(2 of 7)
A month after planting, the fields were green with sprouting cotton. Then followed weeks of "chopping," which means successive thinning of the cotton plants with a hoe. By mid-summer cultivation was over, and shortly the cotton plants bloomed a cream color, changing finally to red. Then the bloom dropped off, leaving the boll, in which the fibre grows, to mature on the stalk. Like planting, cotton picking starts in Texas, which normally produces one-third of the U. S. crop. Sometimes the first bale—or a bale represented as the first—is sold over & over at pound prices in dollars, not cents, for the benefit of charitable and political organizations. This year the first bale was picked, ginned and baled in Starr County near the Mexican border by June 22. It was raised by one Teofilo Garcia, who has been credited with the first bale twice before.
Cotton is the biggest cash field crop in U. S. agriculture. It is also the biggest single item in U. S. exports. At least 10,000,000 U. S. citizens, white & black, count on cotton for their livelihood. In the South cotton is King, irrespective of price or politics.* The average grower plants 15 to 20 acres. He harvests six or eight bales, which at this year's prices will bring him around $400. His cotton seed, about two pounds for every pound of lint, pays for the ginning, with some left over for pocket money. There are a few tremendous plantations, biggest of which is at Scott, Miss. Its 37,000 acres are owned by Delta & Pine Land Co., which was founded more than two decades ago by British spinners who wanted an assured source of fine Delta cotton. It is managed by Oscar Johnston, also manager of the New Deal Cotton Producers Pool. But of the 2,000,000 U. S. cotton growers only 27% own their own land. The rest are either sharecroppers (35%) or tenant farmers (38%). Their standard equipment is a mule and a large family. They are born poor, die poor.
Except for the relatively rare cotton grower who has enough land and capital to apply modern machinery, the only people who consistently make money out of cotton are those who market the crop.
To get $1,000,000,000 worth of U. S. cotton to market each year requires in infinite combination & permutation the use of gins, warehouses, compresses, ships, barges, railroads, trucks, spot markets, futures markets; the services of dealers, bankers, brokers, buyers, factors, graders, merchants. Most important man in the chain is the merchant. The big cotton merchant can arrange every detail in the complex life of a bale of cotton from the platform of a gin in Georgia to the door of a spinner in Osaka. The biggest cotton merchant in the world is William Lockhart Clayton, No. i man of Anderson, Clayton & Co. of Houston, Tex.