196 COTTON 
farmer began preparing for planting again. The 
full crop, we see, does not ripen at once. Again 
and still again harvest comes, and gives a long sea- 
son for the gathering of the crop from the earliest 
to the latest pickings. 
“But is the production of cotton limited at the 
present time by the quantity that could be gather- 
ed?” is a question often asked. 
Here is the opinion of an expert: 
“Excluding the population of towns and villages, 
who do a considerable share in cotton picking, and 
deducting one-third for children under eleven 
years of age, there remains an exclusively rural 
population in the Cotton States of over 6,800,000, 
all more or less occupied in cotton-growing, and 
capable, at the low average of 100 pounds daily, 
of picking more than 450,000 bales a day (or the 
crop of 1905 in three weeks); and if they continued 
picking at this rate through the whole season, they 
could gather four or five times as much as the 
largest crop ever yet made.” 
COST OF PICKING 
Picking costs from forty cents to one dollar per 
hundred pounds of seed cotton—fifty cents being 
perhaps the usual price—and it takes three hun- 
dred pounds of seed cotton to make one hundred 
pounds of lint; that is to say, two-thirds of the 
weight of cotton when picked is seed. With an 
average price of seventy-five cents per hundred, 
the cost per pound for picking is 2.2 cents. With 
cotton selling at ten cents per pound, it is seen that 
more than one-fifth of this amount goes simply for 
labor of picking. As cotton sold for a number of 
years at six cents a pound, with the cost of picking 
