4 BULLETIN 36, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



in the State, with the prices paid, would be prepared in time for exhi- 

 bition at the Oklahoma State Fair in 1913. The samples were, un- 

 fortunately, destroyed, by a fire which occurred in one of the rented 

 buildings of the Department of Agriculture. 



The data resulting from this investigation are far too voluminous 

 to be presented in a single publication, and a detailed discussion of 

 staple-cotton production in Oklahoma and of the effect of varying 

 lengths of staple on the price paid in different sections will not be 

 undertaken at this time. It should, however, be distinctly under- 

 stood that the facts have all been carefully scrutinized and that none 

 of the variations in price which appear in this publication are due 

 to variations in the length of staple of the individual bales considered. 

 There are some markets in which the prices are rather uniformly 

 higher than in certain other markets, the difference apparently being 

 due to the reputation of particular compress points for shipping out 

 cotton superior in staple or other quality to that shipped from other 

 compress points, but every individual bale for which any premium 

 was paid on account of its length of staple has been excluded from 

 the tables and the discussions presented in this publication. 



METHOD OF SAMPLING. 



Because of the impossibility of starting this survey at the begin- 

 ning of the cotton-marketing season and because so few people could 

 be assigned exclusively to this work, no attempt was made to take 

 the samples in such a way as to show the proportion of the various 

 grades of cotton which were produced from- this crop. It was 

 realized that a very large number of the highest grading bales of the 

 j^ear's crop had been marketed before our work was undertaken and 

 that a considerable number of bales, nearly all low grade, would be 

 marketed after our force had returned to Washington. The plan 

 followed was therefore to secure in each market, as nearly as pos- 

 sible, samples from bales representing the extreme range of grades 

 on the market at the time. Following this plan, if the cotton yard 

 contained only a dozen bales of high-grade cotton and a dozen bales 

 of low-grade cotton with about a hundred bales grading about mid- 

 dling, the 15 or 20 bales which would be selected for sampling would 

 probably include more bales above and below middling than of mid- 

 dling cotton. For this reason the number of middling bales taken 

 at any one place on any one date appears to be small, but in a great 

 many cases where a dozen or more bales were sampled early in the 

 season every bale would be found to grade above middling, while 

 later in the season a similar sampling would show very few bales 

 grading as high as middling. 



