COMMERCIAL FEEDS 75 



Importance of Cotton Products. — The yield of cotton in the 

 United States is approximately 11,000,000 bales per year. It 

 takes 1,500 pounds of seed cotton to make a bale and a bale 

 weighs 500 pounds. This leaves 1,000 pounds for the manu- 

 facture of the by-products. The oil mills do not secure all of the 

 seed, as many of the planters keep the seed for feeding and 

 fertilizing at home. The price of seed is on the increase and 

 a greater per cent, of the seed raised is being sold to the manu- 

 facturers every year than formerly. For the year 1908, 929, 

 287, 467 pounds of cotton-seed were manufactured.^ The boll 

 weevil, an insect that destroys a great many bolls of cotton, thus 

 decreasing the yield, has been and is diminishing the yield and 

 acreage of cotton in certain sections of the cotton belt. The 

 figures cited, however, should impress the student with the im- 

 portance of this industry and the large amount of cotton-seed 

 meal and hulls which are used for feeding purposes. 



Cotton-Seed Products. — ^Attached to the seed of cotton are long 

 white fibers known to us as cotton. When the cotton is ginned 

 all of these fibers or lint are removed except a few short fibers 

 which adhere to the seeds. The seeds are then taken to a cot- 

 ton-seed oil mill and treated as follows. First, the greater 

 part of the lint is removed by a second ginning in a machine 

 called the delinter, leaving the seed. The seed is composed of 

 the hull, or hard outer covering, and the kernel or meat. The 

 seeds are then put through a machine called the huller which 

 removes the hulls from the seed. This process is called de- 

 corticating the seed. The whole mass (hulls and meats) is now 

 subjected to a separating process by shaking in a revolving 

 screen, the meats passing through the perforations of the screen. 

 The hulls obtained in this process are known as cotton^seed 

 hulls. The meats are conveyed from the shaker to special steam 

 jacketed covered kettles and cooked. The cooked meats are 

 transferred to a machine, called the cake former, where they 

 are made up into cakes or forms of the proper size to fit the 

 hydraulic press, and wrapped with camels' hair cloth. These 

 hot forms are now subjected to enormous pressure in a hydraulic 



> 1908 Yearbook, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture. 



