How do they produce cotton ?

Cotton, that soft, smooth, strong and sturdy fabric, is a gift of the plant world. It is produced by several different plants that grow around the world. But Mother Nature’s cotton is not ready to be made into dresses. This wonderful material must go through many stages in a cotton mill and more stages in a textile mill before it becomes a fabric ready to be made into a dress.

The story of a cotton dress begins in a warm, sunny field. The soil will be chomped into a layer of soft, brown crumbs and if the climate is dry there will be ditches or an irrigation system to keep it moist. Thick rows of the little brown cotton seeds may be planted in furrows two inches deep, in little hills or in flat layers.

The baby seedlings need sunny warmth and moisture. They are weak little plants and when they get to be about five inches tall, the thick row is thinned out so that fewer plants can grow stronger. The field must be weeded time after time, cultivated to keep the soil crumbly, and watered. Insects are sure to attack the growing cotton plants, so the crop must be dusted or sprayed with insect killing chemicals.

In about two months, the cotton plants are about one foot high. Then one morning they burst into bloom with large, white flowers. But the snowy show is over the next day, for then the blossoms turn red. The petals fall from each flower, leaving behind a flat, green pod. This seed pod is the cotton boll, waiting to ripen through six weeks to two months of sunny weather.

The ripe cotton boll is shaped like an egg, about one inch long and one and a half inches wide. It is a house with maybe five little rooms, each room having maybe ten cotton seeds.

At last the boll bursts open and we see that each seed is wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of fine, whitish threads. The fibers of the blanket maybe 10,000 of them, form the puffy tuft of cotton which Is taken to the cotton mill.

There the cotton fibers are washed and combed, over and over again. Machines sort them into length and twist several together into threads. With more twisting, the threads beeo.me longer and longer and at last great spools of the cotton are ready to be woven into fabric. This job is done by the textile mills which also dye the threads or the' finished fabrics. These mills also print colored patterns onto some of the finished materials.

The world uses more than seven million tons of cotton a year   and about half of this huge crop Is grown in the United States. Our crops are grown in the sunny Southland, in the Southwest and along the far western valleys of California. The cotton plants need a very warn summer, 200 days or almost four months long. They also need water and lots of care to protect them from weeds and insects.