32 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Jan., 



lands in the South were abandoned ; it looked exceedingly seri- 

 ous. Take, for instance, James Island, where the finest cotton 

 was produced, and lands worth from $ioo to $125 an acre were 

 plowed up and put into other crops, vegetables and other 

 products, because they could not produce cotton. The disease 

 spread into Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and into other sections 

 of the South, and we thought it was going over the whole coun- 

 try and was liable to destroy the cotton industry. Now one of 

 the men in the employ of the Department discovered that an 

 occasional cotton plant here and there in the field seemed to 

 resist the disease, and would produce a good crop of cotton 

 when its neighbors were wilting and dying. Some experi- 

 ments were tried. A few of these plants that seemed to be re- 

 sistant were selected, the seed from those immvme plants were 

 planted, and as the result today we have produced some 

 varieties of cotton which will resist that disease completely. 

 When this resistant variety of cotton is planted in the center 

 of a field of the ordinary kind it will stand up like a hedgerow 

 while every plant on each side will go down as the result of 

 the disease. 



We had a similar experience in the case of a disease which 

 attacked the cow pea, which is the clover of the South. We 

 selected the seed from the resistant or apparently immune 

 plants, went through the same process, and succeeded in pro- 

 ducing an immvme pea that would resist the disease. 



As the result of these things today, gentlemen, those 

 cotton fields which were abandoned are growing with fine 

 staple cotton, and fields which would not produce a crop of 

 cow peas in the South are growing with fine crops of this 

 clover of the South. The tobacco growers of Florida, who 

 have no cover crop because of the work, are now growing 

 these cow peas resistant to the disease, and the pathologists 

 of the Department, wherever we can. are discovering these 

 troubles and propagating immune strains as rapidly as possi- 

 ble, putting them into the hands of the growers, and in that 

 way have been able to do much. 



Now the same sort of work has been carried on, more or 

 less, in relation to tobacco, and several other crops. We 

 hardly know what can be accomplished in this direction as yet, 

 but from the beneficial results which have been produced in 

 the case of cotton and other plants we feel confident that 



