cotton, educate me

in my trip across Texas we went thru a lot of cotton country, some in full harvest session, i haven't been around cotton much so, what can you tell me? and how much is one of those huge modules it is pressed into worth? what does it need to grow, in watching, it looks all but primary tillage equipment is unique to cotton and very little grain type equipment is used by cotton farmers, but you usually don't see much cotton equipment for sale anywhere, odd, some of these guys also have oil wells on their fields, so there probably doing a little better than just farming cotton, but its interesting to watch them

Texas leads the nation in cotton, a module is roughly 15 bales, a bale of ginned cotton is 500 lbs., there is seed and dirt in the module so it can weigh a good bit more than 15 X 500. In general, the same equipment, tillage, planters, with row and singulation adjustments can used for conventional corn and for cotton with the obvious exception of harvest.

In addition to what LAA said; a bale of cotton as-picked weighs about 1500# (1000# of seed/trash, etc and 500# of lint). Before it's sold, each bale is graded as to fibre length, strength, color, trash, etc, all of which affects price. I've been out of the business for a long time, but the 'standard' used to be strict low middling 1 and 1/16 inch. Current price is somewhere around 70 cents per pound......$350 per bale.

years ago if cotton was grown on a place,the land was pretty much useless for any other crops afterwards...i worked on the Galveston Wharves when i was alot younger rolling bales of cotton on to cotton trains which took bales to ships or rail cars...those bales averaged 750#...was good money back then but paying for it now with leg and back issues.

Got my education in cotten in the mid 50's. Chopped it with a hoe (2-3 times). Picked it with a 9 ft sack (2-3 times). This way of picking looks like fun to me. I really enjoy seeing a beautiful white field of cotton. Saw some yesterday out of Jackson Tn . Solid white.
Wishing farmers a great year.

here,we planted with cotton planters. Looked very much like standard row planters but the plates had sort of like teeth on them for lack of a better way to describe it. Lots of planters planted seed at three different depths ,often in lister rows, to get the best germination of your seed. Once it was up,we would go through and thin( chop) cotton and weed by hand leaving the best looking plants . There was mechanical cotton chopers available( still is) in both tractor and horse drawn models, but they were not widley used simply because they often left the worst plants and reduced yeilds. Usualy we would weed two or three times by hand in the rows,and use a cotton slip or go devil to turn dirt as plants grew into the rows, eventualy leaving ground level. Cotton was picked several times (in fact almost continuosly) once it was ready. But todays farmers generally defoliate the plants ,and have seed that matures within a few days.the more you can have your plants mature evenly the less time you had to spend picking of course. We hauled it in cotton trailers to the gin where it was graded according to fiber length,trash,dirt,seed etc. my aunt graded cotton and ran the gin here for most of her life.there was a box ,i still have one somewhere, with about as i recall 30 or more samples in it of various grades of cotton, and she would simply match them as closely as she could. lead to a lot of how shall we say "heated " debates when farmers didnt agree with her grading. but most really knew she was fair. and if there was some folks having a particularly hard time ,they were normally graded up a notch or two,though it wasnt really discussed. every town of any size at all had one or more gins,and they competed with each other for buisness. some folks sold there seed to the gin,some hauled it back home for feed which was what we did. wasnt near as many hulls in hand picked cotton, but we have hauled many a wagon load of hulls home also to spread on fields. ww2 nearly ended the cotton buisness in this area.it was labor intensive, lots of farm boys died or were crippled during the war,or simply never returned to the farm after seeing the world away from it. cotton gins closed up all over. and the few left only ran a few days a year.giving rise to the module builder.you basically press your cotton into a module(S) where it can set at gin until it is processed.cotton gins run only what few days they need to instead of being open for months like the old days. alot has changed but mostly like all things its became more mechanized.cotton prices are increasing steadily the last few years due in my opinion to a lot of the green product craze. a good rotation for cotton was blackeyed or cowpeas.which explains their popularity in the south in years past. ive picked about as much peas by hand as cotton.old joke in the south was you could always tell a farmer in the south. because he was always hunched over looking down! every hear of a man looking you in the eye? a guy had to straighten up to do that,it took effort,it was a sign a man thought you were worth the effort,and worthy of respect.

I enjoyed your story, Jack. Brings back lot of old memories. Our house joined the gin property. Started around Sept 1 and often ran 24 hours a day, sometimes through Christmas. Powered by 2 cylinder Fairbanks -Morse diesel engine & a world of line shafts/belts/pulleys. Now, as you say, most if not all the gins around here are closed & this year for the first time in many, I actually saw one cotton field...just one. Still have cotton scales & cotton sack, but sure don't plan on using it!

Jack and others, thanks for the education. Living at the 45th parallel, you multiplied what I knew about growing cotton.

Great thread!! I have only seen cotton in the field a couple times, and never been closer then going down the hiway.

a little about the gin building itself , as jmore said it was ran most often by a engine of some brand setting outside and far from the gin.a series of shafts and belts ran the length of the gin and ran the actuall cotton gins themselves. actually operating the gins was considered by many to be the most dangerous work you could do.and the guys who were good at it were considered highly trained, highly skilled,and highly paid workers. the gin house by its very nature was(is) a highly dangerous place and there was a jillion ways you could get injured or worse. first was the belts,mostly open with no guards.women were NEVER allowed inside a gin for any reason while it was running,long hair and belts was simply too dangerous. a belt could grab your hair and literally rip your scalp and often your whole face skin off. the gin was always kept dark and with the dust and lint visibility was often just a few feet or less. it was kept dark simply so operators could watch for hot spots. cotton in a atmosphere lacking oxygen smolders ,it looks like little electric currents running up the fibers.a hot bearing or a worn/loose chain could get hot enough to make it burn,so the machines needed constant tending. Guys would crawl around these massive running machines,greasing and oiling them, checking for hot spots and generally servicing them while in operation. Once cotton smolders it makes a thing called char cloth,once in that state any spark and a little air would make instant fire,and in fact thats very often the basis of making fire with a flint and steel. dust and lint was of course highly explosive also. workers back then rarely had any breating protection except a rag tied around their nose and mouth.lint would coat their lungs ,and few lived very long.A man basically had to be familiar enough with his machine to service it while running,in the dark and while blind. needless to say accidents were common,and very often fatal. fires also were a constant concern and many a gin burnt.fire fighting quite often meant pulling smoldering cotton out of a gin into the air where it would immediatly burst into flame.occasionaly during the winter when gin was shut down,school kids would be allowed to walk through the gin.they always made it a point to show the kids the inside of one with its fingers close together and graphicly describe whats left when a person falls in the machine and runs through there. needless to say we didnt play around the gin.LOL

Plowing cotton with a mule meant walkingup and down the row at least 4 times plus one in the middle. This varied depending on how much grass was in the crop. It's understandable that men then didn't have a weight problem.

I always understood the standard weight for a bale of cotton is 480 pounds.

Presently, John Deere makes a cotton picker that puts the cotton into a large round bale, maybe 6 x 6 feet, weighting 5,000 pounds, and wrapped around the outside in plastic. These can be moved like round bales of hay except it obviously takes large tractors to pick them up. I think the gin needs some special equipment to process the round bales. CIH makes cotton pickers that make a small module, don't know how much it weighs. I think the JD system is going to be more popular.

KEH

For most of my life, the "bagging and ties" weighed 20-22 lb, which meant that the weight of the cotton was actually about 480 lb per bale. There was an 'acceptable' weight range....which I've forgotten; if the bale weighed more or less than what was acceptable, it would be discounted pricewise. I no longer grow cotton, but understand that bagging and ties now weigh about 5 lbs. There were 3 gins in our little town (population about 3000 back then) when I was growing up. They were all electrically powered. One of the ginners was missing an arm.......which he'd gotten caught in one of the exposed belts. Nearly every community in the county also had a gin or 2 and some of them were powered by diesel engines. In one of the communities we lived in (Arp, TN in 1948), the engine had a very distinctive sound and could be heard for a long distance; everyone said, "That's Old Mother Arp patting her foot." In my era, a good gin/ginner would put out 3 or even 4 bales per hour; I have no idea what they do now..........probably 30 or more bales per hour. Every county also had a "compress".....the Federal Compress in my part of the world; was just the name of the company and had nothing to do with the government. The bales were transported there, where they were unwrapped and compressed further........into about half the size they were from the gin. The local compress was about a mile and a half from where I lived and used steam pressure; they did about 2 bales a minute and you could hear the steam release after each one. Here, the railroad ran right by the compress and the bales were shipped by rail....

(quoted from post at 20:00:24 10/30/12) For most of my life, the "bagging and ties" weighed 20-22 lb, which meant that the weight of the cotton was actually about 480 lb per bale. There was an 'acceptable' weight range....which I've forgotten; if the bale weighed more or less than what was acceptable, it would be discounted pricewise. I no longer grow cotton, but understand that bagging and ties now weigh about 5 lbs. There were 3 gins in our little town (population about 3000 back then) when I was growing up. They were all electrically powered. One of the ginners was missing an arm.......which he'd gotten caught in one of the exposed belts. Nearly every community in the county also had a gin or 2 and some of them were powered by diesel engines. In one of the communities we lived in (Arp, TN in 1948), the engine had a very distinctive sound and could be heard for a long distance; everyone said, "That's Old Mother Arp patting her foot." In my era, a good gin/ginner would put out 3 or even 4 bales per hour; I have no idea what they do now..........probably 30 or more bales per hour. Every county also had a "compress".....the Federal Compress in my part of the world; was just the name of the company and had nothing to do with the government. The bales were transported there, where they were unwrapped and compressed further........into about half the size they were from the gin. The local compress was about a mile and a half from where I lived and used steam pressure; they did about 2 bales a minute and you could hear the steam release after each one. Here, the railroad ran right by the compress and the bales were shipped by rail....

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Just curious, where is Arp, TN? Couldn't find it on iMaps

There is a lot of cotton farmed near Forney, TX in Kaufman County.

At one time there was an active cotton gin in Crandall, TX not too far from Forney.

Lauderdale County........
Arp

We never grew cotton, so I managed to skip one of the most dreaded of the agricultural chores, "chopping cotton". But I did have my turn at picking the stuff, dragging a cotton sack down the rows. The fun wears off quickly.
Got paid 50 cents per hundred, as I recall. My uncle had a gin, but as a kid I didn’t hang around there much. I still have the old bale scale balance from that gin.
My most interesting experience with the cotton business came working for the Anderson-Clayton Co. at its headquarters in Houston. They were the largest cotton factors in the world at one time, and theirs is one of the most notable cases of business evolution. They started out just buying and selling cotton, but then expanded to financing and insuring crops. They then moved into ginning and compressing, the mechanical demands of which led them into specialized machinery manufacturing. The ginning and compressing led to a need for storage, so they went into the warehousing business.
The ginning process produced cotton seeds, so the company went into the oil pressing business. The by-products led them into the animal feeds business (ACCO Feeds). They also sold planting seeds under the ACCO Seeds brand. The vegetable oil led them into food production. Some old-timers may remember some of their brands---Mrs. Tucker’s Shortening, Chiffon Margarine, Seven Seas Salad Dressing.
All in all, they did quite well. One of the founders, Monroe D. Anderson, is best known as the benefactor and namesake of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Hospital in Houston. The other founder, William Lockhart Clayton, was a self-educated finance and economics genius who was asked to be the Under Secretary for Economic Affairs in the Roosevelt government in WWII. It was he who General George Marshall sent to Europe at the end of the war to assess the devastation and determine what must be done to get Europe on its feet again. A few days after he returned and submitted his report, it was delivered almost verbatim in a speech by General Marshall, therefore coming to be known as the “Marshall Plan”.

My Dad always talked about plowing with mules.I Know at some point his Dad bought an F 12 Farmall.So I asked him about how much equipment they bought with the tractor, just a disc. Nothing changed he still had to walk behind the tractor guiding the plow.
Ron

Thread ,cotten, anyone else see the pun? Bill

Good thread, enjoyed reading all posts. Learned a lot!
Thanks, Garry

My great nephew works for Monsanto in LA. He operates a farm that grows the seed for Monsanto. He gets small quantities of it and harvests the cotton for the seed. It is then sent to the Caribbean for replanting that same year. It comes back to him after that harvest and he does it again till they get enough seed.

Raised a lot of cotton in my time. Haven't since 1991 though. Here in La. if we got a bale to the acre we were happy. Nowdays they make two without blinkin an eye. We used to pick it over once, then go back and scrap it. Usually you scrapped on average a bale to every eight to ten acres, sometimes more, sometimes less. The scrapping was considered your profit. Now they deleaf it, pick it once and cut the stalks. Not much cotton around here now. Only three gins running in the parish. Used to have about twelve. Cotton is still purty labor intensive but not nearly what it was twenty years ago. But corn has replaced King Cotton in our area. So much easier and quicker to raise and harvest. And corn has even beat cotton profit-wise over the last several years. I don't think we'll see cotton coming back anytime soon.