King Cotton, once dominant in the South, in the last decades like all crops became subservient to monstrous fleets of oversized machines that plant, fertilize, spray chemicals, and harvest. What is now essentially an industrial process was in the distant past a labor-intensive endeavor involving plants, people, mules, and geese. Most people are aware of the former three participants, but what is rarely remembered is that a special, uniquely American breed of goose played an important role in the cotton economy. Appropriately, it is known as the cotton patch goose.
Cotton patch geese evolved on rural Southern farms for the purpose of eating weeds growing between the planted cotton. These smallish, quiet geese would be released into the fields where they would clean the undergrowth and not harm the precious cotton plants, depositing natural fertilizer as they made their rounds. In a Depression-era South, the geese also provided precious meat, eggs and grease for the often hungry farmers.
By the 1950s the breed began to die out as mechanization displaced the animals and people that had been instrumental to growing cotton. A few years ago, one man, Dr. Tom Walker, remembering the geese of his youth, traveled more than 10,000 miles by car assembling the last remnants of rural flocks. Through his efforts and those of other enthusiasts, a small population of cotton patch geese has been raised. These beautiful little geese with pink feet lay only seven eggs each year, and the total population of adults remaining in the world is probably fewer than a hundred. You are more likely to see a blue whale than a cotton patch goose…unless you go to Greenfire Farms. There, you’ll find both varieties of the breed; saddlebacks and solids. In both varieties, the male is a solid white. In the saddleback variety, the female has a gray saddle on her white body. In the solid variety, the female has a body that is a solid gray without the white. A video of our birds is available in the blog section of this website.
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