4 COTTON SELECTION ON THE FAKM. 



direct agricultural importance in themselves, but they have also an 

 indirect value in making it possible to recognize and rogue out luide- 

 sirable variations. The work of selection need not be deferred till 

 the seed is ripe, but can begin even before the flowers have opened 

 and allowed the good plants to be crossed with the pollen of degenerate 

 variations. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF UNIFORMITY. 



It is not sufficient to make a seed plat and to plant in it only the 

 seed of good plants. The plants that grow in the seed plat must all 

 be alike if the largest and most uniform crop is to be secured. Uni- 

 formity has a direct commercial value in cotton. To grow fiber of 

 good quality but mixed with short, weak fiber is of little or no advan- 

 tage to the farmer. If the manufacturer can buy the long fiber at 

 the same price as the short, he can afford to spin it and let the machin- 

 ery sort the short fiber out, but if he is to pay higher prices for long 

 fiber he naturally objects to having it mixed with short. No farmer 

 who hopes to command a premium for raising superior cotton can 

 afford to neglect uniformity. If the staple were uniform the manu- 

 facturers would be willing to pay premiums for the cotton of many 

 districts that now obtain only the general market prices of the ordinary 

 short-staple grades. 



The fact that the uniformity and other characters of the lint receive 

 so little consideration in the marketing of Upland cotton has allowed 

 people to overlook the damage that is being done to the industry by 

 the failure to select and by the mixing of varieties in the field and at 

 the gin. Some are inclined to lay all the responsibility on the gin, 

 on the ground that farmers are kept from selecting their own seed in 

 the field because of the probability that their seed would only be 

 mixed up again at the gin. 



This amounts to a very serious charge, for if the gin system is really 

 responsible for the general failure to apply selection in the whole 

 Upland cotton industry, it causes an annual loss of many millions of 

 dollars. Experiments indicate that the failure to select the seed 

 commonly diminishes the crop from 10 to 20 per cent below the ^neld 

 that might otherwise be obtained from the same land and with the 

 same cultivation. The deficiency of quality involved in the produc- 

 tion of short, weak, and irregular staple probably involves an even 

 greater loss than the diminished yield. A hundred million dollars 

 per annum would not cover the total loss, which may be more than 

 twice that amount. The boll weevil is not the only difficult problem 

 of cotton culture. The losses threatened by the weevil can be made 

 good to a very large extent by better attention to other factors that 

 influence the crop. 



ICir. OG] 



