48 COTTON 



and so built up our lands as to find no difficulty 

 here, shall we not nevertheless be hopelessly balked 

 by lack of labor for chopping and picking the crop? 



This problem, in our opinion, is another one that 

 is likely to solve itself when inexorable circumstance 

 demands that it do so. 



As for hoeing the cotton, that problem is already 

 solved. Within two miles of where this book is 

 written, some of the finest cotton in the county was 

 grown last year entirely without hand-chopping 

 simply by the right use of the peg-tooth smoothing 

 harrow and the cultivator. The cotton was thinned 

 and kept free from grass entirely by these tools. 

 And instead of the average yield of 200 pounds of 

 lint per acre, this land made 700 pounds of lint per 

 acre! 



A much more serious problem is the mechanical 

 cotton-picker. There are many lions in the path. 

 Cotton does not open all at once, but irregularly 

 through a period of several weeks. Cotton does not 

 have the uniformity of corn or wheat in size or 

 position, but is irregularly placed in the rows, its 

 limbs grow all over it, and the plants vary hope- 

 lessly in size; the limbs furthermore are easily 

 broken. Finally, the lint should be free from dirt 

 and trash, and many have thought that only the 

 human hand could select the lint from the open bolls 

 without adding a ruinously large quantity of dead 

 leaves and dirt. 



Clearly, therefore, the making of a mechanical 

 picker is a hard task, and yet so fertile is the human 

 imagination and so enormous are the rewards await- 

 ing the man who succeeds in making an effective 

 picker the wealth of Croesus may be his that 

 we expect it to come, and to come not very many 



