Ol^TE-VAEIETY COTTOlSr COMMUISriTIES. 3 



DISADVANTAGES OF MIXED-VARIETY PRODUCTION. 



That so simple an expedient as the one-variety organization of 

 cotton communities should have been overlooked so long may seem 

 remarkable, but it should not keep us from recognizing the facts, 

 Now that the serious defects of the present unorganized condition 

 are recognized, more attention may be given to securing a substantial 

 basis of progress in the cotton industry through improved and stand- 

 ardized production in one-variety communities. The problems of 

 community cooperation are a field of research that needs to be culti- 

 vated at the present time for the general welfare of the cotton in- 

 dustry, to place production on a basis of superior varieties. 



That the individual farmers of the same neighborhood should 

 raise different kinds of cotton is as unreasonable, impracticable, and 

 uneconomic as that each operative in a textile mill should spin a dif- 

 ferent kind of thread or weave a different kind of cloth. From the 

 standpoint of progress in other branches of the cotton industry the 

 lack of organization in the field of production appears as a very 

 backward condition. The technical problems — the breeding of 

 superior varieties, growing the crop, spinning thread, and weaving 

 cloth by machinery — are much farther advanced than the general 

 commercial problems of getting good cotton produced and supplied 

 to the textile industry. 



If the present system of mixed-variety production had been 

 planned or chosen for some practical end that would need to be 

 sacrificed in establishing one-variety communities, the case would 

 be less clear, and an adequate discussion would require a careful 

 balancing of the advantages to be gained against those that would 

 be lost by communities restricting themselves to a single variety. 

 But no argument has been developed or advantage claimed for the 

 present condition of miscellaneous, unorganized production. The 

 system of public gins, that destroys varieties by mixing the seed of 

 different sorts together, has had a very gradual and unconscious 

 development in the half century since the Civil War period. 



Keeping good stocks of seed was much more feasible on the old 

 plantations. Many of the large estates were well isolated, grew 

 only a single variety, and had their own separate gins, so that a 

 form of community production existed, a condition that gave place 

 to separately operated small farms and tenant holdings and to the 

 establishment of public gins, with the incidental result of the gen- 

 eral mixing of seed. The changes of the farming system in the 

 recent decades have resulted from other causes, with no relation to 

 the need of uniform varieties or of pure-seed supplies. The pure- 

 seed problems have had consideration only in recent years, after 

 superior varieties had been bred and the utilization of those varieties 

 became a practical question. It naturally was supposed that good 



