COTTON 
47 
Or to put the matter in even more striking form, 
it appears that if through feeding and manuring, 
the wheat straw, corn stover and cotton seed of 
these three crops respectively are each returned to 
the soil, wheat requires nineteen times as much of 
the great fertilizing elements as cotton, and corn 
thirty times as much. 
Sooner or later the Southern farmer will learn to 
apply this doctrine; the farm paper, the agricultural 
text-book in the public school, the agricultural col- 
lege, the Farmers' Institute workers, all are ham- 
mering away at the idea. And then when the cotton 
farmer gets this double- jointed idea: first, that he 
has the finest stock food in the world; second, that 
with this by-product properly utilized he has the 
crop that is of all crops the kindest to the soil — and 
a practical monopoly of this crop, — why, then, we 
shall have a new era in Southern agriculture; and 
as Dr. B. T. Galloway says, "a system of land- 
robbing will give way to a system of land-building." 
THE MECHANICAL COTTON-PICKER 
But, some one reminds us, in this day of labor- 
saving machinery cotton is still the one crop most 
fully dependent on hand labor. It is said that 
within fifty years the time of human labor required 
to produce a bushel of corn has decreased from four 
hours to thirty-four minutes, and for a bushel of 
wheat from three hours and ten minutes to ten min- 
utes, while it is doubtful if the time of human labor 
required to produce a pound of cotton has been di- 
minished even one-third. What then — when the 
world has begun to demand 25,000,000 bales of the 
South, even though we have so improved our seed 
