COTTON 47 



Or to put the matter in even more striking form, 

 it appears that if through feeding and manuring, 

 the wheat straw, corn stover and cotton seed of 

 these three crops respectively are each returned to 

 the soil, wheat requires nineteen times as much of 

 the great fertilizing elements as cotton, and corn 

 thirty times as much. 



Sooner or later the Southern farmer will learn to 

 apply this doctrine ; the farm paper, the agricultural 

 text-book in the public school, the agricultural col- 

 lege, the Farmers' Institute workers, all are ham- 

 mering away at the idea. And then when the cotton 

 farmer gets this double- jointed idea: first, that he 

 has the finest stock food in the world; second, that 

 with this by-product properly utilized he has the 

 crop that is of all crops the kindest to the soil and 

 a practical monopoly of this crop, why, then, we 

 shall have a new era in Southern agriculture; and 

 as Dr. B. T. Galloway says, "a system of land- 

 robbing will give way to a system of land -building." 



THE MECHANICAL COTTON-PICKER 



But, some one reminds us, in this day of labor- 

 saving machinery cotton is still the one crop most 

 fully dependent on hand labor. It is said that 

 within fifty years the time of human labor required 

 to produce a bushel of corn has decreased from four 

 hours to thirty-four minutes, and for a bushel of 

 wheat from three hours and ten minutes to ten min- 

 utes, while it is doubtful if the time of human labor 

 required to produce a pound of cotton has been di- 

 minished even one-third. What then when the 

 world has begun to demand 25,000,000 bales of the 

 South, even though we have so improved our seed 



