OXE-VARIETY COTTON COMMUNITIES. 15 
Since the cotton must be compressed into bales by machinery as 
well as ginned the costs of machinery, power, equipment, and in- 
stallation of a modern ginning plant are beyond the resources 
the average farmer and can not be provided economically for any 
small acreage of cotton. Le-s than a thousand acres is hardly to 
be considered as a community for even a small ginning plant, cost- 
ing from so.". a, to $10,000. Plants costing from $20,000 to S50.000 
are considered more economical and serve large centers of produc- 
tion, where many thousands of bales are ginned every year. 
That the farmers themselves and those who are concerned with 
the progress of agriculture have not been accustomed in the past 
to think of the cotton industry in terms of community relations 
with the gins only shows how far the seed-supply problems am 
other scientific applications in the field of production have been neg- 
lected. But with these relations once clearly recognized, practical 
reforms may be expected to go forward rapidly, in view of the 
many agencies of agricultural improvement that now exist in the 
United State.-, including local. State, and National organizations 
that are devoted to agricultural progress. 
TOO MANY COTTON VARIETIES. 
Hundreds of different varieties of cotton or names for cotton 
varieties are current in the Southern State.-, vastly in excess of any 
practical need. Many of the older varieties, and especially the late- 
maturing kinds, have disappeared in the last decade, during the 
period of the boll-weevil invasion. But many new varieties, or at 
least new names, are brought out every year, advertised as valuable 
novelties and distributed as widely as possible, only to add to the 
general mixture of sorts. 
The need of varieties being adapted to local conditions is to be 
recognized, as well as the need of different kinds of fiber for textile 
purposes, but there are no practical reasons to justify the existence 
of any large number of varieties. A dozen good varieties would be 
very much better than hundreds. Some varieties require rather 
special conditions, but other- can be grown over large regions. The 
new early-maturing varieties that have been introduced from Mex- 
ico to meet boll-weevil conditions have been grown successfully in 
widely different regions, not only in experimental plantings but on a 
commercial scale. The Durango cotton, a new Upland type intro- 
duced a few years ago from Mexico and first acclimatized in Texas, 
has shown its ability to produce large crops of good fiber over almost 
the entire range of cotton cultivation in the United States, from 
southern Virginia around Norfolk to the Imperial Valley in Cali- 
fornia. The Acala cotton, more recentlv acclimatized from southern 
