166 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



homicides, May and October, are also the months when 

 farm labor is most busy." 14a 



By the first of August cotton picking is well under 

 way in south Texas. It moves up the belt until by Sep- 

 tember 11 the whole rural South is engaged in harvesting 

 its cotton. The bolls have opened, and the white fluffy 

 fibre stands encapped in the five pointed star of the 

 opened boll Dixie's trademark. The harvest is to con- 

 tinue for three months. The bolls open at different times, 

 and the fields must be picked over thrice or more. Cotton 

 picking requires more hand labor than any other process 

 in contemporary agriculture. It has never yet been suc- 

 cessfully mechanized. The average Negro hand is expected 

 to pick 150 pounds of seed cotton a day. In the Western 

 Belt, where the bolls grow larger and open, wider, the 

 average adult picks 250 pounds a day. Depending on 

 the yield it takes a man from thirty to a hundred hours 

 to pick an acre of cotton. The average time required out- 

 side Texas is estimated at fifty hours of man labor an 

 acre. Seventy-two planters of Louisiana averaged over 

 six and a half days per cotton acre in picking and haul- 

 ing the cotton. 15 The amount of the farmer's time re- 

 quired to pick an acre of cotton would produce three 

 acres of corn in Iowa or four acres of wheat in Kansas. 16 



At the approach of the picking season the rural South 

 begins to mobilize its labor force. Business picks up. 

 Negroes from the towns and villages load on the planter's 

 wagon or truck and journey out to the fields. Maids, 

 cooks, and men-of-all-work desert their employers with 



14 a Homicides in South Carolina, 1920-1924, p. 22. An unpublished 

 study, University of North Carolina, 1928. South Carolina had a 

 population 82.5 per cent rural in 1919. 



15 Cotton Atlas, p. 16. 16 Baker, op cit., p. 39. 



