I wanted to be sure this series was inclusive of various perspectives when I started it, so I asked a few social media friends who I thought may have a perspective not always represented in commercials about cotton, etc. to contribute. Matt Peregoy of TheRealMattDaddy.com was one of the folks who came to mind. I met Matt through #DadChat on Twitter (he’s @RealMattDaddy).

He’s a dad who points out the absurdity of people saying a dad will be babysitting — whether its a mom or dad spending time with their kids, they are parenting. I really respect that he speaks up for a viewpoint that hasn’t always been the mainstream but is becoming more common everyday. I love how Matt ends the post and would love to know your answer to his question!

When Janice asked me to write some thoughts from a dad’s point of view about cotton, I really wasn’t sure what it would lead to.  I usually write things that are creative and funny on my own blog.  How creative and funny can I be about a plant that looks like this?

But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that I truly take for granted all of the things that are made of cotton.  Heck, it was probably the way my wife looked in those cotton jeans that made me interested in getting to know her back in high school!  Now that I’m an at-home dad, I literally use dozens of things that are made of cotton every single day.

When I wake up in the morning to the sound of my toddler yelling for us to wake up, I throw off my cotton sheets, put on my cotton t-shirt, shorts and socks, and go change my daughter’s diaper using wipes and diapers that both contain cotton.  After getting her out of her cotton pajamas and into some comfy clothes that most likely contain cotton, we head downstairs for breakfast.  After breakfast, my daughter watches Sesame Street on a couch with a cotton-stuffed pillow while holding her Sesame Street plush characters that, no doubt, include cotton fibers.  When I’m finished cleaning up the dishes, we usually go outside dressed in our cotton sweat shirts.  I could literally walk you through my entire cottony day like this!

Living in one of the richest nations in the world, we have the benefit of seeing a finished product when we put on our favorite pair of jeans.  We don’t see the process that a cotton boll goes through in order to turn into those jeans.  I have tried to teach my daughter important things like where her food comes from, that gardening and self sufficiency are important, and we have a responsibility to be good stewards of our resources.  I also want her to learn that every finished product has a beginning, and that beginning usually starts with some kind of farmer whether corn, cotton, livestock or even trees.  I don’t want to raise a child that is blissfully unaware of what she is consuming.  I’d like her to be conscious of that and be doing her part to be a responsible steward of the planet she lives on.

I don’t just want her to know that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and the cotton farmer’s biggest enemy is the boll weevil; I want her to know that cotton is a resource, like all other crops, that is to be responsibly managed, responsibly harvested, and not wasted.  I want her to get the connection that behind every piece of cotton fabric is a farmer working hard to make that raw material.  I’ll do my part to teach my kid.  Will you do yours?

The post A Dad’s Point of View on Cotton appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Cotton gins. They haven’t changed the basic function since they were invented but I do know they have changed dramatically in size & speed. At the end of the day, all of them involve separating the seed from the lint. The vast majority of gin use a system of saws (think about the type used in a circular saw) pulling lint away from seed and through to a cleaning system. There are some gins that use a system of rollers rather than saws.

I need to shoot a video and do the voice over because I can’t find a really good one. The ones I find are either don’t include a voice over, don’t go step-by-step or are too long, HOWEVER, this video does a fairly good job of showing you around inside a gin. Since it doesn’t have voice overs, I’ll point out a few things.

• After some overview footage, there is a shot of a module truck backing up and placing the module on a conveyor. Once in the machine, you can see some of the movement as the seed cotton is pulled apart by air. (By the way, before modules, cotton entered the gin by pulling a wagon up outside of the gin. A worker would use a vacuum shoot & angle it into areas of a trailer to feed cotton into the gin.)
• Gin stands are the tall machines where you see cotton moving by at high speeds. Cotton is being piped in pneumatically to feed into the gin. As it comes into the stands (these say Lummus which is one of the major manufacturers). Safety guards are important as saw are whizzing along, pulling lint into another area that will blow through some cleaners to separate any leaf matter, etc. The seed is moved to another area and the woody gin trash to another.

At the end of the process, the gin has three different components to deal with lint, fuzzy seed and gin trash.  We will be getting to that soon too!

You can learn more about cotton in the series of Cotton 101 posts or on the Cotton 101 page.

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