196 COTTON 



farmer began preparing for planting again. The 

 full crop, we see, does not ripen at once. Again 

 and still again harvest comes, and gives a long sea- 

 son for the gathering of the crop from the earliest 

 to the latest pickings. 



"But is the production of cotton limited at the 

 present time by the quantity that could be gather- 

 ed?" is a question often asked. 



Here is the opinion of an expert : 



" Excluding the population of towns and villages, 

 who do a considerable share in cotton picking, and 

 deducting one-third for children under eleven 

 years of age, there remains an exclusively rural 

 population in the Cotton States of over 6,800,000, 

 all more or less occupied in cotton-growing, and 

 capable, at the low average of 100 pounds daily, 

 of picking more than 450,000 bales a day (or the 

 crop of 1905 in three weeks) ; and if they continued 

 picking at this rate through the whole season, they 

 could gather four or five times as much as the 

 largest crop ever yet made." 



COST OF PICKING 



Picking costs from forty cents to one dollar per 

 hundred pounds of seed cotton fifty cents being 

 perhaps the usual price and it takes three hun- 

 dred pounds of seed cotton to make one hundred 

 pounds of lint; that is to say, two-thirds of the 

 weight of cotton when picked is seed. With an 

 average price of seventy-five cents per hundred, 

 the cost per pound for picking is 2.2 cents. With 

 cotton selling at ten cents per pound, it is seen that 

 more than one-fifth of this amount goes simply for 

 labor of picking. As cotton sold for a number of 

 years at six cents a pound, with the cost of picking 



