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Down the Delta Turnrow

It’s the cotton pickin’ truth

by Eva Ann Dorris
DBJ Contributing Writer

I haven’t picked cotton. Sure, I’ve stood in a field and pulled lint out of a few bolls as specialists and researchers told me about fiber length and quality or used the cotton as comparative example of one variety to another.

But I haven’t spent hours, stooped over in the Delta heat, picking cotton amid insects and under the full sun of a Mississippi summer. Many people I know claim to have picked cotton, most of them as children. However, you have to wonder if that’s like the “walking five miles to school, barefoot, in the snow,” story my father tells me to describe the harshness of his youth.

Picking a row or two of cotton while visiting the grandparents isn’t the same as facing a field of cotton at sunrise and staying until sunset day after day for weeks that could stretch into months. Those of you who have picked cotton must be especially appreciative this year of the invention of mechanical cotton pickers, considering the record-breaking amount of cotton in the Delta.

I’ve gone through this long introduction to hopefully give you some visual perspective to a successful tourist attraction that shows we must have come full circle in a world gone absolutely crazy.

A Turkish cotton farmer is boosting his income by inviting tourists to pick his crop, and they pay him for the privilege. Mustaka Ozturk’s alternative tourism earns him 30 Euros per tourist, per week. Those 30 Euros convert to about 35 American dollars per tourist, and he gets as many as 500 visitors a week. Have you done the math yet? That’s right. The farmer is making $17,500 a week, and he gets his crop picked too.

I’m not sure why people in Turkey are so fascinated with picking cotton. Surely they share a similar history with us and realize picking cotton is not a vacation or an amusement park attraction but is real, back-breaking work.
The farmer, who lives just outside the Mediterranean coastal resort of Antalya, suffered crop losses from flooding after a dam was built nearly four years ago. His cotton crop was bringing him less than 2,000 Euros a year (about $2,300). He turned to tourism to boost his income.
“The tourists want to experience something other than the beach and sun,” he said. Those who pick the most cotton are rewarded with a bottle of wine or a T-shirt.

I am amazed. Now, perhaps the people paying this farmer are parents who send their children so they can be sure they understand real work. Or maybe he’s paid by the Turkish prison system to teach prisoners a lesson. I even considered the story might be an Internet rumor or hoax gone wild, but I did find the source of the story on the WorldLeisure Jobs and News Web site. Apparently, the story is legitimate

The trend now is to search for ways to make money through agri-tourism, and it’s working here in Mississippi as farmers plant pumpkin patches and corn field mazes or open their dairy farms and let children milk cows and pitch hay. When you think about it, that’s work too. The concept helps younger generations connect with the importance of agriculture. Agri-tourism is a good concept, but I wouldn’t have dreamed people would pay to pick cotton. I thought in this day and age it would be almost impossible to pay someone to pick it for you – certainly not just the opposite.

Maybe, for some people, it’s a small price to pay for the bragging rights. Perhaps too many of us are too far removed from the days of sharecropping when children and parents worked side by side, day after day, to make enough money during harvest to get the family through the rest of the year.

Personally, if anything, I’m humbled I escaped having to pick cotton, but I won’t be booking my vacation at a cotton field near you anytime soon.

Thanks for reading. DBJ

(Eva Ann Dorris is an agricultural journalist and columnist from Pontotoc, Miss. She can be reached at 662-419-9176 or eadorris@aol.com.)