214 Practical Farming 



a cash basis, enable him to grow cotton for one-fourth the 

 cost under the old practice of all cotton and a gambling in 

 complete fertihzers bought on credit. 



The varieties of cotton that have been 

 Varieties of produced are almost innumerable. The 

 ease with which the cotton plant yields to 

 proper selection of seed has led to a great many varieties 

 being put into commerce before their character was 

 well fixed, and the result has been that most of the im- 

 proved varieties have been short lived, and while still 

 planted by the original names, they have, through care- 

 less selection of seed, been allowed to degenerate into 

 something very different from the variety originally sent 

 out by the first improver. 



Like the corn crop, the selection of cotton seed has been 

 most careless, while intelligent selection will speedily in- 

 crease the crop as much as the improvement of the soil 

 will. On the northern Hmit of the cotton belt, just as on 

 the northern limit of the corn belt, earliness in the crop 

 is of prime importance. Earhness has also become an 

 important matter in the far South, where the cotton boll 

 weevil has become a menace to the cotton growers. There, 

 the cotton must be early to get a crop ahead of the time 

 that the weevil is destructive, and on the northern Hmit 

 earliness is important in order to get as large a proportion 

 of the crop matured before frost as possible. 



Therefore, in the improvement of cotton, earliness is 

 very important, since there is a demand for seed from the 

 weevil sections for the seed produced in the northern sec- 

 tions of the cotton belt. Hence, every cotton farmer 

 should be a seed breeder, and instead of buying seed of 



