Appreciate Marshall Sigsby giving me & another cotton tweep down our way — Jeremy Bullington from the University of Arkansas Extension Service a couple of harvest time shout outs. Seems like years ago we finished harvest — in record time I am happy to say!

The photo below is of photo below is a beautiful field near Rector, Arkansas. You can see yields were pretty good — just look how white the field looks where the picker is versus the part of the field to the left where the picker has already harvested the lint! I linked the photo directly to its original online post — by going there you can also see other photos Marshall’s posted.

For additional insight into cotton harvest, I have a post that shows the on-board baling moduler at work and others on the topic of cotton harvest in my Cotton 101 series.

The post Arkansas Cotton Harvest October 2010 — Friend’s Photo from Marshall Sigsby appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

One of the folks I met through the National Agri-Marketing Association, Robert Ratliff, recently help me connect the dots.

Robert grew up on a cotton farm and had posted the photo to the left on his Facebook page.  The caption on it pointed to a different machine that he used to pick cotton old school. He explained he “remembers ‘Second Picking’ of the cotton crop in November 1970 when he operated a John Deere, Model 22L, one-row cotton picker.

“It was mounted on a John Deere 3010 tractor, which traveled in reverse when carrying the attached cotton picker. Note the lack of cotton on the stalks in the photo. This is the second harvest of the crop after 95% was harvested on the ‘First Picking.’ Late opening bolls were harvested on the ‘Second Picking,’ also called ‘Scrapping.’  This field appears not to have enough cotton remaining to justify the cost of diesel fuel. this one-row cotton picker harvested more than the Ratliff cotton crop. We also harvested some of our neighbor’s cotton for a custom fee of two cents per pound, which financed my first year of college in 1971.” 

Today’s cotton pickers are a bit different to say the least.

The ones we watch in a field now are picking up to six rows and they are able to move much faster than those.  And they have been refined so they pick cleaner. It also helps that knowledge of the crop’s physiology has advanced and farmers know a lot more about timing harvest so scrapping is very rare. But I’ll talk more about timing harvest maybe another day. Today there is video of cotton pickers at work! For those of you who don’t know much about cotton, what questions do you have? For those who do know cotton, what am I missing?

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fopTclcOkjQ]

This is part of my Cotton 101 series. I hope you enjoy what’s already here & come back to see more! You can subscribe to my blog above right.

The post Cotton 101: How Harvest has Changed in a Lifetime appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Last Sunday as I drove home from a few days fun in St. Louis, I decided to go the road less traveled to see if I could find anyone picking cotton. I pulled off I-55 in Sikeston somewhat tempting the fates.

I chose Sikeston though because it’s one of the northern most areas where cotton is grown and I thought by pulling off there in favor of state highways, I’d have the biggest opportunity to see some cotton harvest underway. I hadn’t gone very far when I saw a familiar sight – a cotton gin that I’d visited with friends a few years ago. After a quick check-in with the office, not only did I have the green light to take photos in the gin yard, but I had directions to a nearby farm where they were harvesting.

Below are photos and a few points for anyone reading this who may not have seen cotton harvest or the new on-board baler/module maker that I saw.  (You may have already seen a photo I twitpic’ed from my BlackBerry last weekend as my friend Tara posted it.) I’ll put a few photos here and several more are in the slide show at the end.

Beautiful fields of Cotton Ready for Harvest

Big fields with lots of pretty white bolls! Lots of them too!

Cotton Picking

Cotton pickers pull the plant into the spindles which pull the lint & seed into the machine while the majority of the plant remains in the field. This farm (owned by brothers Wayne & Wade Parker so I was told) uses the new John Deere picker that picks six rows at a time & compacts the cotton into round bales for transfer to the gin.

Moving Cotton Module Bales for Ginning Access

A tractor driver was trying to keep up with the two pickers dropping bale/modules. He would pick the module up and move it to the turnrow so the gin could pick up several at a time in a module truck.

The post Cotton Picker & Harvest in Action! Photo Essay appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.