Farmers of Mecklenburg County may enjoy exemption from the ravages of the boll weevil for another year or so, but that it will sooner or later invade this entire county is now a foregone conclusion. Its appearance, we are told, has already been noted in the southern extremities of the county.
We may as well, therefore, be preparing to make the best of a bad situation and get in shape to do two things: first, intensively cultivate cotton and then diversify agricultural activities. Broad fields of hundreds of acres of cotton to the farm is in impossible method of farming when the boll weevil has to be dealt with. The only way it can be overcome is by planting smaller acreages and making this restricted area produce more than the larger areas formerly produced by reason of intensive cultivation.
And then the opportunity for Mecklenburg farmers to launch out into other agricultural enterprises continues luminous. We have a soil here that will produce almost everything, fit for the growing of grain and corn and suitable also for the live stock and cattle industry. There are diversities in agriculture from which profits can be reaped and if the boll weevil will suffice to introduce this sort of farming we may be moved, as the old Texas farmer was during the New Orleans World’s Cotton Congress,--to take a popular subscription to erect a monument to the memory of the boll weevil for having taught the people some agricultural gumption.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sept. 6, 1921
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