ONE-VARIETY COTTON COMMUNITIES. 6 
DISADVANTAGES OF MIXED-VARIETY PRODUCTION. 
That so simple an expedient as the one-variety organization of 
cotton communities should have been overlooked so long may seem 
remarkable, but it should not keep us from recognizing the facts. 
Xow that the serious defects of the present unorganized condition 
are recognized, more attention may be given to securing a substantial 
basis of progress in the cotton industry through improved and stand- 
ardized production in one-variety communities. The problems of 
community cooperation are a field of research that needs to be culti- 
vated at the present time for the general welfare of the cotton in- 
dustry, to place production on a basis of superior varieties. 
That the individual farmers of the same neighborhood should 
raise different kind.- of cotton is as unreasonable, impracticable, and 
uneconomic as that each operative in a textile mill should spin a dif- 
ferent kind of thread or weave a different kind of cloth. From the 
standpoint of progress in other branches of the cotton industry the 
lack of organization in the field of production appears as a very 
backward condition. The technical problems — the breeding of 
superior varieties, growing the crop, spinning thread, and weaving 
cloth by machinery — are much farther advanced than the general 
commercial problems of getting good cotton produced and supplied 
to the textile industry. 
If the present system of mixed-variety production had been 
planned or chosen for some practical end that would need to be 
sacrificed in establishing one-variety communities, the case would 
be less clear, and an adequate discussion would require a careful 
balancing of the advantages to be gained against those that would 
be lost by communities restricting themselves to a single variety. 
But no argument has been developed or advantage claimed for the 
present condition of miscellaneous, unorganized production. The 
system of public gins, that destroys varieties by mixing the seed of 
different sorts together, has had a very gradual and unconscious 
development in the half century since the Civil War period. 
Keeping good stocks of seed was much more feasible on the old 
plantations. Many of the large estates were well isolated, grew 
only a single variety, and had their own separate gins, so that a 
form of community production existed, a condition that gave place 
to separately operated small farms and tenant holdings and to the 
establishment of public gins, with the incidental result of the gen- 
eral mixing of seed. The changes of the farming system in the 
recent decades have resulted from other causes, with no relation to 
the need of uniform varieties or of pure-seed supplies. The pure- 
seed problems have had consideration only in recent years, after 
superior varieties had been bred and the utilization of those varieties 
became a practical question. It naturally was supposed that good 
