America's Crop Heritage


to find cotton that could resist the boll-weevil attacks. The weevil
was seriously reducing yields and destroying some crops com-
pletely as it spread from Mexico into the cotton South. Growers
soon found that the weevil-resistant varieties from Mexico and
Central America possessed other valuable characteristics such
as long-staple lint and large bolls. From these varieties growers
developed the Durango which extended the northern limits
of cotton production in both Virginia and Texas. In California
it was planted to 30,000 acres in 1914. The Acala, an upland
cotton brought from Southern Mexico in 1906, also had shown
many points of superiority by 1914. It entered into commercial
production in 1916, and by 1924 had become widely acclaimed
for its earliness, large bolls, and strong fiber. This had become
the predominant crop in the irrigated valleys of the Southwest
and the Imperial Valley in California by 1928, and its annual
value exceeded $50 million.

 TROPICAL PLANTS
 Dates-Large collections of dates continued to be made in
the search for varieties to extend the crop into other parts of
the Southwest. In 1901 the best Egyptian varieties were procured.
Lathrop sent in a large shipment of young date plants in 1902,
and the Department of Agriculture had an eleven-acre coopera-
tive orchard established in Arizona and planted to 580 imported
trees. The first successful crop of the Deglet Noor, a widely
marketed sort, was produced in 1904 in this cooperative garden
with the help of the California Agricultural Experiment Station.
 Thomas H. Kearney procured many valuable varieties in
Tunis in 1905. At the same time, he spent several months inves-
tigating olives and discovered the Barouni, now a successful olive
in California. In the same year, H. A. Rankin, an Englishman
in Egypt, was commissioned to secure superior date varieties
from Fayum, Egypt. The Rev. S. M. Zwemer, a writer on Arabia,
made a journey into the oases of that country for other varieties.
 The date garden at Tempe, Arizona, established in 1900, had
143 varieties in 1912, and other experiments were being con-
ducted in cooperation with private growers in California, Ari-
zona, and Texas. Further date importations from Egypt were
made in 1912 in the form of offshoots. The policy established in
1921 stressed the importation of proven Old World dates to
extend the industry and replace poor varieties. Galloway esti-