38 BULLETIN 1111, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
The growers in the Salt River Valley also maintain an organiza- 
tion for dealing with the labor problems and bringing the cotton 
pickers from Mexico each fall, which are necessary for the har- 
vesting of the crop. The money required to meet such general ex- 
penses of the cooperative industry is raised by a tax of $4 on each 
bale, collected at the gin. The importance and scope of this or- 
ganization may be realized from the fact that in the season of 1920 
it was necessary to bring about 15,000 cotton pickers from Mexico 
to assist in harvesting the Salt River Valley crop of about 180,000 
acres of Pima cotton. 
Special encouragement was given to the development of the Pima 
industry during the war period, as a prospective military necessity. 
With the boll weevil present in the Sea Island districts, the possibility 
of a sudden and complete failure of the crop was foreseen in the 
event of an unfavorable season, and this actually occurred in 1919, 
when the production of Sea Island cotton fell to less than 7,000 bales, 
from 52,000 bales in 1918 and 92,000 bales in 1917. Thus, if the 
war had continued another year the Pima cotton of Arizona would 
have been the only raw material in the United States available for 
making airplane wings, balloon fabrics, and other military equip- 
ment requiring special strength and durability. 
It was reckoned with much satisfaction in Arizona that the Pima 
cotton crop of the Salt River Valley communities in 1919 returned 
about $20,000,000, or nearly twice the cost of the Salt River reclama- 
tion project, including the Roosevelt Dam, electric power plants, 
and irrigation canals. The value of land suited to cotton also 
doubled or trebled in a few years, some of it selling at $500 per acre, 
or even higher. With reduced production in Egypt and loss of 
the Sea Island crop through the boll weevil, the automobile-tire in- 
dustry appeared to be acutely dependent upon the Pima cotton 
raised by the southwestern communities. In the spring of 1920 
manufacturers offered to guarantee a minimum price of 60 cents a 
pound, and some contracts were made at 80 cents a pound, which 
encouraged further rapid extension of Pima cotton not only in the 
Salt River Valley but in the Yuma, Imperial, Coachella, and San 
Joaquin Valleys. Altogether about 180,000 acres of Pima cotton 
were planted in the Salt River Valley in 1920 and nearly 250,000 
acres in all of the irrigated valleys, notwithstanding the very high 
costs of production that resulted from speculative conditions. 
The losses that have followed the world-wide commercial collapse 
of the autumn of 1920 resulted in greatly restricted planting in 1921, 
but this setback has no relation to particular varieties of cotton or to 
local questions. The entire cotton industry, not only of the United 
States but also of foreign countries, was affected in the same way, 
by a general reaction from speculative inflation of values during the 
