48 
COTTON 
and so built up our lands as to find no difficulty 
here, shall we not nevertheless be hopelessly balked 
by lack of labor for chopping and picking the crop? 
This problem, in our opinion, is another one that 
is likely to solve itself when inexorable circumstance 
demands that it do so. 
As for hoeing the cotton, that problem is already 
solved. Within two miles of where this book is 
written, some of the finest cotton in the county was 
grown last year entirely without hand-chopping — 
simply by the right use of the peg-tooth smoothing 
harrow and the cultivator. The cotton was thinned 
and kept free from grass entirely by these tools. 
And instead of the average yield of 200 pounds of 
lint per acre, this land made 700 pounds of lint per 
acre! 
A much more serious problem is the mechanical 
cotton-picker. There are many lions in the path. 
Cotton does not open all at once, but irregularly 
through a period of several weeks. Cotton does not 
have the uniformity of corn or wheat in size or 
position, but is irregularly placed in the rows, its 
limbs grow all over it, and the plants vary hope- 
lessly in size; the limbs furthermore are easily 
broken. Finally, the lint should be free from dirt 
and trash, and many have thought that only the 
human hand could select the lint from the open bolls 
without adding a ruinously large quantity of dead 
leaves and dirt. 
Clearly, therefore, the making of a mechanical 
picker is a hard task, and yet so fertile is the human 
imagination and so enormous are the rewards await- 
ing the man who succeeds in making an effective 
picker — the wealth of Croesus may be his — that 
we expect it to come, and to come not very many 
