotton than in that of almost 

 any other product of the soil. The production of cotton may be due to 

 the greater uniformity of all the climatic conditions obtaining in the 

 cotton-belt, but the chief determining condition as between different 

 sections of our country is the amount of light and heat distributed 

 over the required number of days. For cotton is a sun plant. As a 

 rule a certain amount of sunshine produces, upon a given territory, a 

 certain amount of cotton. The distribution of rainfall is also import- 

 ant, but sunlight is the chief factor The plant requires an abundant 

 supply of moisture during the growing stage, but can stand a good 

 deal of drought after the middle of summer is passed. Now the sec- 

 tion of the country providing these conditions measures only about 

 500,000 square miles, less than one third of the total settled area of 

 the United States. Some 50 per cent of this area is contained in farms, 



