1 June, 1902.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 465 
wheat is under £2, from rice under £6, and from maize under £2 per acre. 
Supposing that a crop of sugar-cane reaches 20 tons an acre (we live in hopes 
that Dr. Maxwell will show us how to produce 100 tons an acre), that would, 
at 10s. a ton for the cane, amount to £10 an acre, from which must be 
deducted the cost of cultivation, trashing, cutting, and loading, leaving the 
small sugar-grower but a living wage. 
; It has been asked: Will it pay the cotton-planter to pick it? Like coffee, 
cotton is essentially a working man’s crop (the term “ working man’s crop” is 
used as distinguished from a “poor man’s crop,” as coffee has been called, 
because the “ poor man” cannot grow it). An able-bodied working man can 
cultivate, pick, and market 10 acres either of coffee or of cotton if he has a 
family of children old enough to go into the field. These children earn for him 
3d. per Ib. of his crop, consequently, if he has their assistance, the cost of 
icking can be eliminated. (Parents might object to their children being taken 
from school to pick cotton, but between the years 1864 and 1880 the Education 
Department arranged the children’s Christmas holidays in such a manner that 
the bairns were available to pick the cotton at the proper season.) 
A PERENNIAL on an Annvan? 
Ts cotton a perennial or an annual? It is both. Sea-Island cotton may 
be grown for several years in succession by pruning. Uplands cotton (woolly 
seed) may be pruned, but it is not worth while, except to produce a very early 
crop. 
To Corron-PLANTERS. 
The following warning might profitably be given to cotton-planters. Never 
pick cotton until the dew is dried off it. When picked, lay your cotton in the 
sun for three or four hours, but take it in before sundown. At the very first 
appearance of one white boll pick it, and continue to pick as long as the white 
bolls appear. Never leave the cotton which has burst out from the bolls for one 
single day in the field, otherwise it will turn yellow. 
Corron-PICKING Macuines. 
Several cotton-picking machines have been invented in various parts of the 
world, one of which was expected to solve the question of hand labour. It was 
a machine which was provided with brushes and rolled over the cotton—that is 
to ‘say, two dises were fastened to an arched attachment, enabling the discs to 
run on both sides of the cotton plants. The theory was that the brushes would 
tear the cotton from the bushes, the cotton being subsequently carried away to 
a receptacle by combs. This machine, however, proved a dead failure. “The 
latest and most approved patent is a pneumatic machine worked by powerful 
suction, somewhat on the principle of the shee )-shearing machine. ‘The machine 
passes along the cotton-field, one man on each side of the trolly from which the 
suction power is conveyed. Briefly speaking, this machine consists of one or 
two or more pneumatic tubes, which, when presented to a perfectly ripe cotton 
boll, immediately suck it into a receptacle in rear of the power. (It has been 
stated in American papers that this machine will perform the work of cotton- 
picking in one-hundredth part of the time formerly required by hand-pickers.) 
In Concruston. 
Major Boyd informed us that, whilst South Sea Island cotton could not 
be profitably grown in the Southern part of the State, although the plant throve 
remarkably well, it would, he considered, flourish in this district. As will be seen 
from the above, it is far the more valuable kind of cotton. Cotton-growing, 
moreover, would not present the same difficulties from a labour point of view 
as sugar-growing. Cotton is, we are assured, even more easily picked than coffee. 
We hope some of our farmers will profit by Major Boyd’s good advice and 
information on the matter of cotton-growing, and endeavour to establish an 
industry 2s a result. i 
