Cotton Facts

COTTON FACTS

  • The English word “cotton" comes from the Arabic word qutun or kutun.
  • It is know that man has made cotton into fabric since at least 3000 BC.
  • In the New World cotton textiles date as far back as 2500 BC.
  • The cotton fiber is slightly over one inch long.  It is a single cell, and is the largest cell in the plant kingdom.  No other plant anywhere in the world has a cell even close to an inch long.
  • The cotton fiber is an elongation of a cell in the skin of the cottonseed.
  • It takes approximately 150 days for the cotton plant to grow from a seed to mature, open bolls.  In North Carolina, cotton is planted in April and May and harvested in the fall.
  • The cotton boll forms first as a flower bud called a “square".  The square becomes a cotton flower.  After pollination, the ovary of the cotton flower develops into a cotton boll.  The cotton fiber takes about 50 days to develop inside the “green bolls", which then crack open to show the white, harvestable lint.  These are called “open bolls".
  • In the beginning cotton was believed to be wool that grew on trees.
  • Eli Whitney (a Yankee) invented the cotton gin in 1793 to mechanize the process of separating the cottonseed from the fiber (or lint).  He got the idea while visiting friends in the south.  The basic concept of Eli Whitney’s gin is the same concept used in the modern high speed gins today.
  • Whitney’s cotton gin invention resulted in the rapid and extensive growth of cotton production in the U.S. and the development of the U.S. textile industry.
  • Cotton trade with Europe became so important the interruption of cotton production during the Civil War caused a serious crisis in the European cotton industry.
  • Cotton production in the U.S. started in Virginia.  It spread south and west to Texas.  With the advent of irrigation, it later spread to Arizona and California.
  • The cotton boll weevil entered the U.S. in 1892 from Mexico as the U.S. Cotton Belt reached the Rio Grande.
  • The boll weevil was extremely devastating to U.S. cotton production because it did not have any natural enemies here to hold its population in check.
  • In 1978 the cotton farmers of NC along with the NC, VA and US Department of Agriculture undertook a program to eradicate the boll weevil from NC and VA.
  • Dr. Milton Ganyard, an entomologist (these folks study bugs!) and the owner of Ganyard Hill Farm, was the US Department of Agriculture’s Operations Program Manager of this program, which was successfully completed in the early 1980’s.
  • Today NC again grows nearly one million acres of cotton.