316 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



may grow sea island cotton on his upland plantation at 

 Hartsville, South Carolina; he may grow over a bale to 

 the acre; he may conquer the boll weevil menace. True, 

 but that is no evidence that his practices will be adopted 

 over the Cotton Belt or even in South Carolina. Mr. 

 Coker has said in a personal letter : 



. . . Although I and my associates have for twenty-five 

 years been engaged in the work of improving the cotton crop, 

 providing marketing facilities for our local territory, and try- 

 ing to impress upon the South the principles of a sound and 

 profitable agriculture, we have not been able except in a small 

 territory to do much to check the destructive tendencies in 

 agriculture which have for many years been undermining its 

 foundations in large areas of the cotton states. 24 



The Department of Agriculture realizes that the 

 farmer can have no expert guidance to correspond to the 

 technician in industry. Consequently, thousands of dollars 

 are spent each year in studies and experiments. The re- 

 sults are embodied in bulletins which are mailed to all who 

 ask for them. But here the causal relation between 

 ignorance and inefficient farming is clear. The vicious 

 circle is there. Poverty created them ignorant and ignor- 

 ance helps to keep them poor. Oftentimes these inefficient 

 methods are matters of tradition, inherited from cotton 

 growing ancestors and embedded in negative and antago- 

 nistic attitudes toward diversification, rotation, and 

 scientific agriculture. "My folks have been cotton farm- 

 ers since Hector was a pup" ; "You can't tell me how to 

 grow cotton out of a book"; "Them University profes- 



24 Dec. 29, 1926, in files of Rural Social Economics Library, Uni- 

 versity of North Carolina. 



