SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



give the Northern farmer pause. Even carrying a big 

 Negro population on their shoulders, these Delta plant- 

 ers face the future confidently. 



Out on the High Plains of Texas an entirely different 

 breed of men are tilling an entirely different soil. There, 

 as in the Delta, land stretches to the horizon. You drive 

 a mile, two miles, through one man's property. But 

 those long, level fields are not spotted with sharecropper 

 cabins. The Plains have their labor problem, but it has 

 always been one of shortage, hence they began to 

 mechanize years ago. Today, except for harvesting, they 

 are thoroughly mechanized upon a four-rows-at-once 

 cultivation system. The mechanical picker is here, too, 

 three good working models from the implement houses, 

 and scores of budding geniuses are working nights and 

 Sundays in barns and garages, tinkering upon an idea 

 worth millions to the luckiest inventor. 



Texas cannot, and does not try to, grow long-staple 

 cotton. Theirs is all mass production, a conception so 

 deeply impressed on them that they are the only large 

 group of agriculturists I have met anywhere who habit- 

 ually speak in terms, not of bales or bushels or tons to 

 the acre, but of men to the acre. They produce middling 

 grades of cotton most of which was previously ex- 

 portedmade with a sharp eye on cost. They are cost- 

 minded rather than price-minded, and recently two ex- 

 perts of their State Experiment Station, C. A. Bonnen 

 and A. G. Magee, published an exhaustive study of 



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