COTTON 
69 
crop, and so rapidly are we finding new uses for 
them — all of which will be considered at greater 
length in other chapters in this book — that Mr. 
Edward Atkinson was probably not far wrong 
when he declared that it would be worth while for 
the South to grow great crops of cotton, even if the 
plant made no lint at all but seed only. How 
varied are the uses of cottonseed — meal, oil, hulls 
and linters — has been suggested in the Introduction 
to this volume. 
The great trouble is that in the new awakening 
to the enormous value of cottonseed as a fertilizer, 
we have not yet come to a proper appreciation of 
their value as a feed also; for, in fact, we may 
feed them and still get three-fourths of their fertil- 
izing value in the manure from the animals. How 
unusually nutritious they are as a food may be 
guessed from the fact that for feeding purposes 
100 pounds of cottonseed equals in value 116 
pounds corn, and 100 pounds cottonseed meal 
equals 175 pounds corn. Cottonseed at 25 cents 
a bushel or cottonseed meal at $25 a ton is as 
cheap as corn at 40 cents a bushel. 
The folly, therefore, of burying this most val- 
uable of cattle feeds — burying it unused to rot in 
the soil — must be apparent to all. What should 
we think of using wheat bran or corn meal as a 
fertilizer for cotton without first having our live 
stock extract its feeding value? Yet in the one 
State in which the authors live, about $3,000,000 
worth of cottonseed meal is used as a fertilizer — 
which means that $2,500,000 in feeding values 
goes to nothing, and is a dead loss to our agricul- 
tural interests. 
