COTTON'S OTHER CROP 



acle. As a matter of fact neither soy oil nor soy protein 

 is a whit better than cottonseed. But poor little cotton- 

 seed has always been an orphan of cotton trying to 

 make its way in the world substituting for something 

 else, which often isn't as good as the cottonseed 

 product." 



This aggressive chemist naturally believes in a chem- 

 ical future for cottonseed, especially for the hulls which 

 are the low-price member of the quartet of major cot- 

 tonseed products, fed to cattle for roughage. Several 

 years ago Leahy showed that from cottonseed hulls 

 almost twice as much furfural can be extracted as from 

 oat hulls. He was told to forget it, but when furfural 

 became a critical material for the synthetic rubber pro- 

 gram, the Government built an extraction plant at 

 Memphis and commandeered one hundred and fifty 

 thousand tons of cottonseed hulls. Results confirmed 

 Leahy's neglected analysis. Almost half of cottonseed- 

 hull bran consists of various pentosans, a varied group 

 of chemicals that can be converted to fermentable 

 sugars, solvents, plastics, even to motor fuels. Furfural 

 (used as a solvent in refining lubricating oil, extracting 

 resins, and in plastics ) and xylose, which is wood sugar, 

 are the best known, but even they have not yet come 

 into their own. There are scores of others. 



All this is still the chemical industry of tomorrow 

 maybe of day-after-tomorrow but right now the hum- 



75 - 



