SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



were over eight hundred and fifty oil mills: now there 

 are fewer than four hundred. However, each of the 

 survivors is doing twice as much business, for the aver- 

 age crush has advanced from five thousand tons of seed 

 per mill to over eleven thousand tons. 



As the ginners have been hustling out into the fields 

 to collect cotton, so the crushers have been scrambling 

 around among the gins trying to corral as much cotton- 

 seed as possible. Competitive bidding for seed has been 

 lively because, working day and night through a short 

 season, an extra ton or two of seed boosts the profits 

 and even five hundred pounds are not to be ignored. 



This progress under pressure may be uncomfortable, 

 but it is wholesome in its effects upon those who can 

 stand the strain. With the best brains of the industry 

 preoccupied with the problems of buying and selling, 

 such vital matters as operating efficiency, quality of 

 finished products, and the development of new markets 

 in new employments for cottonseed products have been 

 too long relegated to the background. Most of the 

 technical progress has come from the outside, chiefly 

 from the makers of machinery and apparatus, and al- 

 most all of the new uses of cottonseed products has 

 originated far beyond the confines of the oil mills. This 

 is an unwholesome state of affairs. Any industry that 

 depends upon its suppliers and its customers to do its 

 own research for it is like a community that depends 



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