In my Cotton 101 series, I wrote a blog post about getting modules from the field to the gin. I love seeing them so I was thrilled when Anna-Lisa Giannini told me trucks were still on the move in her part of the Texas Panhandle. There are a few things that a cotton geek like me notices:

• Look at the horizon. I love it! Not a tree nor hill to be seen. That’s so similar to the the Plains area I called home for my college years! (Enid, Oklahoma for those who don’t know. And Enid really is fairly close to where this was taken.)
• I love that you clearly can see that the truck is bound for the Adobe Walls Gin. It even gives the gin’s phone number on the module cover! So easy to find out the gin is in Spearman, Texas which is incredibly close to the Oklahoma state line. Cotton has grown in this northern High Plains area over the last few years as better adapted varieties have been introduced.
• The farm has labeled it as 555 which is either the farm ID number or the module. Not sure but I love seeing the number as it brings to mind it is most likely not the variety — cause “triple nickel” was adapted for full-season areas and wouldn’t do too well in an area with such a short summer.
• It LOOKS like Anna-Lisa took the photo when stopped to cross Highway 136.

I love that I got a new Friend’s Photo to feature so soon after I started the series! Never would have guessed it! But I have a few others sent recently that I want to share in the near future too.

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Okay. Gin Trash. The two words together… gin trash… the number of jokes that you can come up with based on those two simple words… Its unbelievable! BUT this is a Cotton 101 series so I better get back on track.

But let me start by saying the fact that we call it “gin trash” in no way reflects it has the properties of other trash. It’s very much an eco-friendly product of plant parts. And a number of researchers have looked into the potential uses of gin trash.

Some of the uses I have heard discussed are mulch/fertilizer, livestock food or building material but a friend of mine recently told me that it was also being used as part of the land forming efforts he had to repair some areas of a field.

So some folks are making one ginner’s trash another man’s treasure I guess.

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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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