6 
H. G. Hastings & Co., Seedsmen, Atlanta, Georgia. 
Our Cotton Breeding Work 
All through the growing season Mr. D. S Starr has been watching 
closely the plants in the test grounds as wen as in that portion of the farm 
devoted exclusively to plant breeding. Possibly out of five or six thou¬ 
sand plants of a new variety of cotton tested for the first time he may find 
a dozen or fifteen plants that actually give promise of developing into 
something of value with proper handling. Our Illustration below shows 
Mr. Starr making individual plant selections. You will notice along the 
left hand side of the wagon road the small bags. Each one contains the 
best bolls from some cotton stalk that showed, so far as the eye can de¬ 
tect, marked superiority over the other plants in that particular variety. 
These particular plants have been watched closely all through the grow¬ 
ing season by Mr. Starr and tagged. Before a picker is allowed to go Into 
the cotton, Mr, Starr gets the few bolls he wants from each plant and 
places them in a bag by themselves. The product of each plant is kept 
entirely separate from any other, these bags being removed to our special 
warehouse for the Test and Breeding grounds. In all real work in plant 
breeding we have to start with single plants. First, we depend on what 
we can see on the plant. After these individual plant selections have 
been made begins the real inside work where the “throwing out" starts. 
Mr. Starr made last fall selections from some 2,600 plants. So far as the 
eye could see these were all superior plants and that’s just where nature 
often deceives us. 
The cotton from each one of those 2,500 or more separate stalks is gin¬ 
ned separately on a special gin for this purpose. The seed cotton from 
each plant is carefully weighed before ginning, the lint and seed separ¬ 
ately weighed on delicate scales afterwards. It is often necessary to 
throw out over one-half of these apparently superior plants because of 
low lint percentage. We find a great difference between the lint per cent 
of the dinerent plants. The last complete report shows some plants run¬ 
ning as low as 17 per cent of lint, less than one-fifth, while others went as 
high as 49 per cent, practically even weight of lint and seed. 
MR. Di S. STARR, OUR EXPERT COTTON BREEDER AT WORK ON THE HASTINGS FARM 
We don’t want any cotton plants with less than 38 to 40 per cent of 
lint and the report above shows what an enormous variation there is in 
the lint prodding qualities of different cotton plants. Among cotton 
growers generally is the old saying that cotton “thirds itself.” Some 
plants do much better than that, others much less and one of the first 
things we do in our plant breeding work is to get rid of these low per 
cent of lint plants. 
Lint rather than seed is what the cotton grower is after and there is 
no use growing these low per cent lint plants. There are tens of thousands 
of these low per cent tint plants in every grower’s field and no system of 
^eed selection that depends on the eye alone is going to get right results. 
In fact, these low per cent lint plants were among the best looking. Other 
points taken into consideration in our work along that line is length and 
strength of lint as well as high productiveness of the general crop. In 
fact there are so many difterent points to be considered in ‘‘cotton breed¬ 
ing’' that we are sometimes at a loss to know just which direction to go 
first. Four things we keep in view constantly, however; increase in yield. 
Increase in lint percentage, better quality of staple and last, but not least 
in importance, the breeding of varieties that will make paying crops of 
cotton in spite of the boll weevil, which will cover the entire cotton belt 
within the next few years. We have no Boll Weevil in Georgia as yet but 
we will have it and are getting ready to meet it by breeding quick-matur¬ 
ing varieties that will make before the Weevil can get in its work. We 
have varieties now that are making as high as a bale per acre in some of 
the worst infested weevil districts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. 
