COTTON'S OTHER CROP 



operation of the oil mill. He learned that damp, dirty 

 seed will rot and sometimes it bursts into spontaneous 

 combustion. So when precleaning became standard 

 practice he already knew it made good sense to dry the 

 seed and remove twigs, leaves, bits of boll before stor- 

 age in the seedhouse. He saw the seed cleaned and 

 then pass through the delinting machines where re- 

 volving circular saws cut off the fuzz of lint and whirl- 

 ing brushes collected it, sending it to the baler. He ob- 

 served the differences of the single pass-through and its 

 "mill run" linters and of the double delinting with its 

 "first cut" and its "second cut" products. He learned 

 first-hand how the hulls of the seed are sliced in the 

 huller, then separated from the meats or kernels, and 

 he could appreciate the fine points of bar or disc huller 

 and the comparative merits of all different types of 

 shakers, beaters, and other separators. 



Before he could vote, Harrell followed the hulls to 

 storage and shipping rooms and watched the meats 

 squeezed into flakes by steel rollers and then dumped 

 into the big cookers. It was years later before the first 

 steam-pressure cookers appeared with their saving in 

 cost and improvement in yield. Pressing the cooked 

 meats into slabs and wrapping them in filtercloth held 

 no secrets, and he was familiar with all the tricks of 

 stacking the slabs in steel boxes, one above the other, 

 a dozen or fifteen high, and then squeezing them to- 

 gether with a powerful hydraulic ram, four thousand 



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