The Montgomery advertiser., 1908-08-07

| the greater part of the South, interest
 in the possible output of the cotton
 seed industry is revived. Altogether
 only about half of this one-time waste
 product is utilized at present, 1t rep | resents annually manufactured arti-
 cles valued at nearly s150.0o0, 900. | Tennessee and Mississippi mills
 the seed used. South Carolina ,crushes | only about half the seed from her I gins. It devolves on Texas to furnish more than one fourth of the cotton ! seed used in the S4S mills operating in the cottolbelt.
 Approximately sss.ooO. 900 Is invested in the manufacture of cottonseed oil
 and other by-products of the seed.
 and while the valuation of the output
 has increased fifteen fold in the past twenty-five years, manufacturers aver 1 that the value should now approximate l $200. 1000 year. More products of cottonseed are consumed at home now than eight years ago. though the ex- | ports for the year ending in March | 1908 showed oil to the value of &l7- 600.0o0; cake, $13,40o.000. and lard l compounds ss.1o0.000. And these re- | turns from a product one time deem- l ed as valueless as saw-dust from l country saw-mill, and from whose &C., .cumulations gin houses were once moved from time to time. But what | the utilization of the waste in the
 manufacture of petroleum was to the | mineral oil business, so has the utiliza-
 tion of cottonseed been to the cotton 1 growing industry,
 We annually grow some 1s.ooo.ooo | bales of cotton. Each bale yields
 about a thousand pounds. or thirty bushels of seed. and each bushel of this seed is worth thirty cents in the rax a 100000 bushels of valuable material | for direct and indirect human con- | sumption every year. and 1t means over s100,000.000 in the pockets of the cotton growers which would other wise have gone to waste. It means,
 when the seed Is transformed into finished products, 260,00O, 1000 gallons of l oil. valued at thirty cents a gallon. totalltng $7S,0e0. 900; 3,250,000- tons of
 hulls valued at s1s,000.o00; over 2,000- 900 tons of meal valued at about S47.000,0O0 and 130,0oO, ,000 pounds of lint valued at 5000, 900.
 All told. 1t means that what was of
 no value little more than a quarter of century ago is now annually
 made into finished product worth the
 enormous total of nearly S150,000, 900. With the waste now being utilized in | tEis one crop we could build fifteen
 battleships of the Dreadnaught type. Not only has the utilization of the
 hitherto worthless cotton-seed brought
 the ransom of a hundred kings into | the pockets of the cotton farmers. but
 1t has affected nearly every man. wo-
 man and child in the country by mak- | ing the price of beef lower. Down in Texas they raise millions of cattle
 and millions of bales of cotton. A ton | of hulls and the meal from one bale | of cotton will fatten as sleek a beef Ak An | And hundreds of thousands of such steers are grown every years that could not be grown were 1t not for the l utilization of cottonseed. In Texas, for instance, they have pasture for | about eight or nine months out of the
 year. During the otker months they
 need some kind of "roughness". What
 corn fodder is to the Western farmer
 and oat straw to the Northern stock
 grower during the winter months,
 cotton seed hulls have become to the
 Southern farmer and thus he Is en-
 abled to grow beef cattle as fine as
 those of the Iowa or Illinois farmer.
 When one Is told that the annual
 cotton crop yields 2.000 .000 tons of cot
 ton seed meal. he will begin to notice
 that this means a whole lot of beef
 and whole lot of milk and butter. But
 when the information is added that
 one ton of cottonseed meal has as much nutrittve value as several tons of
 wheat bran or corn meal, the impor-
 tance of the product will begin to ap- l pear. A ton of cottonseed meal con-
 tains 1S4 pounds of nitrogen, as com l pared with forty-seven pounds in |
 ton of wheat bran. The othe constit- | uents of nutritive value show similar l proportions. Yet 1t sells to the stock | feeder at a price but little above that l of wheat bran or corn meal
 | Everybody knows that wheat is one | of the most completely nourishing of the cereals. It combines nearly every constituent needed for human or anil nal nutrition. Yet when a bushel of
 wheat has a dollars worth of food ele- ments in 1t, a buSheI of ccttonseed will show 1.3S worth of them. or more | nutrition by almost half. Another in teresting thing developed in the scien- | life study of cottonseed Is that when cotton seed hulls and meal are fed to cattle the resultant manure is almoss | as valuable for a land fertilizer as the | original hulls and meal would have | been, bringing the cattle grower al- l most double value from his cottonseed l The utilization of cottonseed began
 to take commercial form about the be- l ginning of the civil war, when many
 experiments were made in both New l England and the South. But it was not l until after the beginning of the elgh- | ties that 1t figured largely in the reck-
 onings of the value of the cotton crop
 and much later than that when it reached It's present vast dimenEons
 One Frederick Good was a pioneer in | the cottonsead oil business but 1t was not a profitable venture for him, and he carried little flask of the oil about with him, remarking to his friends
 that 1t cost him twelve thousand dol l lars.
 We are indebted to the Europeans
 for teaching us the use of cottonseed
 neal anl hulls. The meal cake was
 exported for a number of years and
 was regarded with a prime favor by
 European cattle-feeders and dairymen
 before we tried it. The hulls were at first burned in the engines to make steam for manufacturing the oil. but it was soon found that they were worth too much for such use. and ever since they have been fed to cattle. with an increasing profit. The oil was put to
 but comparatively few uses in the
 earlier years of it's production, but in
 recent years 1t has found a thousand
 uses One of the first uses made of 1t
 was by the French and the Italians
 They imported most of the product in
 the infancy of the business. refined 1t