MANURING has for its basis cotton seed. About one thousand pounds of cotton seed are obtained from each bale of cotton, which makes 137,000 tons the supply of this region. Of this, 25,000 tons, at two bushels per acre, is used for planting; a small amount is fed to stock. None is carried to the oil mills, and very little is sold, the price being ten to fifteen cents per bushel; the balance, about 100,000 tons, is returned to the soil as manure. For small grain, it is sown broadcast, and plowed in with the seed in the fall. For corn, it is killed by heating, and applied in the hill. For cotton, it is becoming the practice to compost it with acid phosphates and stable manure, sometimes with the addition of other litter and lime. It is applied in the drill, at the rate of a ton to two to four acres. This leaves a large portion of tilled land to be supplied with manure from other sources. Corn rarely receives any manure, and the deficiency for the cotton lands, when cotton seed and stable manures are exhausted, is supplied by the purchase of commercial fertilizers. The amount purchased in this region reaches an aggregate cost of nearly one-half million of dollars, or $1.98 for each acre planted in cotton. It varies, from a maximum in Spartanburg of $3.33 per acre in cotton, to a minimum of .92 cents in Abbeville. It is used most extensively in Spartanburg, Greenville, York and Anderson, to stimulate the growth and maturity of the cotton plant in these counties, which, being more elevated and nearer the mountains, have a shorter growing season. In Newberry, the county most productive in cotton of the region, the average is $1.02 per acre in cotton. Green manuring has been practiced only as an experiment. Such experiments with pea vines have had a very promising success, but it has been found better to allow the vines to wither before turning them under. CULTIVATION. Fallow lands or lands that have been in other crops, and sometimes the heavy red lands, are broken up broadcast during the winter and spring. The great body of the lands, however, being planted year after year in cotton, the usual method is to lay off in the alley with a shovel plow, drill in the manure, and bed to it with a turning plow. Three to five furrows complete the bed, and the land is ready for planting. On the thinnest lands, the rows are two and one-half feet apart-generally they are three feet to three and one-half feet-and on the strongest lands they are four feet. Planting commences on and after 10th April, and is completed on or before the 10th of May. The seed used is the short limbed cluster variety of cotton, known under the name of Dickson's improved, or Boyd's prolific. It is rather a delicate plant, a prolific bearer, of early maturity, and a short staple. Carefully sown, one bushel of seed will plant an acre, though as much as three and sometimes five bushels are used. With a planter, two bushels answer, and two to two and onehalf may be taken as the average. Most of the seed is sown by hand, in a furrow opened by a small plow, and covered by various devices of boards, propelled by hand or by a horse. On the smooth, well-prepared land, planters, especially the Dowlow, are much used and well thought of. The seed comes up in four to ten days in favorable seasons; late plantings in dry seasons are longer in appearing, and may not come up in a month, and then give a good stand. This occurrence is always a misfortune, as it not only retards the crop, but allows the grass a chance to overtake it. As soon as the stand is perfected, thinning commences, and the cotton is chopped out with a hoe to spaces varying from six inches on thin lands to eighteen inches on the strongest, usually to nine inches and twelve inches. The after cultivation consists in keeping the ground light and loose by the use of the plow, and in keeping the grass out of the row with the hoe. A great variety of plows are used for this purpose-twisters, turn-plows, shovels and harrows; the later workings, when the plant is fruiting, are usually given by passing twice through the row with a sweep, which skims the surface. Generally there are four plowings, and four hoeings; sometimes three answer. When the plant is ten inches to fifteen inches high-usually about the 1st of July-it begins to bloom, though blooms are sometimes noticed as early as the 15th of June. Open bolls appear about the middle of August; in favorable seasons they are sometimes seen the last of July, and at other times not until the 1st of September. Although in some instances the plant grows as high as four feet to five feet, the height at which it is thought to be most productive here is from two feet to three feet. Picking may commence about the 25th of August, but it is not in full blast until the 1st to 20th of September. The crop is gone over three to four times, and it is all out of the field by Christmas; sometimes as early as the 20th of November. DISEASE AND ENEMIES. In its early growth, unless in exceptionally windy and cold seasons, or through bad hoeing, cotton does not suffer here at all from "sore shin." Nor does it often run to weed; in unusually warm and wet seasons, or on strong fresh land this may occur; cultivation and manuring are thought to check excessive growth, and to promote fruiting. Worms are rarely seen in this region, and are not at all feared. Shedding and rust are often injurious. The first is likely to occur during alternations of dry and wet weather. Black rust is confined to ill-drained soils, especially to those of the trap rocks. Wet weather is more likely than dry and hot weather to affect the cotton plant injuriously here. No crop grown anywhere over so extensive an area is more certain than is the cotton crop in this region. Drainage and stable manure, with fairly good culture, are unfailing remedies for such diseases as have as yet affected it. The enemy most dreaded and most certain to require the best efforts of the farmer to hold it in check, is grass; and, with one consent, the species is known as "crab-grass," "a corruption," John Drayton says, "of cropgrass, as it was unknown until the land was cultivated." BeBrahm, writing of Carolina in 1752, says: "Because new land produces scarce any grass, and once hoeing will do for the season, but the grass comes and increases in such a manner that sometimes three hoeings are scarce sufficient in one season, and when this comes to be the case, the planters relinquish these fields for pastures and clear new ground of its wood." This grass makes an excellent hay, attaining a height of two feet to three feet, and yielding from one to four tons to the acre, according to the land and the season. Next to cotton picking, however, it is the chief source of trouble and expense in the culture of this crop. GINNING. The ginning and picking season open and close together. The gins in general use are Brown, Winnslops, Taylor and Hall gins. The most generally used power is horse-power-four mules and the old wooden. cog-wheel gearing. Such power is used for gins of forty to forty-five saws, and the out-turn is about two and a half pounds of lint an hour to the saw, or an average of about eleven hundred pounds of lint as a day's work for a gin. With steam and water power the same number of saws are made to do double this work, but it is questionable if it is so well. done. The cotton on the average does not quite third itself, and as estimated, 1,231 pounds of seed cotton are required to make four hundred pounds of lint. This gives seventy-one bushels of seed as the daily product, per gin, in the estimate above stated. For baling, six out of eleven reporters used and preferred the old wooden screw, run by horse power; two used the Scofield press, and the remainder the Finley and other hand-presses. It appears with these presses, if three to four hands and one to two mules are employed, the out-turn for ten hours work is about four thousand pounds of lint in eight or nine bales. The iron arrow tie Jute bagging, the heaviest DunThe weight aimed at in the bale has entirely superseded rope for baling. dee, or the domestic Ludlow is used. varies from four hundred pounds to five hundred pounds; the average is four hundred and fifty-two pounds. SHIPPING AND SELLING. As soon as the cotton is packed it is moved to market, commencing about the 1st of September; by the end of the year almost the whole crop has passed out of the farmers' hands. The farmer usually sells to the merchant at the nearest railroad station, and has only a charge against him of ten cents a bale for weighing. In some localities the transportation, hauling from Laurens county to Greenville, is stated to cost two dollars a bale. Cotton shipped by railroad to New York costs three dollars and fifty cents a bale. To Charleston it costs, from Fairfield, two dollars to two dollars and twenty-five cents; from Spartanburg, two dollars and fifty cents; from Abbeville, two dollars and seventy-five cents. From Chester the charge is, to Charleston, forty-eight cents per hundred weight; to New York it is sixty-three cents per hundred weight. Cotton shipped from Fairfield to Charleston, and sold by the farmer, costs, everything included, four dollars and fifty-seven cents for a bale weighing four hundred and sixty-five pounds, and it is usually estimated at about one cent per pound. COST OF PRODUCTION. This is estimated in four reports at seven cents; in one report at eight cents, and in one at nine cents per pounds of lint. The following table exhibits the detailed statements on this head. Cost of each Item of Labor and Material expended in the Cultivation of an 1. R. C. Carlisle & J. S. Rennick, Newberry, yield 400 pounds lint Cotton, 825 pounds cotton seed. |