HUSBANDRY: Cotton Crisis

Last week cotton took wheat's place in the press headlines of the land and in the worried mind of the Federal Farm Board. Good growing weather began bringing in the 1931 crop ahead of schedule. On the Shafter, Calif, farm in which President Hoover has a financial stake, the first bale of long staple was produced three weeks earlier than last year. Ginning the South Carolina crop started at Allendale seven days ahead of time. In Washington, Department of Agriculture officials hotly defended as "reasonably accurate" their 15,584,000 bale crop estimate.* Prices sank to the lowest level since 1899. If they went any lower William Wrigley Jr., who has taken a heavy loss on his bargain to buy cotton with the proceeds of his gum sales in the South (TIME, April 13), threatened to use cotton instead of excelsior to pack his product.

Into the chaos that is cotton the Federal Farm Board, driven to desperation by the failure of its other relief schemes, tossed a startling proposal. It was: Let the South plow under one-third of its cotton crop. The idea was not new. It had been suggested and summarily dismissed at a cotton conference at Austin, Tex. fortnight ago. Stocky little Governor Theodore Gilmore Bilbo of Mississippi had revamped it into a suggestion that planters simply abandon one out of every three rows in the fields. Within 24 hours the Farm Board had filched the Bilbo idea (without credit) and offered it to the Governors of the 14 cotton-growing States as a solution to the cotton problem. Chairman Stone of the Board signed telegrams that went to Montgomery, Phoenix, Little Rock, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Jackson, Santa Fe, Raleigh, Oklahoma City, Columbia, Nashville, Austin. Excerpts:

"Government cotton report . . . provides total crop and carryover supply of more than 24,500,000 bales against probable world consumption of American cotton of 13,000,000 or possibly 14,000,000 bales. . . . This condition has already resulted in drastic declines in cotton prices which if allowed to continue may bring direct disaster to cotton-producing States and indirect distress to the nation. . . . Time has now come when cotton producers themselves must be called upon for immediate and drastic action. . . . Board suggests you immediately mobilize every interested and available agency including farmers, bankers, merchants, landowners and all agricultural educational forces to induce immediate plowing under of every third row of cotton now growing. Problem is to secure abandonment which will give farmers better return on remainder. . . . Board recognizes that this suggestion calls for drastic remedy for serious emergency but major operation of this kind now needed."

The South was being asked to destroy about 5,000,000 bales of its cotton on the chance the other 10,000,000 would bring in more money. At $30 per bale this was equivalent to plowing $150,000,000 in good money back into the ground. As an inducement Chairman Stone promised that, if ten major cotton States agreed to the plan, the Board would withhold from the market its own 1.300,000 bales and get its co-operatives to withhold their 2,000,000 bales, making a total reduction of 8,000,000 bales in the 1931 market. To be effective, Mr. Stone warned, the plow-under must be complete by Sept. 15.