The Chesterfield advertiser. [volume] (Chesterfield C.H., S.C.) 1884-1978, 1922-02-23
BY James A. Hollomon
printed by permission Atlanta Con-
stitution)

Troy, Ala. THE farmers of south
east Alabama, as a whole, have masI
rered the boil weevil problem better
than they have in any other section Of
| the cotton belt-better than in the
Brownsville and Corpus Christi ter
| ritories along the Texas Rio Grande,
where the weevil first made his ap-
pearance many years ago.
They have done this after the usual
nerve-straining period of three or
four years of agricultural
panic through which they passed, by
drastically cutting their cotton acre
age planting cotton only for a surplus
crop, and going heavily into the grow
ing of grains and hay and especially
peanuts and meat. When they began
to realize by stern necessity that they
could protitably grow other money
crops besides cotton, and live at
home and feed their stock at home
in the meantime, they from yesr to
year reduced even the radical cut in
cotton acreage that they had been
! literally driven 10 at first in order to
subsist, and as the boil weevil prob
lem was thus reduced to a more re-
stricted area on every farm they
naturally fought out one of the es-
sential solutions of control by in
/ tensely cultivating their cotton, thus
! pushing it away from the weevil as
much as practicable.
Small Acreage; More Fertilizer; In
tense Culture; More Cotton
With this reduced acreage they be.
gan to fertilizc more heavily, study
2he chemical demands of their soil
more intelligently, and to apply more
and better business methods in the
cultural program than they had been
enabled to do when practically all
the tillable land was planted 70 cot
ton and cultivated on the old let
INSTRUMENTATION proposition of
forty acres to plow and a mule. >
In the meantime committee of
leading farmers from several of the
counties in southeast Alabama jour
| neyed to Texas and studied the weevil
| where he first made his stand, and
where he had already been mastered
by the more progressive planters.
There they learned the lesson of
rotation, field cleaning, perfect drain
age separation of cotton plants from
woodlands, thick spacing, liberal fer
tilizer and fast, shallow cultivating.
They applied these methods, max
ing even more intense than they first
thought necessary, their cultural ac-
tivities, reducing further to eight
acres to plow in many instances.
With the Result that they began
to get more net lint off of an acre
than they had formerly been getting
off OF two, and many times off of
three acres.
All the while they made from the
major part Of their old cotton plan
tatlons Spanish peanuts, for which
they found a ready market, by she'll
ing plants following quickly in the
wake Of the ''goober fields" and from
which they made millions of pounds
OF meat to use and to ship.
To this they added liberal fields of
corn, oats, wheat, rye, barley-fol-
lowing each harvest with cover crops,
| from which they made hay for home
use and to sell. and at the same time
built up and kept up their soils.
So successful, therefore, were the
results of diversification forced by ne
cessity, following the weevil advent
| that there is no section in the entire
cotton belt, devoted purely TO field
crops, SO uniformly wealthy to day
! as the tier of counties in southeas st
Alabama that ten years ago raised
scarcely anything else but cotton, and
imported from the west practically all
Of the meat they consumed, and "a
great quantity of the meal and flour
and even a larger quantity Of their
grain and hay for the stock.
In the meantime, too, the smaller
cotton fields are to-day producing
more cotton on an average per acre
than ever before--the boil weevil be-
ing just as prolific as ever, and just
as much q menace to those farmers
who refuse to fight him or who refuse
to rise to the hard, fast working
methods of their progressive neigh
bors.
1t will be recalled that it was in
this section of the cotton belt, over
at Enterprise, not distant, where
monument was actually erected 10 the
boil wecVil, because it had been the
wcevil who had unwittingly taught,
first ,diversihcation, and second, the