26 BULLETIN 1111, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
scattered about in mixed-variety communities. Assembling, sorting 
over, and classing the American cotton crop is an expensive opera- 
tion which unified community production would greatly simplify. 
Without discussing the question whether the buyers generally get 
too large a return for their services in assembling and sorting over 
the crop to make up the commercial lots that manufacturers buy, 
attention may be called to the fact that the work done by the buyers 
in classing and assembling individual bales of the various qualities 
and conditions of fiber to make up the " even-running " commercial 
lots would be greatly facilitated if the crop were standardized in 
production through one-variety community organization. Thou- 
sands of men are employed and millions of dollars expended every 
year in sampling, sorting out, and assembling commercial quantities 
of the different qualities of cotton before selling to the manufacturers, 
and much of this effort and expense could be avoided if communities 
grew one uniform kind and handled their product in a uniform man- 
ner. The preliminary for unifying and standardizing the quality of 
cotton is the planting of uniform seed and giving equal conditions 
and care to the growing plants, so that regular development may 
follow and normal maturity may be reached. 
Even if the manufacturers were in position to take over the whole 
system of buying, classing, and sorting the crop, community co- 
operation would still be necessary for effective improvement of pro- 
duction. On a community basis the buying and other commercial 
problems are simplified, as shown by the experience of one-variety 
communities. 
CLASSING COTTON IN THE FIELD. 
On account of the use of cotton fiber for machine spinning there 
is a particular requirement that the cotton grower's product shall be 
uniform in order to be of good quality for manufacturing purposes. 
Mixtures of long and short staples are worse than useless to the man- 
ufacturer and can be sold by the farmer only because unskillful 
buyers ma} 7 fail to detect even badly mixed fiber. The simplest and 
most definite way to detect mixing is to inspect the plants in the 
field. If a farmer's cotton is not uniform its quality is already 
impaired. It is impossible that really first-quality fiber should come 
from a mixed field. Even with short staples uniformity is important, 
and manufacturers would willingly pay more for really uniform fiber 
if assured of the " even-running quality " that is their ideal of textile 
raw material. Notwithstanding the importance of uniformity to the 
manufacturer, little attention has been given to this problem on the 
side of production. 
The quality of cotton, and especially the uniformity of the fiber, 
can be judged much more effectively in the field than by the present 
