The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-06-04
UNCLE SAM AND THE COTTON CROp-By c. Carpenter

pure and left it there for two hours. At the end of that time he took it out and put it on the table and it was only stag gering drunk He then sealed handful of the insects in q tin can and laid it
 upon brush heap. which was set on fire. The flames melted the solder from the
 can and the red hot weevils flew out and | burned down his barn.
 Has Cost Millions
 | Speaking seriously, however; the depart ment estimates that the weevil has al- ready cost us millions of bales of cotton and many millions of dollars. It has an- nually cost Texas more than twenty mill lions for series of years, and it is now ravaging the states farther east
 Take Mississippi. for instance, the southern part of which state is now wee vii covered. In 1906 the cotton crop of Adams county amounted to 23,00O bales and it was more than 10000 in 1907.< Then the weevil flew in and in 1909 the yield dropped to 100 bales. The tenant farm- CTS and laborers lett the county in gangs, and today lands can be bought there for a song. It is the same in some counties of Louisiana. In Pointe Copee 5O,00o bales of cotton, which, including the seed, were worth over ss.50o,0oo, were raised in 1906, and the crop of 1907, amounting FcfSSS' GOO. Then the boil weevil came and in 1909 the crop fell to 3a0o bales, or to something like $200,Oo0. These figures give you some idea of what this deadly bug means under the old raising conditions.
 There is another feature of the situ,- tion however. which must be mentioned. In most parts of the cotton belt cotton was the only crop. The planter relied upon it for the money with which he bought everything else. He imported his corn from the north and his pork came from the store. He sent abroad for his mules. and, with the exception perhaps of a few vegetables, raised nothing but cot ton Moreover, he did the most of his farming on credit getting the store keeper or planter for whom he worked to furnish him his supplies for the winter, the same to be paid out of the cotton when 1t was picked. When the weevil wiped out the cotton he had nothing to fall back upon, and starvation started the
 greater part of the population in the face. l What Uncle Sam Did
 | This was the situation when Uncle Sam, 1 Patriarch. in the person of his agent the
 late Dr. Seaman A. Knapp. began to in
 struct the farmer how to fight this ter riblc bug and still make money out of
 his land Dr. Knapp's plan was to teach | us how to control the weevil as far as l possible from season to season, and by the proper selection of seed and by deep blowing and narrowing to produce plants which would yield more cotton, or, rather,
 enough to feed the necessary weevils and
 leave something to spare. His motto
 was; Double the crop by good farming
 or, rather, Raise the same crop on half
 of the land"
 | The plan also provided for diversified | farming, to make the farmer raise all of his own supplies, all his farm animals and their feed, and to have one patch | which should be planted to cotton to fur nish the cash for the family. This last
 fitted in with the conditions, for the boil
 weevil destroys credit wherever it goes and the farmers are compelled to raise
 other things in order ito live.
 Tbe work began in Texas in 1904 and t has now spread throughout the south.