ville and Nashville Railroads and Family 
Lines, and a director of the American 
Telephone and Telegraph Company. 
e Essentials of Success 
Mr. Coker considered the following as 
among the essentials of success in cotton 
growing: (1) pure bred seed of guaran- 
teed good germination from a recently 
pedigreed strain of one of the early high- 
producing varieties of good staple length, 
and (2) the rigid limitation of the acre- 
age planted to an area which can be 
properly worked and rapidly gathered. 
“The bane of the whole cotton industry,” 
he declared, “is the planting of bigger 
crops than can be rapidly harvested, and 
this has resulted in a heavy over-produc- 
tion of low grades and in an under-pro- 
duction of food stuffs.” 
All his life David R. Coker worked un- 
tiringly to breed seed of constantly im- 
proved quality, but he went much further 
than that. He preached better farming, 
balanced farming, profitable farming— 
and never gave up in his long-range 
struggle to help the farmer overcome the 
evils of outmoded methods. His dream, 
which he pursued with a quiet but un- 
flagging determination, was of a South- 
land whose farm families were well 
housed, well nourished and well dressed, 
and with educational facilities for chil- 
dren second to none in the country. He 
was often heard to say, “Agriculture is 
not just a business. It is a way of life.” 
He thought in terms of essential food 
production on the farm, of a reduction 
in the number of dollars that had to 
leave the South for life’s necessities, of 
farm equipment that would make the 
work-day easier for those who went into 
the fields to plant, cultivate and harvest 
the crops. He knew cotton would long be 
the South’s principal cash crop, but he 
hated the prevailing idea that it should 
be grown on every available acre, good 
and bad; and he deplored to the last mo- 
ment of his life the fact that not every 
farmer accepted the basic fact that good 
yields of high quality crops begin with 
the planting of quality seed. 
He was proud, as he had every right 
to be, of the success that finally came to 
him and his company. The fame of his 
improved seed spread throughout South 
Carolina; North Carolina farmers, and 
those in Georgia and other states, anx- 
ious to improve the quality of their cot- 
ton, heard of the great work being done 
at Hartsville and many of them soon 
were planting the seed that resulted from 
Mr. Coker’s tireless efforts. 
In 1921 he told his customers: “Every 
planter is interested in his financial fu- 
ture and we are equally interested in the 
financial future of our planter customers 
and of Southern agriculture generally. 
We are operating a seed breeding farm 
and selling highly bred seeds of the prin- 
cipal crops grown in the South. Our 
operations,” he said, “must be financially 
successful if this business is to be main- 
tained. We, however, did not take up this 
business primarily as a money-making 
proposition but mainly because the con- 
dition of Southern agriculture demanded 
that more attention be given to the im- 
provement of agriculture through the 
breeding and introduction of better va- 
rieties of our staple crops and the main- 
tenance of a reliable source of highly 
bred seed. We saw in this field of ac- 
tivity a great opportunity for public 
service of the highest grade. When our 
work was started in 1902, no other work 
ee 
CG&OMPress Photos. 
PICTURE ABOVE, made on one of the Coker breeding farms at Hartsville, 
shows cotton piled on squares of burlap at end of rows. Expert supervision of 
this and all other operations in the breeding program is highly essential. 
TWO OF THE warehouses, above, at Hartsville used for storing pedigreed 
cottonseed, small grains and other seed. In the summer, visitors are served 
cold watermelon under the trees between the warehouses. The Coker hybrid seed 
corn processing plant, below, is one of the most modern in the country. 
