Studies in Gujarat Cottons, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Studies in Gujarat Cottons, Vol. 1

This cotton is cultivated as a mixture crop, one row being sown between ten or twelve rows of some cereal. In the first season it yields little or no cotton: in the hot weather it is cut down to one foot of the ground, in the second monsoon it grows luxuriantly and produces a full crop in the following hot season. The cotton in subsequent years is of coarser quality than that of the second, and the plant is usually rooted out at the end of the third or fourth season, but it is occasionally allowed to grow for six or seven years. When growing wild in hedgerows the cotton turns yellow, and very short in staple the fuzz at the same time becomes long. Rozi is markedly different from the annual cottons and does not seem to hybridize with them. It strongly resembles Gossypium a’rboreum, the chief difference being a yellow flower and the absence of the marked reddish tinge possessed by this species.

As has already been stated, the cultivation of this cotton is declining. It produces a lint of fairly long staple, which is, however, very coarse, and is almost entirely used locally in Northern Gujarat. Its value is much decreased owing to the unripe condition in which it is usually picked. It has probably little or no future, and while it will continue to be grown, yet its cultivation hardly affects the larger interests of cotton growing in the province. It occupies nearly 7 000 acres in the Kaira District.

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