COTTON 291 
air. It lives on disorganized materials. While it 
enjoys a ration in which cottonseed meal forms a 
part, yet it does not use this material before nature 
has rotted or decomposed its component parts. 
The same amount of effort that nature uses in doing 
this work, live stock may give, and to their profit. 
In other words, what is food for the plant is not 
food for the animal; what is food for the animal 
is not food for the plant. In other words, just as 
the oil mill takes the oil from the seed, and yet 
turns back to the farmer all the elements of the 
seed that he can utilize, so the animal takes 
from the seed certain properties useful to it, and 
yet returns to the soil practically all the matter 
the soil could utilize for its enrichment. Meal is 
food for the animal but not food for the plant, 
until nature does to it precisely what the animal 
does to it. This is to decompose it. The animal 
is benefited because it grows and becomes fat in 
breaking up the organized forms of meal and fat. 
When the animal gets through with its work, it 
returns the fertilizing elements to the soil in the 
form of liquid and solid excrement. 
THE FACTORY FARM 
The cattle industry should be a part of cotton 
farming; not simply to raise feeding stuffs on the 
farm, but to change these from the raw state into 
finished forms. That is what any factory does: 
the cotton factory, for example, takes raw cotton 
and makes it into finished products. On the factory- 
farm the cotton farmer will take his meal, hulls, 
grasses, corn stover and hays, and manufacture 
them into such finished products as milk, butter, 
cheese and beef. For we lose one of the import- 
