Cotton pickers are some of the coolest machines out there. I mean, memes keep coming back that compare the lights and action of cotton harvest with a mainstage concert!

I love watching cotton getting picked! And getting a ride along is always a fun way to go…. sometimes farmers have even trusted me behind the wheel, but I’m really best suited for the buddy seat.

Basic Functions of Cotton Pickers

The basic premise of a cotton picker is to pull cotton off of plants leaving as much of the plant matter in the field as possible to reduce the possibility of contaminants making it to the gin or the textile mill. But the way they do it is an amazingly complex system of actions.

Here’s a drawing I made to show some of the primary elements of the machine.

Spindles Pull Cotton From the Plant

Cotton pickers have spindles that rotate on cylinders that rotate as well. The roughened metal of the spindle pulls the cotton from the plant. There are cotton pickers and then there are cotton strippers… they both harvest cotton, but cotton pickers are a bit different in that they can harvest cleaner fiber because of the spindles whereas strippers strip everything off the mainstem.

You can see in this photo how the spindles are lined up between the two gray guides.

Rows of spindles around the cylinder, keep lots of movement, trying to leave the branches of the plant and even the bracts in tact. The bracts are the parts of the plant that keep the fiber attached until picked.

Compacting Cotton for Transport to the Gin

There are a few ways this is done now:

• Cotton is still collected in trailers without compacting in some countries but this is rare in the U.S.
• Separate machinery from the picker that is used at the field’s edge. This was common in the recent past but has become much less common in the U.S. You can see this in an old post about how moduling comes after cotton harvest.
• On-board moduling / bales that happens as the cotton picker continues to pick more fiber. I shared a photo essay on the John Deere picker that creates modules in the field back in 2010.

And this tweet and the image in it…. that’s what got me to blog today! Love seeing a diagram of what happens in the basket with the on-board moduling system!

Funciona de uma colheitadeira de algodão pic.twitter.com/DwtJUwYIsn

— Agricultura (@agricultura4you) July 9, 2022

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In June, I helped organize a meeting for the office and that’s when I got the chance to meet Darren Brown, a cotton farmer in the Missouri Bootheel (that small part of Missouri near the Mississippi River, Arkansas and Tennessee). Love that he was willing to stick with me through cotton harvest!

Since I hit the highway to and from my hometowns of Memphis & St. Louis so often, I can’t help but take a look from the highway. Knowing Darren was such a character and was willing to share the good, the bad and the ugly with me as his planting season was wrecked by bad weather when we met, I kept his phone number handy and would check in throughout the season.

The Bootheel crop went from one that was ragged and worrisome to being one of a lot of promise.

As I launched Hundred Percent Cotton, I stopped in the Bootheel on a drive back from Memphis and shot a short video I used on some of the social media sites. The crop looked good but I was waiting to hear from farmers and I wondered how cotton harvest would go. I texted Darren asking about harvest as a friend from Canada had told me she’d never seen cotton in the field and I thought maybe we could get there.

We didn’t make it, but Darren was nice enough to send me some video clips. I had to share.

If that’s not enough of cotton at harvest to make you happy, you may really enjoy these photos from a couple of years ago. Some of my favorite cotton harvest photos of all time were taken in the Bootheel! This one was taken at Charles Parker’s farm!

The post Cotton Harvest in the Missouri Bootheel — Darren Beat the Rain! Video appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

October is devoted to raising awareness in breast cancer. We see the NFL and Delta Airlines go pink to raise awareness but what can a cotton farmer do? How can you tell when a cotton farmer is committed to something? Well, the best examples are clear to the eye! October brings harvest time and modules are a great canvas for making a statement. And it seems a lot of them have gone pink this month!

Yes, cotton farmers have been showing their support of breast cancer research. My friend Marjory caught this on a gin yard in Greenwood, Mississippi the first of October.

And then I saw Cannon & Heidi Michael from California (he’s @agleader on Twitter) popping up pink today and I couldn’t put off posting this any longer. Think about how many people can be prompted to think pink when they roll past round modules that big wrapped in pink!

And I have to share one of my favorite t-shirts. I found out about it a couple of years ago around the same time of year as a community was hosting an event to raise money for research & support.

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Tonight I was asked to answer a question about cotton on Quora and I decided to go ahead and post my reply here on the blog too since I had already taken the time to write it all up.   The question was “How is cotton picked nowadays?” The answer I gave them follows with a few minor modifications.

There are a few ways that cotton is currently harvested.

In the US the two predominant ways to harvest cotton on farms is either using 1) mechanical cotton pickers or 2) using a mechanical cotton stripper. A cotton picker pulling the lint from the plants bracts that hold it on and leaves the rest of the plant as is. This is what is used in the Southeast, Mid-South and Far West (CA & AZ). Some areas of Texas and Oklahoma use pickers but on the High Plains (Lubbock & Amarillo, Texas are two of the bigger cities in that area) cotton strippers are commonly used. Strippers pull more of the plant into the equipment which means there will be additional cleaning or ginning needed. Its interesting to note that within the cotton picker segment there are some differences in machinery and labor requirements. The latest state of the art pickers include the ability to compact cotton on-board, pressing it into a module as it rolls through the field. These pickers can pick six rows of cotton at a time and are rapidly becoming the market standard in the US as they eliminate the need to a separate module builder and other equipment and people to run those. Most of the more developed or advanced agricultural systems in cotton producing nations use pickers so its similar in Australia and Brazil.

There are a few photos & videos of cotton harvest on my blog if you’d like to take a look.

• a bit of recollection from a friend who drove a one row cotton picker in the 1970s as well as a video of one of the new on-board moduling pickers that produces rectangular modules.
• another current day picker running through the field and shows you what the round modules look like.
• shows you what I mean by moduling that’s needed with pickers that do not have the on-board moduling system and shows how those modules are transported.

Hand-harvesting is still the standard in many other countries and you can see that done in many areas of Turkey, India, China, Africa, etc. In these places, the people who harvest are still picking cotton the way it was done in the US many decades ago. Usually people are paid per pound or kilo of cotton harvested. Cotton in these countries may be brought to the gin in trucks, still in bags or in wagons pulled by tractors. (The photo at right is from a trip I took to Turkey and ended up visiting farms during my vacation.)

I can also tell you that I have picked cotton in the very recent past here in the US but that was part of research efforts where researchers pick individual plants or even selected bolls for testing and breeding purposes.

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I have a lot of posts in a Cotton 101 series as well as even more tagged as cotton. Feel free to add topics to my blogging list! I sometimes wonder what others would like to know about my favorite fiber crop!

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