Agronomy: Goosing the Cotton

After the great mechanical mulchers have completed their clattering passage; after the green seedlings have sprouted above black ribbons of polyethylene plastic (TIME, April 19) and the chemical spray guns have finished their hissing attack on bug and weed, the most modern cotton fields in the U.S. are likely to resound to an unexpected and old-fashioned racket. Day after day, nearly a million geese honk their way across the carefully tended farmland. In a time of rising costs and declining markets, cotton growers are showing an expanding enthusiasm for an antiquated agricultural technique known as “cotton goosing.”

Geese can be bought for $3 apiece, or rented for as little as $1.50 a season, and their ravenous appetites make them more than a match for marauding Johnson grass—a hardy weed that sprouts between the cotton rows again and again, despite the heftiest doses of weed killer. A brace of the waddling birds can keep an acre of cotton weeded; a gaggle of twelve geese can gobble as much as a hard-working man can clear with a hoe. Cotton-goosing farmers save $20 per acre compared with the stiffer cost of chemical weeding. The only drawback to the system is that the geese, grown fat from their weed-gorging, occasionally trample down the young cotton. But after their chores are done, and the cotton is safely off to the gin, the geese themselves can always be peddled to help pay for the loss.