26 BULLETIN 1111, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



scattered about in mixed-variety communities. Assembling, sorting 

 over, and classing the American cotton crop is an expensive opera- 

 tion which unified community production would greatly simplify. 



Without discussing the question whether the buyers generally get 

 too large a return for their services in assembling and sorting over 

 the crop to make up the commercial lots that manufacturers buy, 

 attention may be called to the fact that the work clone by the buyers 

 in classing and assembling individual bales of the various qualities 

 and conditions of fiber to make up the " even-running " commercial 

 lots would be greatly facilitated if the crop were standardized in 

 production through one-variety community organization. Thou- 

 sands of men are employed and millions of dollars expended every 

 year in sampling, sorting out, and assembling commercial quantities 

 of the different qualities of cotton before selling to the manufacturers, 

 and much of this effort and expense could be avoided if communities 

 grew one uniform kind and handled their product in a uniform man- 

 ner. The preliminary for unifying and standardizing the quality of 

 cotton is the planting of uniform seed and giving equal conditions 

 and care to the growing plants, so that regular development may 

 follow and normal maturity may be reached. 



Even if the manufacturers were in position to take over the whole 

 system of buying, classing, and sorting the crop, community co- 

 operation would still be necessary for effective improvement of pro- 

 duction. On a community basis the buying and other commercial 

 problems are simplified, as shown by the experience of one-variety 

 communities. 



CLASSING COTTON IN THE FIELD. 



On account of the use of cotton fiber for machine spinning there 

 is a particular requirement that the cotton grower's product shall be 

 uniform in order to be of good quality for manufacturing purposes. 

 Mixtures of long and short staples are worse than useless to the man- 

 ufacturer and can be sold by the farmer only because unskillful 

 buyers may fail to detect even badly mixed fiber. The simplest and . 

 most definite way to detect mixing is to inspect the plants in the 

 field. If a farmer's cotton is not uniform its quality is already 

 impaired. It is impossible that really first-quality fiber should come 

 from a mixed field. Even with short staples uniformity is important, 

 and manufacturers would willingly pay more for really uniform fiber 

 if assured of the " even-running quality " that is their ideal of textile 

 raw material. Notwithstanding the importance of uniformity to the 

 manufacturer, little attention has been given to this problem on the 

 side of production. 



The quality of cotton, and especially the uniformity of the fiber, 

 can be judged much more effectively in the field than by the present 



