146 ANNUAL REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



COMMUNITY COTTON PRODUCTION. 



That all cotton production should be placed on an organized com- 

 munity basis appears the more desirable with each additional season 

 of experience in such efforts. The most direct and obvious advantage 

 of uniting upon a single variety is that each farmer in the community 

 can get more for his cotton than if many different kinds are raised. 

 There is no question that large buyers and manufacturers will pay 

 more for cotton of one. kind that can be had by the hundreds of 

 thousands of bales than for cotton that can be had only in small lots, 

 with each farmer feeling at liberty to grow a kind different from 

 his neighbors. 



The result of mixing the seed of many varieties at public gins and 

 of planting such " gin-run " mixtures of seed is a general and con- 

 tinuous degeneration of varieties. This can be counteracted only in 

 a partial and temporary way by the breeding and distribution of seed 

 of select stocks, which soon lose their purity and uniformity when 

 grown in mixed communities. 



The chronic deficiency of pure seed, even of the oldest and best- 

 known varieties, is traceable largely to the lack of communities where 

 seed of one variety can be grown without contamination. The advan- 

 tages of community production of one kind of cotton and adequate 

 supplies of pure seed have been demonstrated conclusively in the Salt 

 River Valley of Arizona, which now has the largest body of uni- 

 formly pure cotton in the world. The first communities that were 

 organized in different parts of the cotton belt are being utilized in 

 the same way as sources of supply of pure seed for other communities 

 that are beginning to organize. 



War-time conditions are enforcing with many special reasons the 

 general policy of more diversified farming and the need of each 

 district producing its own supplies of food, as far as this can be done, 

 but a fundamental relation of the cotton industry to other crops 

 should not be overlooked. In humid regions the effect of the weevil 

 is to compel or at least to encourage the replacement of cotton with 

 other crops, but in the drier parts of Texas and the adjacent States 

 the relative importance of cotton as the chief reliance of the farmer 

 has increased during the period of weevil invasion, because the pest 

 is less injurious in dry climates. While a large aggregate volume of 

 other products is grown in the dry regions, cotton serves as the basic 

 crop, being sufficiently reliable to keep the people on the land, so that 

 the other ventures are made possible. 



CORN GROWING. 



Conclusive evidence has been obtained from several lines of work, 

 proving that the productive power of a corn plant is influenced by 

 the treatment received by the kernel from which the plant grew, from 

 the time it ripened until it was planted. It has been common knowl- 

 edge that injury to seed corn would reduce its germinability. These 

 investigations have extended bej-ond germinability and determined 

 the effects of seed treatment upon productivity independent of ger- 

 minability. 



A good stand may be obtained by the thick planting of poor seed, 

 but with an optimum stand of plants from injured seed such plants 

 are less productive than the same number from uninjured seed. 



