COTTON'S OTHER CROP 



an industry based on an agricultural by-product cannot 

 but profit by a sounder, more profitable farm commu- 

 nity. That is turning the chemurgic idea inside out. It 

 might reap a rich haryest. 



But there is a good chance that the lowly cottonseed 

 may cease to be a by-product of the fiber plant and be- 

 come a full-fledged crop in its own right, a straight 

 competitor of the soybean and the peanut, of corn and 

 grain sorghums. This is, of course, the idea behind Dave 

 Killough's semilint cotton. Whatever the future may 

 hold for cotton fiber, the demand for edible oil and 

 protein stock-feed is greater than the supply and prom- 

 ises to become still greater in the years ahead. The 

 horizons of cottonseed are wide and rosy-hued. 



There is one self-confident little chemist, placed at 

 a rare vantage point for scanning these horizons, who 

 believes that the sky's the limit. John Leahy is director 

 of the Cotton Research Committee of Texas, an inter- 

 esting man energetically working on one of those new- 

 style self-help-for-cotton projects. That committee is a 

 brainchild of George Moffett of Chillicothe, who, amaz- 

 ingly, is the only farmer in the Texas Legislature. Sen- 

 ator Moffett is a real dirt farmer, a second generation 

 cotton grower from the High Plains, one of those whole- 

 sale, thousand-acre planters who make money regard- 

 less of farm conditions. His practical idea was an 

 agency to hook together and make sense of all the 



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