Farm Press announces cotton photo contest

The crop perhaps most associated with the South is the subject of a Farm Press photo contest that will run through Nov. 1.

Farm Press, which publishes Southeast Farm Press among other publications, is looking for the best photo that reminds readers of cotton’s picturesque beauty.

Cotton is “as much a part of Southern farm culture as Spanish moss on live oaks, azaleas in April and sliced watermelon on a hot summer evening,” Slate Canon writes in the Farm Press Blog. “Snow-white fields ready for harvest hold promise of a good return for hard work and perseverance. 

“And from the time the first seedling pushes through the soil, to first bloom, to boll fill and finally to the massive pickers marching through fields leaving brown swaths in the white landscape, a cotton crop is a work of art,” she adds.

Indeed, there are few things more Southern that zipping through a rural county in the late afternoon and coming over a hill upon a field of cotton so full that it looks as though a freak storm dumped a couple of inches of snow on the landscape. Or seeing wisps of cotton blowing across a country highway, catching on nearby stalks of dried corn or piling up in ditches.

Patriarchs ponder Chinese centennial

The Chinese Republic turns 100 this week, as does Liu Peng-hua, a resident of Taiwan. Both have seen a century of tumultuous change.

When Liu was born in what is today the northeastern Chinese province of Liaoning, the nation had just deposed its last emperor, many women still had bound feet, and almost all men wore their hair braided into long ponytails, or queues, stretching down their backs, according to a story by Agence France-Presse.

“There were no bicycles or cars in our village,” Liu told the wire service at his home near Taiwan’s capital Taipei. “Most of the time when we needed to go somewhere, we travelled on foot or rode horses or donkeys. Whenever I think about it, it’s like a dream. So many things have happened since then. So much has changed.”

While the Republic of China was formally established on Jan. 1, 1912, on mainland China following the Xinhai Revolution, its roots began with the Wuchang Uprising which began on Oct. 10, 1911, and replaced the Qing Dynasty.

The revolution ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China, but the republic itself only lasted until 1949 on the mainland.