(See front cover) Ten minutes before the short Saturday session officially closed on the New York Cotton Exchange last week, a gong brought trading on the world's biggest cotton futures market to a silent halt. The U. S. Crop Reporting Board, having been locked in secret session in Washington since dawn, was about to release its first estimate of the U. S. cotton crop for the new crop year which opened Aug. 1. Trading also stopped on the country's other two cotton futures markets, in Chicago and New Orleans. On the spot markets scattered throughout the cotton belt the morning's desultory dickering petered out. In Britain the Liverpool Cotton Market had closed for the day, but traders would get the U. S. cotton news after the races and the cricket matches. In Bombay, Shanghai, Osaka the Orient's cotton men roused themselves from bed or stirred impatiently in club chairs. In Egypt, where the world's finest cotton is grown on the banks of the Nile, the cotton men of Alexandria waited dinner.
At noon sharp, Eastern Daylight Saving Time, the figures flashed to the waiting cotton world. It was the Government's guess, the best to be had, that this season's crop in the biggest cotton land in the world would be 12,481,000 bales of about 500 Ib. each.* Last year the crop was 10,638,000 bales. The estimate was a little higher than expected, although Clinton T. Revere, famed cotton expert for the Manhattan firm of Munds, Winslow & Potter, scored a bull's-eye with a private estimate of 12,498,000 bales, only 17,000 above the Government figure. A month ago the Crop Board estimated that this year's cotton acreage was up less than 10% from the 1935-36 season, and cotton prices jumped to 12¾¢ per Ib. Last week, as favorable news of crop conditions accumulated in advance of the Government's estimate, the price slipped below 12¢. After the figures were out cotton dropped still further, opening this week around 11 ⅛¢.
As the cotton season progresses, less & less interest is taken in production, more & more in consumption. Cotton consumption throughout the world in the season just ended set a new high, exceeding even the 1928-29 peak when the world used 25,778,000 bales. Meantime world carry-over has been reduced from a staggering total of 17,600,000 bales in 1932 to about 12,500,000 bales which is not far above normal. In the dark of Depression the U. S. carry-over accounted for no less than 13,000,000 of the world's 17,600,000 bales. Today this U. S. surplus is down to about 7,100,000 which is also not far above normal, even though the Government owns one-half of it.
Lint Land. Before the Crop Board could be locked up for its secret ciphering last week, before field estimators and picked farmers could furnish the figures with which it arrived at its estimate, some 30,000,000 acres of farm land had to be plowed, harrowed and seeded in that area of the continental U. S. where the growing season from frost to frost is at least seven months. Planting started, as it does each season, in Southern Texas in late winter. From there it rolled north with the sun on an ever widening front until the last seed was in the ground before June 1.