Chapter 5 of 22 · 3766 words · ~19 min read

Part 5

The culture of cotton must be a clean one. It is not necessarily deep culture, and during the growing season the cultivation is preferably very shallow. The result is a great destruction of the humus of the soil, and great leaching and washing, especially in the light loams of the hill country of the United States. The main object, therefore, of the American cotton-planter is to prevent erosion. Wherever the planters have failed to guard their fields by hillside ploughing and terracing, these have been extensively denuded of soil, rendering them barren, and devastating other fields lying at a lower level, which are covered by the wash. The hillsides have gradually to be terraced with the plough, upon almost an exact level. On the better farms this is done with a spirit-level or compass from time to time and hillside ditches put in at the proper places. In the moist bottom-lands along the rivers it is the custom to throw the soil up in high beds with the plough, and then to cultivate them deep. This is the more common method of drainage, but it is expensive, as it has to be renewed every few years. More intelligent planters drain their bottom-lands with underground or open drains. In the case of small plantations the difficulties of adjusting a right-of-way for outlet ditches have interfered seriously with this plan. Many planters question the wisdom of deepbreaking and subsoiling. There can be no question that a deep soil is better for the cotton-plant; but the expense of obtaining it, the risk of injuring the soil through leaching, and the danger of bringing poor soil to the surface, have led many planters to oppose this plan. Sandy soils are made thereby too dry and leachy, and it is a questionable proceeding to turn the heavy clays upon the top. Planters are, as a result, divided in opinion as to the wisdom of subsoiling. Nothing definite can be said with regard to a rotation of crops upon the cotton plantation. Planters appreciate generally the value of broad-leaved and narrow-leaved plants and root crops, but there is an absence of exact knowledge, with the result that their practices are very varied. It is believed that the rotation must differ with every variety of soil, with the result that each planter has his own method, and little can be said in general. A more careful study of the physical as well as the chemical properties of a soil must precede intelligent experimentation in rotation. This knowledge is still lacking with regard to most of the cotton soils. The only uniform practice is to let the fields "rest" when they have become exhausted. Nature then restores them very rapidly. The exhaustion of the soil under cotton culture is chiefly due to the loss of humus, and nature soon puts this back in the excellent climate of the cotton-growing belt. Fields considered utterly used up, and allowed to "rest" for years, when cultivated again have produced better crops than those which had been under a more or less thoughtful rotation. In spite of the clean culture, good crops of cotton have been grown on some soils in the south for more than forty successive years. The fibre takes almost nothing from the land, and where the seeds are restored to the soil in some form, even without other fertilizers, the exhaustion of the soil is very slow. If the burning-up of humus and the leaching of the soil could be prevented, there is no reason why a cotton soil should not produce good crops continuously for an indefinite time. Bedding up land previous to planting is almost universal. The bed forms a warm seed-bed in the cool weather of early spring, and holds the manure which is drilled in usually to better advantage. The plants are generally left 2 or 3 in. above the middle of the row, which in four-foot rows gives a slope of 1 in. to the foot, causing the plough to lean from the plants in cultivating, and thus to cut fewer roots. The plants are usually cut out with a hoe from 8 to 14 in. apart. It seems to make little difference exactly what distance they are, so long as they are not wider apart on average land than 1 ft. On rich bottom-land they should be more distant. The seed is dropped from a planter, five or six seeds in a single line, at regular intervals 10 to 12 in. apart. A narrow deep furrow is usually run immediately in advance of the planter, to break up the soil under the seed. The only time the hoe is used is to thin out the cotton in the row; all the rest of the cultivation is by various forms of ploughs and so-called cultivators. The question of deep and shallow culture has been much discussed among planters without any conclusion applicable to all soils being reached. All grass and weeds must be kept down, and the crust must be broken after every rain, but these seem to be the only principles upon which all agree. The most effective tool against the weeds is a broad sharp "sweep," as it is called, which takes everything it meets, while going shallower than most ploughs. Harrows and cultivators are used where there are few weeds, and the mulching process is the one desired.

The date of cotton-planting varies from March 1 to June 1, according to situation. Planting begins early in March in Southern Texas, and the first blooms will appear there about May 15. Planting may be done as late as April 15 in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, and continue as late as the end of May. The first blooms will appear in this region about July 15. Picking may begin on July 10 in Southern Texas, and continue late into the winter, or until the rare frost kills the plants. It may not begin until September 10 in Piedmont, North Carolina. It is a peculiarity of the cotton-plant to lose a great many of its blooms and bolls. When the weather is not favourable at the fruiting stage, the otherwise hardy cotton plant displays its great weakness in this way. It sheds its "forms" (as the buds are called), blooms, and even half-grown bolls in great numbers. It has frequently been noted that even well-fertilized plants upon good soil will mature only 15 or 20% of the bolls produced. No means are known so far for preventing this great waste. Experts are at an entire loss to form a correct idea of the cause, or to apply any effective remedy.

Cotton-picking is at once the most difficult and most expensive operation in cotton production. It is paid for at the rate of from 45 to 50 cents per cwt. of seed cotton. The work is light, and is effectually performed by women and even children, as well as men; but it is tedious and requires care. The picking season will average 100 days. It is difficult to get the hands to work until the cotton is fully opened, and it is hard to induce them to pick over 100 lb. a day, though some expert hands are found in every cotton plantation who can pick twice as much. The loss resulting from careless work is very serious. The cotton falls out easily or is dropped. The careless gathering of dead leaves and twigs, and the soiling of the cotton by earth or by the natural colouring matter from the bolls, injure the quality. It has been commonly thought that the production of cotton in the south is limited by the amount that can be picked, but this limit is evidently very remote. The negro population of the towns and villages of the cotton country is usually available for a considerable share in cotton-picking. There is in the cotton states a rural population of over 7,000,000, more or less occupied in cotton-growing, and capable, at the low average of 100 lb. a day, of picking daily nearly 500,000 bales. It is evident, therefore, that if this number could work through the whole season of 100 days, they could pick three or four times as much cotton as the largest crop ever made. Great efforts have been made to devise cotton-picking machines, but, as yet, complete success has not been attained. Lowne's machine is useful in specially wide-planted fields and when the ground is sufficiently hard.

_Cotton Ginning._--The crop having been picked, it has to be prepared for purpose of manufacture. This comprises separating the fibre or lint from the seeds, the operation being known as "ginning." When this has been accomplished the weight of the crop is reduced to about one-third, each 100 lb. of seed cotton as picked yielding after ginning some 33 lb of lint and 66 lb. of cotton seed. The actual amounts differ with different varieties, conditions of cultivation, methods of ginning, &c.; a recent estimate in the United States gives 35% of lint for Upland cotton and 25% for Sea Island cotton as more accurate.

The separation of lint from seed is accomplished in various ways. The most primitive is hand-picking, the fibre being laboriously pulled from off each seed, as still practised in parts of Africa. In modern commercial cotton production ginning machines are always used. Very simple machines are used in some parts of Africa. The simplest cotton gin in extensive use is the "churka," used from early times, and still largely employed in India and China. It consists essentially of two rollers either both of wood, or one of wood and one of iron, geared to revolve in contact in opposite directions; the seed cotton is fed to the rollers, the lint is drawn through, and the seed being unable to pass between the rollers is rejected. With this primitive machine, worked by hand, about 5 lb. of lint is the daily output. In the Macarthy roller gin, the lint, drawn by a roller covered with leather (preferably walrus hide), is drawn between a metal plate called the "doctor" (fixed tangentially to the roller and very close to it) and a blade called the "beater" or knife, which rapidly moves up and down immediately behind, and parallel to, the fixed plate. The lint is held by the roughness of the roller, and the blade of the knife or beater readily detaches the seed from the lint; the seed falls through a grid, while the lint passes over the roller to the other side of the machine. A hand Macarthy roller gin worked by two men will clean about 4 to 6 lb. of lint per hour. A similar, but larger machine, requiring about 1-1/2 horse-power to run it, will turn out 50 to 60 lb. of Egyptian or 60 to 80 lb. of Sea Island cleaned cotton per hour. By simple modifications the Macarthy gin can be used for all kinds of cotton. Various attempts have been made to substitute a comb for the knife or beater, and one of the latest productions is the "Universal fibre gin," in which a series of blunt combs working horizontally replace the solid beater and so-called knife of the Macarthy gin.

Opposed to the various types of roller gins is the "saw gin," invented by Eli Whitney, an American, in 1792. This machine, under various modifications, is employed for ginning the greater portion of the cotton grown in the Southern States of America. It consists essentially of a series of circular notched disks, the so-called saws, revolving between the interstices of an iron bed upon which the cotton is placed: the teeth of the "saws". catch the lint and pull it off from the seeds, then a revolving brush removes the detached lint from the saws, and creates sufficient draught to carry the lint out of the machine to some distance. Saw gins do considerable damage to the fibre, but for short-stapled cotton they are largely used, owing to their great capacity. The average yield of lint per "saw" in the United States, when working under perfect conditions, is about 6 lb. per hour. Some of the American ginners are very large indeed, a number (_Bulletin of the Bureau of the Census on Cotton Production_) being reported as containing on the average 1156 saws with an average production of 4120 bales of cotton. Saw gins are not adapted to long-stapled cottons, such as Sea Island and Egyptian, which are generally ginned by machines of the Macarthy type.

The machine which will gin the largest quantity in the shortest time is naturally preferred, unless such injury is occasioned as materially to diminish the market value of the cotton. This has sometimes been to the extent of 1d. or 2d. per lb. and even more as regards Sea Island and other long-stapled cottons. The production, therefore, of the most perfect and efficient cotton-cleaning machinery is of importance alike to the planter and manufacturer.

_Baling._--The cotton leaves the ginning machine in a very loose condition, and has to be compressed into bales for convenience of transport. Large baling presses are worked by hydraulic power; the operation needs no special description. Bales from different countries vary greatly in size, weight and appearance. The American bale has been described in a standard American book on cotton as "the clumsiest, dirtiest, most expensive and most wasteful package, in which cotton or any other commodity of like value is anywhere put up." Suggestions for its improvement, which if carried out would (it is estimated) result in a monetary saving of L1,000,000 annually, were made by the Lancashire Private Cotton Investigation Commission which visited the Southern States of America in 1906.

The approximate weights of some of the principal bales on the English market are as follows:--

United States 500 lb. Indian 400 lb. Egyptian 700 lb. Peruvian 200 lb. Brazilian 200 to 300 lb.

With baling the work of the producer is concluded.

_Cultivation in Egypt._--Climatic conditions in Egypt differ radically from those in the United States, the rainfall being so small as to be quite insufficient for the needs of the plant, very little rain indeed falling in the Nile Delta during the whole growing season of the crop: yet Egypt is in order the third cotton-producing country of the world, elaborate irrigation works supplying the crop with the requisite water. The area devoted to cotton in Egypt is about 1,800,000 acres, and nine-tenths of it is in the Nile Delta. The delta soil is typically a heavy, black, alluvial clay, very fertile, but difficult to work; admixture of sand is beneficial, and the localities where this occurs yield the best cotton. Formerly in Egypt the cotton was treated as a perennial, but this practice has been generally abandoned, and fresh plants are raised from seed each year, as in America; one great advantage is that more than one crop can thus be obtained each year. The following rotation is frequently adopted. It should be noted that in Egypt the year is divided into three seasons--winter, summer and "Nili." The two first explain themselves; Nili is the season in which the Nile overflows its banks.

For cotton cultivation the land is ploughed, carefully levelled, and then thrown up into ridges about 3 ft. apart. Channels formed at right angles to the cultivation ridges provide for the access of water to the crop. The seeds, previously soaked, are sown, usually in March, on the sides of the ridges, and the land watered. After the seedlings appear, thinning is completed in usually three successive hoeings, the plants being watered after thinning, and subsequently at intervals of from twelve to fifteen days, until about the end of August when picking commences. The total amount of water given is approximately equivalent to a rainfall of about 35 in. The crop is picked, ginned and baled in the usual way, the Macarthy style action roller gins being almost exclusively employed.

_Cotton Seed._--The history of no agricultural product contains more of interest and instruction for the student of economics than does that of cotton seed in the United States. The revolution in its treatment is a real romance of industry. Up till 1870 or thereabouts, cotton seed was regarded as a positive nuisance upon the American plantation. It was left to accumulate in vast heaps about ginhouses, to the annoyance of the farmer and the injury of his premises. Cotton seed in those days was the object of so much aversion that the planter burned it or threw it into running streams, as was most convenient. If the seed were allowed to lie about, it rotted, and hogs and other animals, eating it, often died. It was very difficult to burn, and when dumped into rivers and creeks was carried out by flood water to fill the edges of the flats with a decaying and offensive mass of vegetable matter. Although used in the early days to a limited extent as a food for milch cows and other stock, and to a larger extent as a manure, no systematic efforts were made anywhere in the South to manufacture the seed until the later 'fifties, when the first cotton seed mills were established. It is said that there were only seven cotton oil mills in the South in 1860. The cotton-growing industry was interrupted by the Civil War, and the seed-milling business did not begin again until 1868. After that time the number of mills rapidly increased. There were 25 in the South in 1870, 50 in 1880, 120 in 1890, and about 500 in 1901, about one-third being in Texas.

Experience shows that 1000 lb. of seed are produced for every 500 lb of cotton brought to market. On the basis, therefore, of a cotton crop of 10,000,000 bales of 500 lb. each, there are produced 5,000,000 tons of cotton seed. If about 3,000,000 tons only are pressed, there remain to be utilized on the farm 2,000,000 tons of cotton seed, which, if manufactured, would produce a total of $100,000,000 from cotton seed. In contrast with the farmers of the 'sixties, the southern planter of the 20th century appreciates the value of his cotton seed, and farmers, too remote from the mills to get it pressed, now feed to their stock all the cotton seed they conveniently can, and use the residue either in compost or directly as manure. The average of a large number of analyses of Upland cotton seed gives the following figures for its fertilizing constituents:--Nitrogen, 3.07%; phosphoric acid, 1.02%; potash, 1.17%; besides small amounts of lime, magnesia and other valuable but less important ingredients. Sea Island cotton seed is rather more valuable than Upland: the corresponding figures for the three principal constituents being nitrogen 3.51, phosphoric acid 1.69, potash 1.59%. Using average prices paid for nitrogen, phosphoric acid and potash when bought in large quantities and in good forms, these ingredients, in a ton of cotton seed, amount to $9.00 worth of fertilizing material. Compared with the commercial fertilizer which the farmer has to buy, cotton seed possesses, therefore, a distinct value.

The products of cotton seed have become important elements in the national industry of the United States. The main product is the refined oil, which is used for a great number of purposes, such as a substitute for olive oil, mixed with beef products for preparation of compound lard, which is estimated to consume one-third of cotton seed oil produced in the States. The poorer grades are employed in the manufacture of soap, candles and phonograph records. Miners' lamp oil consists of the bleached oil mixed with kerosene. Cotton seed cake or meal (the residue after the oil is extracted) is one of the most valuable of feeding stuffs, as the following simple comparison between it and oats and corn will show:--

+-----------------+----------+--------------+-------+-----------+ | | Proteins |Carbohydrates | |Ash or Bone| |Average Analyses.| or Flesh | or Fuel and | Fats. | Makers. | | | Formers. |Fat Suppliers.| | | +-----------------+----------+--------------+-------+-----------+ |Cotton seed meal | 43.26 | 22.31 | 13.45 | 7.02 | |Corn | 10.5 | 70.0 | 5.5 | 1.02 | |Oats | 17.0 | 65.0 | 8.0 | 1.2 | +-----------------+----------+--------------+-------+-----------+

Cotton seed meal, though poor in carbohydrates, the fat- and energy-supplying ingredients, is exceedingly rich in protein, the nerve- and muscle-feeding ingredients. But it still contains a large amount of oil, which forms animal fat and heat, and thus makes up for part of its deficiency in carbohydrates. The meal, in fact, is so rich in protein that it is best utilized as a food for animals when mixed with some coarse fodder, thus furnishing a more evenly-balanced ration. In comparative valuations of feeding stuffs it has been found that cotton seed meal exceeds corn meal by 62%, wheat by 67%, and raw cotton seed by 26%. Cotton seed meal, in the absence of sufficient stock to consume it, is also used extensively as a fertilizer, and for this purpose it is worth, determining the price on the same basis as used above for the seed, from $19 to $20 per ton. But it has seldom reached this price, except in some of the northern states, where it is used for feeding purposes. A more rational proceeding would be to feed the meal to animals and apply the resulting manure to the soil. When this is done, from 80 to 90% of the fertilizing material of the meal is recovered in the manure, only 10 to 20% being converted by the animal into meat and milk. The profit derived from the 20% thus removed is a very large one. These facts indicate that we have here an agricultural product the market price of which is still far below its value as compared, on the basis of its chemical composition, either with other feeding stuffs or with other fertilizers. Though it is probably destined to be used even more extensively as a fertilizer before the demand for it as a feeding stuff becomes equal to the supply, practically all the cotton seed meal of the south will ultimately be used for feeding. One explanation of this condition of things is that there is still a large surplus of cotton seed which cannot be manufactured by the mills. Another reason is found in the absence of cattle in the south to eat it.