EXTENSION OF COTTON PRODUCTION IN CALIFORNIA. 9 



so that half of the return, or $35 to $50 an acre, may be reckoned as 

 a net gain from the farm operations. With Egyptian cotton, the 

 cost of picking must be reckoned as about double that of Durango, 

 and the ginning of Egyptian cotton is also more expensive, roller 

 gins being required instead of saw gins, which are used for Upland 

 staples. To make good these differences, a premium of 4 or 5 cents 

 a pound for the lint is necessary to render the Egyptian more profit- 

 able, but the new and rapidly increasing demand for Egyptian cot- 

 ton for automobile tires and other industrial uses, and the stationary 

 or declining production in Egypt favor a substantial premium for 

 Egyptian. It may be that yields will average higher with Durango, 

 in view of the fact that Egyptian cotton requires a longer season to 

 mature a full crop, though with favorable conditions Egyptian may 

 yield as much as Durango. Profits of $150 to $250 per acre are 

 claimed for growers of Egyptian cotton in the Salt River Valley in 

 1916, but these must be considered as altogether exceptional and cer- 

 tainly not to be used as a basis of calculation. 



It is possible that difficulties may be encountered in providing 

 roller gins in case a greatly increased acreage of Egyptian cotton 

 should be planted in Arizona and southern California in the season 

 of 1917. Roller gins are not made in the United States, but have to 

 be imported from England. The demand for them has been limited 

 in the past to the Sea Island districts of the South Atlantic States. 



LABOR REQUIREMENTS OF COTTON. 



That the labor requirements of the cotton crop have not been well 

 understood in California may be one of the chief reasons why more 

 efforts have not been made to extend this industry before. The popu- 

 lar idea that large supplies of very cheap labor must be available, as 

 in Egypt, India, China, and formerly in the American cotton belt, 

 has been shown to be erroneous. The last and most striking demon- 

 stration of this fact is the establishment of Egyptian cotton produc- 

 tion in the Salt River Valley of Arizona. Although labor appeared 

 to cost about 10 times as much in Arizona as in Egypt — $2 a day, as 

 compared with 20 cents — it has been possible by the use of farm 

 machinery, improved cultural methods, and especially the breeding 

 of better and more uniform varieties of cotton to make good the 

 differences in cost of hand labor. 



Egyptian cotton has been grown to advantage in Arizona for 

 several years past, during a period of unusually low prices. The 

 chief difficulty in the newly settled southwestern communities is not 

 that the cost of labor is prohibitive, but that not enough labor is 

 available when needed. This seems to have been the difficulty that 

 was encountered in the early attempts at cotton culture in the San 



