Please, somebody, take this guy to a cotton patch

"Turnips should never be pulled; it injures them. It is much better to send a boy up and let him shake the tree."
- From How I Edited An Agricultural Paper, by Mark Twain.

I couldn't help but think about the aforementioned Mark Twain short story when a friend sent me a copy of 100% Rotten, an article by G. Pascal Zachary that ran in the December 2005 issue of Business 2.0.

Twain's story tells of a down-on-his-luck journalist who takes a job as editor of an agricultural publication while the editor goes on vacation.

Throughout the story, the substitute editor shows a complete lack of understanding about how anything grows or even what it is. He thinks guano is a species of bird and that the pumpkin is a berry. As he tells it, ganders spawn and farmers set out their corn stalks. His readers begin to think he's deranged.

Now, Business 2.0 should be about as far from that kind of humor as possible. It's one of those "new economy" business publications that tends to labor on about this or that person reinventing the future. And it tries to have a social conscience.

Enter G. Pascal Zachary, a man brimming with social conscience. More on him in a moment.

Mr. Zachary's article was the kind of piece that pops up all too commonly. Cotton catches more of this than most crops. I guess people finally grew tired of lambasting tobacco.

I'll boil it down to a few points.

• Cotton subsidies are evil.
• Farmers are getting rich.
• The United States is competing unfairly against Brazil, Africa and the world.

Like I said, you've read it all before, folks.

There certainly were errors, misinformation and misinterpretation. At one point, he says that cotton isn't "a food staple." The definition of food staple might be debated. But the point is that he sees cotton only as a fiber crop, dismissing the fact that cotton seed oil is marketed for human consumption and that cotton seed and meal are livestock feed. If you can make biodegradable plastic from corn - which you can - does that now disqualify it as a food crop?

All that can be glossed over, I suppose. Piddling points, at best.

What really separates the article from all the others like it I've read - and they are legion - is Mr. Zachary's near total lack of understanding about how cotton grows. Here's a quote (with emphasis added), and I promise that I'm not making this up:

"The environment, too, would catch a break from reduced production; growing cotton can be tough on the planet, especially now that genetically modified seeds encourage U.S. growers to soak their fields in a defoliant that kills everything from bugs to the cotton bush itself and knocks the unharmed bolls to the ground, where they can be scooped up by mechanical harvesters."

Scooping the bolls off the ground? Really? If that were the case, I guess it would be called "picking up cotton."

For anyone reading this who is not familiar with cotton, the lint is pulled from the bolls - either by hand (mostly in Developing and Third World countries) or by a harversting machine. If the bolls hit the ground, the cotton is lost. It would be too dirty to use for anything except maybe stuffing cheap mattresses. Period.

So, you can see why I thought about Mark Twain's rather obscure short story. Twain couldn't have done better. If he had written anything that funny on purpose, he probably would have scooted his chair back and decided to take the rest of the day off, knowing he wouldn't be able to top it. Mr. Zachary is one faltering step away from sending the boy up the tree to shake a few bolls loose. And, for that matter, farmers don't "soak" fields with anything unless it's with irrigation water. Chemicals are too expensive, and most of what is being sprayed is water, anyway.

I'd like to give Mr. Zachary the benefit of the doubt. Believe me, I've had bad days when the pressure of deadline caused me to cut some corners or make assumptions. Maybe that's what happened. Based on his web site, he is one busy guy. He has written at least three books on weighty, historic and technical subjects, plus he lectures widely on topics relating to Africa and technology. In fact, his name rang a faint bell when I first read the cotton piece.

When I went to his web site, I discovered that he had been a writer for The Wall Street Journal, which is why his name stood out. While at the Journal, he wrote more than 80 front page pieces, which in itself is an significant statistic for anyone who makes a living putting one word behind another. According to his web bio, The Boston Globe called him “the single most interesting journalist of all the [Journal’s] 700-plus highly-talented reporters.”

No rookie, for certain.

He's also listed as a guest lecturer at Stanford University. His bio there says: "Reviewing his work in 2000, the Atlantic monthly wrote, 'Zachary is making a bid to become a serious public intellectual who can combine familiarity with scholarly literature with first-hand reporting.'"

And, yet, he writes this extremely intense piece without really understanding the core subject. Has he ever seen a cotton field up close? Up to a point, I don't mind people being shrill. But when they're shrill and so faulty, it tends to make me question everything else they've ever written, the Atlantic's opinion and all those front-page stories in the Journal not withstanding.

Anyway, 100% Rotten now becomes my benchmark for defective articles on the subject of agriculture. If you've got any that even approach being this uttlerly off the cliff, please forward them to me. I may start an annual contest.

In the meantime, here are three links:

• 100% Rotton by G. Pascal Zachary, Bsuiness 2.0, December 2005.
  
• How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Once, by Mark Twain, from the July 1870 edition of The Galazy.
• An audio version of How I Edited An Agricultural Paper Once, by Mark Twain, from the July 1870 edition of The Galaxy.