Round bale cotton

A few days ago there was a post about old style modules and the new rolls of cotton. I took some pictures from the gin that the company I work for rents warehouse space from for seed storage. I told JM I would post pictures of the different chains in the trucks that pickup the rolls and the old style modules. I couldn't get pictures of the new style chains because the trucks were gone and didn't come back in while i was there this morning. The first three pictures are part of what is setting on the yard now to be ginned. The fourth picture are the chains in a truck for hauling the old style rectangle modules. The chains for picking up the rolls have little round pieces in place of the u shaped piece on these chains. The fifth picture is a load of rolls setting on the feeder in the gin. The sixth picture is after the rolls are turned up on their end and the plastic about to be taken off. This is how the rolls are fed into the gin. Hope you enjoy the pictures and hope this helps on how the cotton gets into the gin.

Chris

Always enjoy what other Farming is all about. How much does a roll weigh?

Around 5-6k pounds the best I remember.

A year or so,Sherry Scheaffer of 'Heritage Iron' magazine did a very interesting and informative article about that.As was said,it is always interesting to see how the 'other stuff' is done.Thanks!

Thanks for that post. I know absolutely nothing about cotton only that it is white! Sometime I need to get down a bit further south in the USA and explore it some. The photo is of myself and my old neighbour on the edge of a cotton field somewhere in Tennessee, absolutely bewildered to see such a crop! I don't think we could grow it in Northern Ireland...so don't worry about competition!
Sam

Interesting , I just passed a flat bed loaded with some cotton bales on them. huge bales with the yellow plastic. Never seen them before yet on our back road I found them, so one of the farms back in here has been growing cotton this year. Just southwest of Gainesville Fl. Also seen few fields of tobacco growing up near Newberry Fl.

Samn40,
Cotton is processed so much differently now as compared to when I was a kid.(But hasn't everything changed?) As a kid in central Oklahoma in the '40s cotton was all hand work. We chopped our cotton three times with a cotton hoe, first thinning it out, then cleaning the grass and weeds out of it the next two times. Now as a kid that would warp your personality right there. Then all the cotton was picked or snapped by hand. Picking was done by pulling the cotton fibers and seed out of the boll. Snapping was done by "snapping" the boll with the cotton fibers intact. It was then put in a long canvas sack that was pulled by the poor stiff that was picking the cotton. When the sack was full or getting too hard to pull the sack was weighed and emptied into the wagon. About 2000 pounds of "snapped" cotton would make a 500 pound bale of cotton fibers.The fibers was separated from the boll and the seed at the gin. Today that all is done mechanically. They say, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Growing and processing cotton is living proof of that. Who knows what a personable guy I'd be today if it wasn't for having had that "cotton field" experience as a kid.

Hey, Sam, your jeans are blue, aren't they? Haven't you ever seen a field of blue cotton? LOL.
My first employment after high school was in a "Cotton Mill" At the time it was the wolds largest producer of denim. Raw bales of cotton would arrive at one end of the facility in rail cars. It was carded and spun, then sent to the "dye house".
next came the weaving room, and lastly the "finishing dept." where I had the misfortune of spending five and six nights per week. (11:00 PM until 7:00 AM) There it was brushed, inspected, treated to the shrinking process, (except for what we shipped to Levi Strauss, we shipped theirs to them straight off the loom).It was a fascinating process, but held no future as the ladder of success there was very short. At the time the pay wasn't too bad, but I doubt if they kept up with progress compared to what other companies paid as time passed. After a year, I decided that I had enjoyed as much as I could stand, and moved on in search of greener pastures. That was 56 years ago, as someone has already stated, times have changed drastically. I am not sure if the place is still in operation at all today. Most of such operations have gone U KNOW WHERE.

They have taken off in australia probley 65% round balers theses days. Heres a few pics when i drove one a couple of years ago

I remember when it was picked by hand here. Then the neighbor bought a JD 1010 with a picker on it. After picking was done he would drive under a pecan tree and take the basket off and use the tractor the rest of the year. The picking has changed so much from using wagons to modules and now round bales. I guess module builders will be a thing of the past in another 5 years.

Down under how did you like that bale mover? Nobody around here has one of those. All of them are the fork type that adjust in and out. There were several pickers from here that went to Australia.

In 1948 my dad bought a new "A" john deere and the first cotton stripper that the J D dealer got in. In west Texas we stripped cotton instead of picking it. The stripper took everything off the stalk. Bolls, leaves, stems and everything. The gin separated the burrs and trash from the lint. We pulled the cotton trailer through the field behind the tractor. There was a elevator and a blower that blew the cotton back in the trailer.

There pretty good need plenty of wait on the front of the tractor. Some contrators are running them both front and back on newer tractors. Sum have two arms which should be better to roll the bale on sumtimes they take a couple of gooes to roll them on they are then lifted onto trucks mostly with artic loaders and big hay forks

samn40. That is a poor excuse for a cotton field. Looks like our fields back in the 60"s and 70"s around here. Lucky to pick a bale to the acre back then. Wish you had came on down to Louisiana where you could have seen a "real" cotton field of today. LOL.