Paul Hoefler Productions presents “Cotton Picking and Ginning.” The black-and-white educational film, made in cooperation with the National Cotton Council of America, provides the viewer with “the story of cotton from harvest to mill” and was the first film in a series of five subjects on cotton. There are a few strains of “My Old Kentucky Home” before we’re told how cotton is the most important crop grown in the United States (mark 00:40) and the most widely used fiber in the world. It takes about 200 days for cotton to ripen following planting, we learn, as the camera pans fields and provides up close shots of the white tufts. Stooped workers hand-pick cotton (mark 01:22) as we are told more of its importance as a crop. “Hand-picked cotton is cleaner and brings the highest prices,” says the narrator (mark 02:23). After weighing the the 70-pound bags of cotton it is carried up a ladder and tossed into a trailer. At mark 03:25, lines of mechanical pickers are shown making their ways through fields, gathering cotton at a rate 50 times faster than humans, freeing people to take others manufacturing jobs. Come mark 05:00 the viewer learns of the cotton gin and the process involved in separating seeds from the lint. A telescoping pipe literally sucks the cotton from trailers (mark 05:48) into the gin machinery, where saws begin the separation process, which is shown in slow-motion photography. The line is shown being pressed into 500-pound bales (mark 06:40), wrapped, and tagged, before being taken to a warehouse. Following an inspection, the bales are graded and offered for sale. As workers are shown loading cotton bales onto boxcars (mark 09:10) for transport across the United States, the narrator explains that cotton is also sold to other countries in high-density bales, which later are shown being placed on ships.