cotton was known as virginia's gold and silver.
what crop was known as virginia's gold and silver?
cotton
flue-cured virginia tobacco became the favoured crop of many european planters in the shire highlands in the second decade of the 20th century. the areas farmed rose from 4,507 acres in 1911 to 10,489 acres in 1913 and 14,218 acres in 1920, yielding an average tobacco crop of 407 pounds an acre. before 1920, only about 5% of the crop marketed was dark-fired tobacco produced by african farmers, but this rose to about 1 million pounds or 14% by 1923. the first world war boosted the production of european-farmed, flue-cured virginia leaf, but post-war competition from the united states virginia prompted a rebate one-sixth of import duties to assist empire growers. much of the tobacco produced by nyasaland's european estates, particularly by smaller growers, was of low-grade and often unsaleable. in 1921, only 1,500 tons of a 3,500 ton crop could be sold immediately: the cost of the relatively expensive flue-curing process (when overproduction was leading to reduced sale prices) made low-grade tobacco unprofitable, and put the smaller european growers out of business. europeans produced 86% of nyasaland's tobacco in 1924, but only 57% in 1927 and 28% in 1933.
a. l. bruce estates
genes from a gmo may pass to another organism just like an endogenous gene. the process is known as outcrossing and can occur in any new open-pollinated crop variety. introduced traits potentially can cross into neighboring plants of the same or closely related species through three different types of gene flow: crop-to-crop, crop-to-weedy, and crop-to-wild. in crop-to-crop, genetic information from a genetically modified crop is transferred to a non-genetically modified crop. crop-to-weedy transfer refers to the transfer of genetically modified material to a weed, and crop-to-wild indicates transfer from a genetically modified crop to a wild, undomesticated plant and/or crop. there are concerns that the spread of genes from modified organisms to unmodified relatives could produce species of weeds resistant to herbicides that could contaminate nearby non-genetically modified crops, or could disrupt the ecosystem, this is primarily a concern if the transgenic organism has a significant survival capacity and can increase in frequency and persist in natural populations. this process, whereby genes are transferred from gmos to wild relatives, is different from the development of so-called "superweeds" or "superbugs" that develop resistance to pesticides under natural selection.
genetically modified food controversies