When I tell people I write a bunch of blog posts about cotton, I frequently get a quizzical look or a blank stare. Then when I explain a bit more, that I have worked with cotton farmers for a long time and I enjoy sharing what I’ve learned. Seems some folks wouldn’t think you could enjoy a fiber crop as much as I do this one and the people who grow it. And yet, I’m not alone.

Before I even get started listing them, I need to say I know I will miss some great bloggers who write about cotton. The great thing is I will keep updating this post so the list will grow! The blogs aren’t listed in any particular order either…. it was as much when I thought of them and where the cursor happened to be on the page as anything.

The Cotton Shedd

Tiffany Shedd of The Cotton Shedd in Arizona was brought to my attention years ago because she has such great ideas on decorating with cotton! And almost every time she posts a new creative way to decorate with cotton, someone will stumble on it and send me a link! If you are in the Phoenix area, you may want to watch for occasional workshops she holds where she teaches people to make something like the cotton wreath I have in my stairway. She has a bunch of beautiful greeting cards, coffee mugs, even covers for the iPhone 5 that feature some of her cotton artwork in an online store.

Kissed a Farmer

You may remember reading about Suzie & Daniel Wilde before — she wrote a guest post “A Colorful Life of Cotton Memories on a Texas Farm” for the series of posts I have of people who say cotton is the fabric of their lives. Her blog Kissed a Farmer and the Kissed a Farmer Facebook page She grew up the daughter of a cotton ginner and married a cotton farmer. She’s got the crop in her veins as she works in town touching the crop too! Suzie will be celebrating her blog’s one year anniversary soon.

FarmFresh The Blog

Kelly Whatley and her family have a cotton farm in South Texas. Her blog FarmFresh includes posts about family, football & farming. She’s a really good photographer and does beautiful cotton photos especially — I mean check out these cotton harvest shots! I’m always blown away by the scale of things in that part of Texas…. check out the planting equipment in this post and the windmills here. And I’ll never forget her and her sons taking time to show around Jake’s Flat Stanley…. Jake doesn’t have 4H at his school so it was all news to him.

Tales of a Cotton Wife

I met Aussie Bess Gairns, who writes a personal blog on the Cotton Australia site. She gets a lot of content up too! So much cotton content that she has broken it into these categories — Cotton Dictionary, A Cotton Season, Cotton Plants, Careers in Cotton, Cotton Research & Science, Industry News & Events and Other Things Around the Farm. She also is active on her Tales of a Cotton Wife Facebook page.

The Life of a Farm Wife

Stephanie Miller in Boaz, Alabama has a great blog called The Life of a Farm Wife. There are quite a few posts about growing cotton on their farm as well as posts about the other crops they grow including another Southern favorite peanuts! To help you get a feel for what they grow, she’ has a farming 101 page that highlights cotton, chicken, peanut and corn production. She also shares stories about all the other things that happen in the family…. birthday parties, building a house and more. They also post to their Miller Farms Facebook page.

Across the Branch

I’ve been following Ashlee’s blog Across the Branch for a couple of years having had a friend in Georgia flag it for me. She talks about her family and farm — it’s been fun watching the kids grow up. She has a page that links her “best of” posts on a variety of topics but you know my favorite would be about cotton! She has a great cotton elementary section and I have really enjoyed learning about another crop with her watermelon elementary too!

From the Tractor Seat

I first met Jillian when she was a student at Auburn, she was a sweet girl from the farm who had taken her first plane ride to New Orleans for the Beltwide Cotton Conference. A few years later I met her boyfriend Jared as he thought about planting his first cotton crop. Later they began From the Tractor Seat to tell their farm’s story. You’ll see they are too cute and they are excited about agriculture too! There are a good number of posts about the farm, different things they have going on, etc. few posts they have on cotton are all good ones!

The Road Less Traveled

Georgia cotton Farmer Trevor Smith grows cotton, peanuts and watermelons and now and then, puts his thoughts on his blog The Road Less Traveled. I met him on Twitter (he’s @GAFarmer80) and love that he explained his farm saying “My wife is the watermelon expert, being the daughter of a lifelong watermelon grower. She markets all the watermelons herself, last year over 150 semi loads. We are shareholders in Osceola Cotton Co. in Ocilla, GA, and Tifton Quality Peanuts in Tifton, GA. This helps to add additional value to the crops we produce.” on his about the farm page.

The Cotton Wife

Deciding to write a blog post like this I decided I should search for “cotton farm blog” on Google and loved that I found Jennifer Warthan aka The Cotton Wife. Jennifer’s a farm wife in Virginia. The blog is primarily a photography blog — she does some wildly popular photography training sessions! Looking at the families page of her blog you can tell she does beautiful work and that cotton is sometimes a member of the family!

Cotton Content on janiceperson.com

I figured showcasing the great cotton content all these other cotton bloggers have, I thought I’d remind you I have quite a bit on here too. So if you are interested in the way I organize the cotton content here on the blog, there are a few places you can find it. I keep this Cotton 101 series photo on my sidebar so you can always find some of the posts about the basics of cotton. Some of the great folks who share my passion for cotton have written guest posts. And because I like to write cotton content so often, I have a category where all things cotton are posted. I also have a Twitter list of cotton people to follow if you are on that channel.

The post Top Cotton Blogs You Should be Following appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Hey there friends! I think for some people, I may be one of the few connections you have to cotton farming. I’d love your help as I work on a presentation about social media for the cotton industry’s major meeting — the Beltwide Cotton Conference. As I’ve been working on my presentation, I kept thinking there are some questions that you could help me answer that may help me as I tell my social media story. And if it helps me encourage others to share their cotton story, all the better!

I’m trying to make this easy for you to help me, just a few questions with drop down answers and a text box where you can say anything else that you’d like to say anything about what you’ve learned, the sources you go to, etc.

One more thing…. I’d really appreciate your helping me get a few folks to fill this out if you have a few minutes to share it.

[contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Website’ type=’url’/][contact-field label=’Your connection to cotton’ type=’select’ required=’1′ options=’I wear it,I am in the cotton business,I%26#039;m not sure I have a connection’/][contact-field label=’Have you learned anything about cotton through social media?’ type=’select’ options=’Yes,No’/][contact-field label=’If you have learned about cotton through SM%26#x002c; have you ever shared that info with others’ type=’select’ options=’Yes,No’/][contact-field label=’Has social media had a lasting impact on your perception of cotton?’ type=’select’ options=’Yes (for the better),Maybe,No’/][contact-field label=’What else would you like to say about cotton %26amp; social media?’ type=’text’/][contact-field label=’Do you like seeing photos %26amp; videos online?’ type=’select’ options=’Yes,No,maybe’/][/contact-form]

The post Poll on Cotton & Social Media (I need your help please!) appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

People frequently ask me why cotton farmers do this or that. One of the most common questions is about GMO cotton, or why they would plant a cotton variety that has been genetically modified in one way or another.

I have talked about the choice in bits and pieces, but I think this post by Suzie Wilde of I Kissed a Farmer fame does a great job of explaining her farm and the choices they make.  Rather than try to speak for her, I am just putting the first couple of paragraphs here with the recommendation you visit her blog to read the rest.

A Buggy full of Cotton

For harvest season this year, I left my office each day at noon to go run the boll buggy for the Farmer I Kiss.  So why would I go to work early to get my office work done, then drive 40 miles to the dusty, noisy, bumpy, late night job of cotton harvesting?   Because harvest season is the best time of the year.  It means we actually beat the Chihuahuan Desert and produced cotton!

The post Why would a farmer plant GMO cotton? appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This weekend I drove down to Memphis and have to admit, I really enjoyed the fact I wasn’t on a tight deadline! I did well getting on the road early and made great time, well, that is until I reached the part of Missouri that is part of the Cotton Belt. Yes, I moved a lot slower once I got to the Missouri Bootheel!

I was able to resist the urge to check the cotton crop up close for a few exits, but by the time I reached Hayti, it was clear. I HAD TO STOP. Now I could attribute this need to stop to the fact I was sure that some of my blog peeps (ie you) would like to see what the cotton and corn crops look like in the south, but really, it is also because I just wanted to see some cotton myself!

I will let the video do most of the talking….

As you can see, the cotton crop is up and it is growing well. For growth stages of cotton before it starts putting on blooms, we usually talk about the number of true leaves or fruiting branches the plants have. I saw plants that ranged from 4-6 true leaves in this field, but others were 8-12 true leaves.

Although glyphosate-resistant pigweed used to be a massive problem in this area, farmers here have made great progress in controlling the weed through a program approach and that is reducing the seed bank. The fields I saw along the highways were much cleaner than a couple of years ago.

Corn is looking good too. I saw some great looking fields but it was clear that irrigation is making a big difference this year. It has been a really weird spring. It has been drier than normal but more importantly, it has been really hot too! The combination is taking its toll on farm fields across the US and the corner of this corn field shows it.

Cotton can weather the environmental conditions a little bit better but it still needs some moisture.

What questions do you have about these crops?

The post Cotton & Corn Crop Conditions this Week – Video appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Recently my friend Daren met a West Texas cotton farmer at a meeting in Chicago and was impressed with her Facebook page where she’s taking people through a year of growing dryland cotton on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert through her Facebook page — Kissed a Farmer. What came next? Obviously he had to introduce us! Now that I’ve connected to Suzie Wilde online, I’m trying to figure out whether I’ve met her and her husband Daniel. Afterall, the cotton industry is pretty small.  The Wildes live in San Angelo (that’s in West Central Texas) and farm cotton, wheat and milo.  Daniel has been growing cotton for 40 years and comes from a long line of Texas cotton farmers.  Suzie is the daughter of a second generation cotton ginner from the southern Rolling Plains of Texas.  Here’s a bit of her story and you really should like the Kissed a Farmer Facebook page so you can follow it throughout the year. (Since I wrote this post, Suzie started a Kissed a Farmer blog telling the story of their cotton farm.)

Daniel & Suzie Wilde

If I ever write my autobiography, the first line will be, “My earliest memory is of cotton.”  My playpen was in the front room of a cotton gin office.  I knew the farmers who brought their cotton to my dad’s gin so well that I thought of all of them as my “uncles.”  I always loved the clink-clank sound made by the big black weights of the old manual scale when a trailer load of cotton pulled over the deck.  When I heard that sound, I knew one of my “uncles” was about to come in and if I was lucky, they would buy a 5 cent soft drink in a thick green glass bottle from the old red soda machine and give me the first sip.

Being the daughter of a second generation cotton ginner, and now married to a multi-generational cotton farmer, I consider the excitement of that first load of cotton as the beginning of the best time of the year, time to harvest cotton!  The local newspapers will run a little story each year of the farmer who harvests the first bale of cotton in the county, sometimes with a photo of the farmer and ginner standing with the actual bale of cotton.

Daniel & the Planter

Somewhere in my old photo albums are a couple of those yellowing newspaper clippings of my smiling dad standing beside one of his smiling customers with that coveted first bale of the year.  The black and white photos from back in the 50’s and 60’s of proud, smiling farmers and ginners with their first bales line the wall of a steakhouse that now occupies the hull of an old cotton gin not far from here.  I stop there every chance I get just to reminisce.

I love to ride along with my husband and watch the basket of the cotton harvester fill up with that beautiful, fluffy white fiber for the first time each year.  We may not have the first bale in the county, but the smiles in our field are just as big as the ones in those old black and white photos when our first basket gets full.

My seasons are not marked by a calendar, but by watching all the different colors that paint across the fields of cotton throughout the year.  Bright crayon green as it peeks up out of the ground in the spring.  Soft butter yellow flowers that turn baby girl pink, then just briefly a gem stone purple before falling off as it produces the boll in the summer.  Deep olive green and rusty red leaves as fall approaches.  Crispy brown and bridal gown white as the bolls pop open to dry in the sunshine, waiting for the best time of the year, time to harvest cotton.  I have been wrapped in the the fabric of our lives quite literally my entire life, and what a beautiful, colorful life it is.

Daniel in the cotton harvester aka a cotton stripper, pickers are used in most other cotton production areas. 

Daniel in a cotton field

You can read more stories of people sharing how cotton is the fabric of their life or read about how cotton is produced by checking out some of the other things on the blog.

The post A Colorful Life of Cotton Memories on a Texas Farm appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

aka Vocabulary the Way I’ve Heard Cotton Farmers & Other Experts Use It & How It Can Be Misunderstood

If the title and subhead don’t point out this is not an academic endeavor, then let me say it outright. THIS IS NO ACADEMIC DICTIONARY ON COTTON. This is just a simple compilation of words that we use in cotton that may make other people not in the industry shrug their shoulders and say huh? Would appreciate additions, clarifications and questions all!

Bollbuster

• What it isn’t — This was the most fun to use when I was in New York in my awesome Italian community. Depending on the accent, you could easily make it sound like ballbuster which was used a good bit of the time to refer to someone giving a guy a real hard time.
• What it is –There are crop protection products that you can use to help get the bolls on the plant that are designed to help the boll drydown and open more quickly. A real cool snap of weather can have a similar impact on a crop that has bolls drying down. There is a single harvest aid product that has this name but the reality is the slang use is the way I have always heard it.

Burr (pronouced brrrr)

Canopy

• What it isn’t –It is not the sort of tent you put up so you can relax outside for a few beers.
• What it is — It is the shading of the dirt between plants when the plants grow big enough to shade out the dirt underneath them. This is really important because that cuts the sunlight off from weeds & grasses that may want to grow…. of course if the weeds have already gotten above the crop, then they will get lots of photosynthetic energy and will keep growing.

Cut-out

• What it isn’t — I know lots of you think scissors and coupons or paper dolls with the word cut-out, that’s rarely the image I have of cotton farmers though. And if you get caught cutting up in school you are in trouble. Neither of those apply.
• What it is — In cotton, cut-out is a growth stage in the crop. And it really refers to what happens when the crop stops putting on new leaves, branches, bolls, etc. Because cotton varieties can be either determinate or indeterminate as well as range in maturities, cut-out can vary. But when your crop cuts out, you know that all the yield potential you have is already in the field. Farmers don’t want the crop to cut out until they have a good boll load, but mid season stress, particularly drought can lead to premature cut-out with small plants and very few bolls.

Fair to middlin’

• What it isn’t — Just a saying on how your day is going.
• What it is — Fair to middling was part of the grading system before it became a numerical system. The word based system included a spectrum including poor, fair, middling, good and excellent meaning

Fallout

• What it isn’t — A laughing fit that is so hard you can’t stand up!
• What it is — At harvest when cotton lint gets blown off the plant or otherwise comes off the plant. It results in farmers getting fewer pounds per acre.

Fruit

• What it isn’t — A kind of alcohol that you serve with tonic & a twist of lemon!
• What it is — A facility that separates the seed from the lint so we can turn the lint into thread & fabric as well as use seed for oil & livestock feed. You can see how a gin works in this post.

High Cotton (aka Tall Cotton in some areas)

• What it isn’t — Not just the lyrics of an Alabama song.
• What it is — A saying that speaks to a really good part of life. I even wrote a whole post on this one! High Cotton blog post

Layby

• What it isn’t — this term makes you think of a mom taking a nap alongside a newborn baby… Please do not think cotton farmers are in the habit of taking a nap between the rows if you hear this term.
• What it is — Instead, this is talking about the timing of the last weed control activity. Farmers have to keep an eye on weeds until the crop canopies over the rows. (see above for detail). At this time cotton farmers can take a bit of break on weed control which is great cause they have lots of other this to think about with the crop (insects, fruit retention, disease, etc)

Mike/Mic

• What it isn’t — Not a guy who goes by the common nickname for folks named Michael.
• What it is — A measure of fiber quality that is largely related to maturity of the fiber. My favorite way of explaining mic (short for micronaire) is to visualize cotton lint as an artery or vein because cotton puts on an external cylinder wall with very fine walls. As the fiber matures, the walls strengthen — kind of like really high cholesterol levels can do to our circulatory system. The property is measured by having a known force of air pressed over the lint. Resistance is measured so immature fiber will collapse and provide the most resistance, whereas air will pass over perfectly round ones. Mic is important as textile manufacturers look at dyeing and weaving.

Picker

• What it isn’t — Guitarists rock my world routinely and I know a couple of cotton farmers who may have musical streaks, but pickers aren’t people in the US any more except in rare research cases where people harvest individual bolls, plants, etc.
• What it is — Enormous pieces of highly complex machinery now harvest cotton crops in the US, Australia and Brazil. Pickers pull lint off the cotton plant and prep it for storage or may even take care of creating the on-board module. There are some photos and posts on the Cotton 101 page.

Square

• What it isn’t — I know that there was a time when a person would be called square, much like a nerd. Farmers and the plants they grow are rockin’, no way they could be mistaken for square. And a pinhead-square would have to be a lowblow!
• What it is — When the plant goes into fruiting mode (starts putting on blooms/flowers), the buds are very small and some folks think that the earliest part of the bud looks squared a bit cause there are generally four sides. Because the square is so small, it can be especially vulnerable to damage by insects so scouts tend to check them to make sure nothing is going to get in the way. Pinhead by the way refers to the size of the square/bud!

Stringout

Stripper

• What it isn’t — A scantilly clad woman dancing with a pole.
• What it is — A piece of harvesting equipment that is sometimes used in the High Plains of Texas. Unlike pickers, strippers pull a good bit of the plant matter into the machine when harvesting. The machine is not as complex and consequently not as expensive, but the tradeoff is found in fiber quality quite often as extra cleaning at the gin can result in reduced fiber quality.

Turnout

• What it isn’t — the folks who come for a party, a misheard lyric from DJ Snake & Lil John (Turn Down for What)
• What it is — A ratio of seed to lint that comes from the gin. Since lint is the piece that offers the greatest profit potential, farmers like to get a higher percentage of lint than seed.

The post A Working Cotton Dictionary (Words Cotton Folks Use that May Confuse Others) appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Going local has been the buzz in food for a while. And as someone who loves going out to nearby farms and picking my own fruit or to spend a Saturday morning at the farmer’s market, I find myself buying more local food too. But with clothing? Its a lot different than the food discussion. People are wanting less processed foods, they want it in the state it comes off the plant & they’d like to eat it ASAP (which is CRITICAL with some foods like sweet corn if you ask me), but cotton isn’t in a ready to consume state (unless you want to hand gin it, do all the combing, spinning, dyeing, weaving, etc and I’ve met a few people who do that to come up with incredible textiles but the time that takes & the costs if not for yourself is truly amazing).

The US textile business used to have us a fairly local business with small textile mills in many, perhaps even most of the states where cotton is grown. But in the past 15 years, international competition (particularly from China) and consumers desire to buy nearly disposably cheap clothes has put most of the US textile industry out of business or at least encouraged them to relocate to areas of the world where they could produce on an economic scale that makes them competitive at the cash register.

But there are a few people in the Cotton Belt who are looking to change how we look at clothes and a recent article from CNN tells us about a concept under development in North Carolina. And the return of acres to cotton from grain may just provide additional fiber that can be used locally. An excerpt of the article follows:

One company hoping to take advantage of this abundance of cotton is TS Designs, a small T-shirt printing company in Burlington. In manufacturing quality T-shirts within the state, TS Designs aims to preserve environmental resources and restore part of the crippled North Carolina textile industry in the process.

Regional farmers and manufacturers have banded together to form Cotton of the Carolinas, a collaboration aimed at promoting the use of locally grown cotton.

“The genesis of Cotton of the Carolinas was this idea that the growing of cotton here in the United States and then exporting that to far-ranging regions of the world, in the long run, just didn’t make sense,” says Sam Moore, an adviser to TS Designs.

Moore, along with friend and TS Designs President Eric Henry, made the decision to manufacture T-shirts from cotton grown, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed and dyed all within the state’s borders.

“The transportation distance of a conventional T-shirt that you buy in a big box store can vary drastically. If China is involved, then you’re talking, as the crow flies, at least 17,000 miles,” says Eric Michel, the company’s vice president of operations.

“Our shirts go from dirt to shirt in less than 700 miles. That’s actually including roads and not as the bird flies.”

TS Designs has three main objectives for Cotton of the Carolinas: to reduce the transportation footprint, to support jobs in North Carolina and to have a transparent supply chain. “We can build an entire supply chain here in North Carolina,” Michel says.

TS Design’s first step in achieving these goals was to call Ronnie Burleson. (HundredPercentCotton note — photo above is from a subsequent visit to Ronnie’s farm.)

“They wanted to convince us that this was a good thing and (that we should) be a part of it. I said, ‘Sure,’ ” Burleson recalls. “If I can support my neighbor and they can support me, then I think that’s a good thing for all of us.”

via Locally grown clothes go from ‘dirt to shirt’ – CNN.com.

Would you be willing to look at the tags & consider something you knew came from dirt to shirt right here in the US or even better, from a group of farmers right down the road? What if they cost more?

The post A New Way to Think about Going Local — Dirt to Shirt appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

This is one of the posts in the Cotton 101 series to introduce people to the basics of cotton farming. 

Cotton is a warm weather plant and doesn’t like wet feet at all.  That simple sentences guides a lot of planting thoughts for the crop. Like all crops, at planting you want to be sure you have the depth set correctly for the soil type, etc.

Raised Beds for Planting — Depending on the soil types and typical moisture availability, some people will “bed up.” By creating raised beds a farmer can help channel water where they want it. My first cotton farm visit was to Mr. Ray Young’s in Wisner, La.  I was there in the winter and the fields were perfectly in rows for the stale seedbed planting to come. He helped pioneer this version of conservation tillage as the beds would help him keep the seed in moisture but not too wet.

A couple of years later I made my first visit to a farm in West Texas where they bedded up in order to plant between the raised beds. That way water could reach the seed in that truly dryland area. And in lots of places they plant to a level field. Different strokes for different folks or conditions.

Temperatures — A general guideline for planting from a temperature perspective is to wait for 65 degree soil temps at 8 am at a depth of 4-6 inches. You want to get that same temp for a few days and have favorable weather conditions (air temperature and sunlight), as well as consider the moisture, soil texture and ground cover.

One of the considerations that distinguishes cotton from some of the other major Southern crops like rice and soybeans is row spacing. Cotton is planted on rather wide rows (most farmers I know use 38-inch rows or something similar). With the humidity that plaques so many areas of the Cotton Belt, that wide spacing allows a bit more air to get through the crop and lessens the likelihood of late season issues with boll rot. Of course, this can give farmers a tough time as it takes longer for the crop to canopy and the increased spacing allows for more sunlight to get through encouraging weeds later into the season.

Consistency of row spacings is important since equipment rolls through the field for insect or weed control as well as harvest. And unlike a combine a cotton picker leaves the majority of the plant standing in the field so if the spacings aren’t consistent, you can really big problems at harvest.

The post Cotton 101: Cotton Planting Considerations appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Today’s post is written by Billy Brozovich, a student at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). He had a project to write a story for three year olds and he decided to make cotton farming a central part of the story. I have met Billy a few times — usually as he stopped by his dad’s office since his dad was my chiropractor and his parents are really close friends to friends of mine.

Anyway, parental pride and a friend’s knowledge of my routine writing about cotton meant an email got to me! Thanks Billy for letting me share it with some more folks! ! I hope you get an awesome grade on the project!  And I hope we continue to find stories like these, with many in books that we can share with our children (or nieces and nephews ) about farming!

There once was a little boy named Eric who lived in Greenville, Ms.  Eric’s Daddy has lived in the Mississippi Delta all his life where he learned how to farm.

Eric was three years old when his Daddy took him on his first cotton picker ride through the white cotton field.  Eric had a really fun time riding that cotton picker with his Daddy.

Eric watched his Daddy drive the cotton picker during the harvest seasons every year.  Eric could not wait to be able to drive the cotton picker by himself.  Eric asked, “Daddy, when do I get to drive the cotton picker?”  His Daddy answered, “Son, if you watch me closely and learn how I drive it then you I will let you drive it one day.”

Two years passed and Eric turned five years old.  Eric still loved going to work with his Daddy and playing in the cotton field.  His Daddy had gotten him a toy cotton picker to practice with.  Eric asked, “Daddy, if I practice on this toy cotton picker can I drive the big cotton picker?”

Daddy answered, “I will let you be my co-pilot and sit in my lap and help me steer the big cotton picker next year if you practice hard.”  Eric practiced every day and could not wait for that next year to help his Daddy pick that cotton.

The next year came and Eric could not sleep.  He was so excited about helping his Daddy pick cotton for the first time ever.  After five years of watching his Daddy and learning exactly how to steer Eric was ready!!!

Eric loved the farm, cotton was his favorite crop.  Five years passed so he now is 11 years old.  His Daddy asked, “Eric what do you want to do when you get older?”  Eric responded happily, “Dad, my dream is to be just like you and to be a farmer.”

A few harvest seasons past and the big season came soon.  “Daddy, can I drive my own cotton picker yet?” asked Eric.  His Daddy responded, “Actually Eric, since you are 15 years old and you have watched and learned from me and have done all the things I have asked you to do, today I will let you start driving your own cotton picker!!”  He cranked that cotton picker up and started picking cotton all by himself.

One day Eric’s Daddy told him they will own the farm together.  Eric was so excited and asked, “When?”  His Daddy told him he could own half after he graduated from high school and college.

So, of course, Eric studied extremely hard in school so he could own that farm one day with his Daddy.  He made very good grades.  Eric graduated college and got half of the farm.  Eric is now 23 years old, driving his own cotton picker and picking his own cotton.

Eric owns half of the farm with the person he loves the most, his Daddy.  Eric says, “Daddy, I love you so much and I learned everything from you and guess what Daddy, my dream came true, I’m just like YOU!!!”

The post A Cotton Pickin’ Story for Toddlers appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Following is a guest post by my niece Alicia who’s currently working on her masters in education at the University of Memphis (she’s the fourth generation of women in my family to go there!).  I’ve been lucky enough to have her living with me — we both seem to be enjoying it! I so appreciate her willingness to share what she learned her first time out on a working farm on this scale.

First I want to say that writing this blog is a little out of my comfort zone, but it was a lot of fun being in the field and I figured I would share what I learned for the rest of the people out there who know little about cotton farming, as I do.

With that disclaimer, let me start my blog post.

I recently had my first experience on a real farm that wasn’t there for tourists.  Janice has worked in cotton since before I can remember and I have always been told how important it and other natural fibers are to our lives.  I went with her to a friend’s farm to see how cotton was picked.  Being from a small town in the South, I am used to fields of crops and farm equipment, however, cotton is not grown near my hometown in North Carolina.  It was quite different from what I am used to seeing.  This was the first time I’ve been in a cotton field and been able to look at the bolls up close.

Being in the field of cotton brought up some thoughts about how things are made.  I wear cotton almost everyday, but rarely think about how it comes from a plant.  It’s strange to think that a seed is what started the beginning of my favorite t-shirt but I digress.

We got up Saturday and got a late breakfast on the long (for Memphis) drive out to the farm.  When we got there, there were two pickers in the field along with a boll buggy, module maker, and a shredder.  Before that day I would not have been able to tell you what any of these looked like much less how they worked.  I’m not saying I’m an expert on them now, but I do understand the basics. 

The pickers were two different models, one that built modules on board and one that doesn’t, hence the need for the boll buggy and module maker.  We spent a long time watching the machines work in the field, while trying to stay out of their way.  My favorite time was when the two pickers were facing each other and it seemed like they were dueling, of course they weren’t they were figuring out the rest of the field since they were now working in the same area.  Janice’s friend Bob wasn’t in the field when we got there, but showed up a little later with lunch for the all the guys who were working.

After the guys filled up on fried chicken I got in the picker that makes its own modules with Tim (there is actually a “buddy” seat for riders).  This was by far the biggest vehicle/machine I had ever been on besides a plane.  Tim and I headed through the fields of already picked and cut cotton to cross the street and head to a new field.  It was quite bumpy riding in the picker. 

As we were crossing the fields I was noticing the different computers and technology inside.  This was something that I had never really thought about when seeing tractors and other machines in fields.  There were many conveniences inside along with the high tech gear.  One screen shows the exact location of the field as well as other information to keep track of the cotton.  There is one to show the images off the three different cameras on the machine and another to show how full the module is.

When we started picking in the other field, I learned about some of the differences between the two types of pickers. Who would have thought that the turning radius would be so different on two such similar machines, not me?  I know this because when there was just our picker in the field we weren’t skipping any rows in between like before lunch when there were two in the same field.  I was in the picker for about an hour and picked one module full of cotton, well Tim picked it, I just watched.  However, it didn’t seem like that much time had passed as it was fascinating to watch the cotton get pulled in by the six pickers on the front right below my feet.  It was also interesting because the plants themselves are left standing after going through hundreds of steel teeth.

After just a few hours on a farm I learned a lot about how things work.  Many things that are used everyday by me and my friends start in a field, which is strange to think about.  I have a greater appreciation to those that work out in the field everyday in order for people like me to have nice things than I had before.  I learned a bunch of stuff on the farm, and know that there will be more lessons coming to me from an ag standpoint while living with Janice.

If you have a chance to experience something like this I strongly encourage you to do so.  I had a lot of fun and have a great story to share with my future students.

As I mentioned in my blog post Friday, we are starting a series of Cotton 101 posts and I got energized to create a logo to provide a link to all of them as they come out.

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