As with virtually all other aspects of cotton farming, substantial assistance has been provided by the government.
It can take more than 25, 000 liters of water to produce a single kilogram of cotton.
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It's made from a blend of cotton and a new polymer made from corn.
China has been stockpiling a mountain of cotton, presumably to insulate its textile makers from shocks.
This followed a statement in which the company expressed concerns about the increasing price of cotton.
This led the government to restrict the cotton exports, in order to safeguard the domestic supplies of cotton.
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It's a blend of cotton and polylactide, a polymer derived from dextrose, which can be cost-effectively made from corn.
By means of canals and huge concrete aquaducts, they took the rivers' waters to irrigate vast areas of cotton.
He added that there were also areas of cotton grass, which he said were "a common sight on moss lands".
This year, fruit and vegetable farmers will be getting more of the help that growers of cotton and corn have had for decades.
He had no hand gun but he carried his rifle slung across his back on a piece of cotton plow line.
In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture.
Once a year at harvest time, the local cotton company sends a four-wheel-drive truck to pick up his sacks of cotton.
However, with the demand for clothing picking up alongside the shortage of cotton, the cost of the raw material has soared.
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Southerners are now more likely to live in suburbs than in shacks, to pick stocks instead of cotton, and to wear shoes.
In 2002 the Americans produced a bumper crop, and are forecast to sell 2.2 million tons of cotton on the international market.
As the domestic market shrank, thousands of cotton farmers in Mississippi and Lousiana switched to other crops such as corn and soybeans.
"We're having good yields and good prices, " said Mr. Mimms, who raises 4, 000 acres of cotton with his sons and his father.
There, she scooped up swatches of cotton, linen, denim and imitation silk--the real stuff is unkind to silkworms--and took them to Italian shoemakers.
But the key moment, in the history of the mule, came a few years later, when there was a strike of cotton workers.
The problems began when the former Soviet Union made Kazakhstan its main producer of cotton, a plant that needs a great deal of water.
And finally, a ton of cottonseed will contain about 150 pounds of "linters, "which are tiny bits of cotton fuzz that are stuck to the seed after ginning.
Pretty soon, even robots will have the pleasure of enjoying the touch... the feel of cotton and maybe even hum that jingle to themselves, too.
Comparing the number of cotton bales that different types of workers produced to similar workers on other farms, planters calculated the worth of each slave.
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The United States is also the world's largest exporter of cotton.
The mother returned with a plate and placed it on the rug: crumbled feta and sliced tomato submerged in the pee yellow of cotton oil.
The production of cotton became extraordinarily concentrated in these two places.
Cotton growers have also shown an astounding ability to coax value out of cotton production by throwing nothing away and finding somebody, anybody, to eat it or buy it.
This spring, the designer offered playful monkeys climbing up the front of cotton dresses, and bright, digitized Navajo patterns on pant sets, cotton sweaters and full-skirted frocks.
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