44 
COTTON 
negro slaves and negro tenants that we do not yet 
appreciate the marvelous possibilities of scientific 
cotton farming. Just take the bald statement of 
Dr. H. J. Webber: "The average yield of cotton 
in the United States is only about 190 pounds of 
lint per acre, while on many large tracts carefully 
cultivated a yield of 500 to 800 pounds per acre 
is frequently obtained." Here in itself is material 
for a book of sermons. 
SEED SELECTION MAY INCREASE YIELD 30 TO 50 
PER CENT. 
For one thing, the seed for the cotton crop are 
probably selected with less care than are seed for 
any other farm crop that men grow. Your cotton 
farmer will carefully select the largest and best- 
formed ears for his seed corn; he will pay high 
prices for improved seed or oats; even his water- 
melon seed are selected from the most luscious and 
reddest-meated specimens of last summer. But 
when it comes to seed for his cotton crop he is 
strangely careless. The average farmer gets his 
seed haphazard from the general supply at the gin 
— good, bad, indifferent; early, late, medium; tall, 
bushy, and ordinary, varieties all mixed. 
With such conditions there is indeed abundant 
reason for believing that the average cotton yield per 
acre could be increased one-fourth by only five 
years' wise selection of seed. We know a farmer 
now who by selecting seed from the most thrifty 
stalks and having the seed ginned separately, in 
two years so improved the crop from the selected 
seed that the improvement was easily noted and 
became a matter of comment by persons passing on 
