The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1899-11-29

If the importance of the principle OF
exchanging cottonseed for hulls and
meal between planters and oil mills
were fully recognized and generally
carried out in practice, 1t must lead
the cotton planters step by step to
cattle.fattening, then cattle and sheep
raising, saving manure from these and
all other animals on the farm, fully
utilizing it in building up more lands
and enriching goods lands, building
barns for milch cows and fattening
cattle, storing ensilage, hay, etc., to
reinforce or dilute the too rich cotton
seed and meal. Terracing the lands
will come next, to keep the prepared
soil from washing away; better roads
will be built, cotton acreage will be re-
duced to make pasture, for the manure
enriched land will pay better to raise
vegetables, hay and cereals than cot
ton. Rotation Of crops at least from
pasture to cotton field and cotton field
to pasture must follow.
As the tendency of manufacturers is
to 20 to the raw products, packing
houses will 90 to the cattle and sheep,
and the ideal agricultural system will
at last be reached in the South when
those products which make little or no
drain on the soil-cotton, oil, wool,
dressed beef, mutton, butter-wil be
exported, and all the fertilizing and
reeenerating power of the cottonseed
will be retained on the land where 1t is
needed, while full profits are being
made on it's feeding value.
Cattle and sheep will then be q leash
cropn as well as cotton, and the mer-
chant will no longer need to In
fIuence the farmer to raise cotton to
cover his mortgage. Other factories
will spring up-creameries, woolen
mills, tanneries, shoe factories. These
industries will call for labor, skilled
and unskilled, and immigration from
abroad, and from the North and West,
must result.
Keeping cottonseed meal, which is
the true life-blood Of the cotton plant,
at home will deprive foreigners of one
of the most highly-concentrated and
cheapest feeds. These foreigners have
sense enough to make the double use
of the meal as feed and fertilizer. and
there IL no telling how many thous-
ands of thrifty foreigners American
cottonseed meal enables to make that
bare subsistence sufficient to prevent
most men from changing homes. We
should keep our cottonseed meal and
literally starve these desirable foreign
ers into becoming American citizens,
and into raising cattle on our soil,
allowing them to send the beef back
home If they will.
Before this industrial revolution
could take place it will be absolutely
necessary that all our. cottonseed
should be put into proper shape for
feeding, and before this can be done a
higher price must be obtained for the
oil to encourage the exchange of seed
for the products. A great improve.
ment in the general average quality OF
cotton oil is possible by refining out
the impurities in the crude oil at the
place of manufacture before the heat OF
manufacture has left the OLA plan
which is not generally practiced.
This would of itself widen the market
aud tend to raise the price, but the
people of the cotton-growing States
must get rid of their prejudices against
cotton oil, use it freely and commend
it to the rest of the world. This is no
small matter, as the future comfort