Blytheville, Ark. had never seen so many folks before. On Ross Hughes’s farm there were 15,000 of them—come from as fur away as Texas to see the first annual cotton-picking championship of the U. S.

A blazing sun beat down one day last week on the Mississippi delta cotton fields as hundreds of white-shirted, straw-hatted plantation owners, managers, ginners, dealers, bankers, scientists and ...