The Dispatch News

Times-Picayune.

The South's cotton industry, which has been bringing ten times more foreign money to the United States than any other business, is reaching a stage of decadence where only drastic measures, taken by a unified industry, can be expected to bring a regeneration and check the abandonment of the farm.

In setting down this view before the New Orleans cotton exchange yesterday, Col. Harvie Jordan, secretary of the American Cotton association, government crop reporting and assailed the present method of told the New Orleans traders that they should come through with support for 2000 small industrial farms, which by improved methods, are pointing the way to profitable cotton farming.

The boll weevil and antiquated farming methods made the cost of producing cotton this year about $40 per acre, the colonel said. The farmers are getting only an average of 162 pounds to the acre over the South. They must get 25 cents a pound, on this basis of production to pay costs, he declared. Cotton farmers, he said, will be poorer when the crop is sold this year than they were when it was begun.

"It is not the price of cotton that is causing the disappointment," he said. "It is the method of producing and handling the crop."

For three years the American Cotton association has been supplying 1000 small farms with equipment and directions for fighting the weevil and improving production. They produced this year, Col. Jordan said, an average of 373 pounds to the acre, while the average over the South was only 162 pounds to the acre.

These farms made a net profit above all costs, including labor, of about $13 an acre, while other farms over the South were losing money.

Col. Jordan wants a total of 2000 of these farms in operation by next year. They will show the way to a regeneration of the industry.

If measures are not taken to bring up the quality of Southern cotton and increase the production per acre, he asserted, the South, no matter how great its total production, will not be able to withstand the gradually increasing pressure from foreign competition.

Cotton has degenerated both in length and strength, he said. Carolina mills are now rejecting cotton grown east of the Mississippi and buying that cotton grown west of the river.

Col. Jordan drew applause from the cotton exchange members when he condemned the government's semi-monthly condition and crop forecast. The condition reports should be monthly, he said, and there should be no forecast of production until October. The acreage reports should be continued, he said.

A committee of cotton men will confer with congressmen in Washington on the proposed new method of making reports. The cotton growers, Colonel said, want the law amended so that they can go to Europe and get foreign farmers to come here in place of the hundreds of thousands of men who have abandoned the cotton fields for industrial centers.

Southern farmers, he said, must quit sending a million dollars a year out of the south for food and feed stuffs, the colonel asserted. "Cotton can not be expected to carry a load like that," he continued.

Support for the demonstration farms has been coming largely from the East and north. Colonel Jordan and Jos. O. Thompson of Alabama here with him, want the South to make some contribution to the work.

To encourage the use of ammonium sulphate, a fertilizer material derived from coke in the Birmingham mills, the Birmingham operators have agreed to supply 80,000 pounds for the small farms.