31 
As a rule cotton crops have not received the attention necessary for 
their best g-rowth and fruitf ulness. This lack of necessar}^ cultivation 
is more particularly noticeable with tenant farmers. The plant is thus 
least able to overcome insect ravages and put on additional fruit in 
place of that destroyed. The natural perennial habit of the cotton 
plant tends to make its growing season later and later for a given 
locality. The continued use of seed of local and often unknown origin, 
frequently secured from public gins, has been instrumental in produc- 
ing a rank, late fruiting and maturing strain of cotton on which boll- 
worm ravages are generally admitted to be much more severe than on 
earlier maturing varieties. 
The principal crops grown, namely, cotton and corn, are the two 
preferred food plants of the bollworm, and in the absence of fall and 
winter plowing the insect finds conditions most favorable for its 
development. 
In the more eastern cotton belt States conditions affecting the status 
of the bollworm present important differences and readily account for 
the unimportant character of the insect as a cotton pest in these States. 
The smaller size of farms does not permit of the cultivation of cotton 
in such large and unbroken areas; while the ''weed" is smaller and 
less succulent by reason of a lesser fertility of the soil. The general 
use of fertilizers hastens the formation of fruit, so that it is more 
quickly out of danger of insect attack. The rotation of crops also is 
much more generall}^ practiced. The three-year rotation of corn, cot- 
ton, and oats, or other crops, insures thorough plowing of the lands. 
Cowpeas are very generally planted in corn as it is being laid by, and 
often after oats, thus furnishing the bollworm moth with an abun- 
dance of food from the nectaries of the flower stalk, and they are thus 
not forced to the cotton fields for food. In Georgia the senior author 
has seen bollworm moths literally in swarms feeding in cowpeas, to the 
complete neglect of adjacent fields of cotton. 
It would appear that there is some relation between the relative 
acreage in cotton and peas in the different States and the injury 
suffered by these States from bollworms. The following table, com- 
piled from the Twelfth Census, of the plantings of cotton and peas for 
the year 1899, is of interest in this connection: 
Table III. 
— Comparative acreage in cotton and cowpeas, 1899. 
state. 
Acreage in 
cotton. 
Acreage in 
peas. 
Ratio of 
acreage in 
cotton and 
peas. 
1, 007, 020 
221,825 
2, 074, 081 
3, 513, 839 
3, 202, 135 
2, 897, 920 
1,641,855 
1, 376, 254 
6, 960, 367 
88, 407 
17, 875 
143, 070 
167, 032 
91,126 
64, 490 
31,414 
15, 190 
33,947 
11 tol 
Florida 
12t0l 
South Carolina 
13 tol 
Georgia 
21 to 1 
35 tol 
Mississippi .' 
41 to 1 
Arkansas 
52 to 1 
Louisiana . .... 
91 tol 
Texas , 
205 to 1 
^051— No. 50—05- 
