COTTON'S OTHER CROP 



in the picking season. They leave fleets of trailers to be 

 loaded, and then drawn by their own trucks in long 

 trains to their gins. Although as yet only a few gins do 

 their own hauling, most farmers have their own trucks. 

 Seven out of ten pounds of seed-cotton now move from 

 field to gin by motorized equipment, and this has 

 shoved out the collection radius to twenty-odd miles. 



For the gin owner forced out of business by this 

 competitive pressure, it is little comfort to know that 

 he has been a victim of progress. Yet this is true since 

 small-scale operations do not make for efficiency and 

 economy, and growers are continually demanding 

 better ginned cotton. 



The average gin handles only a thousand bales a year 

 and works from six weeks to two months. A large cen- 

 tralized gin can handle thirty thousand bales a season. 

 Allied with an oil mill, as is already accomplished in 

 more than one instance, it becomes a sizable operation 

 that can afford modern equipment, maintain it prop- 

 erly, and man it with competent labor. The cost of 

 ginning and wrapping a bale of cotton is only six dollars, 

 not an exorbitant share of the charges against the 

 grower. But if American cotton is to meet the open- 

 price competition of cheap foreign growths and low- 

 cost synthetic fibers, then every penny will count. 



Within the wider orbit of the oil mills, similar forces 

 have been pressing the same kind of progress forward. 

 Casualties have been greater. Thirty years ago there 



- 69 - 



