THE RELATION OP COTTON BUYING TO COTTON GROWING. 17 



sampling upon which the buyer relies. But by field inspection 

 admixtures of 1 or 2 per cent are quite as easily and definitely detected 

 as percentages of 10 or 20 per cent. A buyer or inspector having 

 sufficient familiarity with a variety could establish definite per- 

 centage grades of purity of stock for all of the cotton of a neighbor- 

 hood, and these percentages could be used as a basis for buying. 

 The short-staple plants or inferior iadividuals stand out very dis- 

 tinctly, so that they can be seen at a glance by those who have 

 sufficient familiarity with a variety, and they can be pulled out or 

 counted as easily as the same number of weeds that a careless farmer 

 might leave in his field. 



Buyers are on their guard, of course, against deliberate mixing or 

 "platmg" of bales by putting good cotton on the outside and poor 

 cotton in the middle, but when the long and the short cotton grow 

 together in the same field and are picked together the chances of 

 detection are greatly reduced. Dishonest farmers have been known 

 to add a proportion of short-staple seed before planting, in order to 

 increase the yield and sell the crop at regular long-staple prices. 

 This has been done, not alone in out-of-the-way places where there 

 were no regular long-staple buyers, but in recognized long-staple 

 markets. The buyer puUs only two or three samples from the bale, 

 and unless he happens upon short cotton in ^'pulling the sample" the 

 bales may be passed and paid for as long staple. Hence, the present 

 system of buying affords no protection against the deterioration of 

 varieties of long-staple cotton. The mixture is likely to go on to the 

 point of complete contamination of the stock before the buyer detects 

 the damage. 



In failing to make use of the opportunity of judging cotton in the 

 field, the present system of buying becomes wasteful and inefficient. 

 Buying cotton at a flat price without discrimination of quality 

 means that all the different grades and qualities that a region pro- 

 duces are brought together, and then they are sorted out again, 

 though there is much less chance of correct judgment as to quality 

 than before they were brought together. Buying from a knowledge 

 of the cotton in the field would require, no doubt, more work from 

 the buyer than he now applies to his business, but the effort would be 

 worth while and might be expected to find proper remuneration. 



FIELD INSPECTION IN THE INTEREST OF MANUFACTURERS. 



What the long-staple manufacturers might do, and what they 

 undoubtedly would do if sufficiently alive to their future interests, 

 would be to send men into districts where long-staple cotton is 

 grown, in order to gain direct famiharity with the facts that deter- 

 mine the value of the cotton for manufacturing purposes. The 

 knowledge that might be gained in this way could be used either in 



