I love seeing a cotton field near harvest time and I’m afraid this may be the last set of photos I get to capture this year during picking time. Late in the afternoon and into the early evening there is a kind of light that grabs my attention and makes me hit the brakes no matter what I should be doing. I hope you enjoy the photos and that you get a moment’s wonder thinking this is where your favorite jeans, hoodie or concert shirt got it’s start.

I should have gotten photos taken when someone else was around or I should have put a tri-pod in the car because balance the camera on my car, on a jacket didn’t give me too many options for a self-portrait. And the wind was pretty strong and cool (especially without the jacket!). Add to that the drought kept this crop pretty short and well, I love cotton far more than I love the results of my self-portrait exercise. This one is ok even if I’m not smiling.

Related articles

• Cotton Plant 101: What do a cotton plant, blooms & bolls look like? VIDEO
• Cotton 101 Video: Impacts of Rain on Cotton During #Harvest12
• Area cotton farmers talk about this year’s crop

The post Cotton – Maybe My Last Photos of a Harvest Ready Field in 2012 (Day 6) appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Saturday I was driving down Interstate 55 toward Memphis to visit family. I wasn’t in a real rush so I decided to hop off the highway and shoot a few quick tutorial videos that I could put here on the blog. Got those cranked out and thought it would be a straight shot into Memphis. Well, that was until I saw a few cotton pickers running.

Yep, you guessed it. My car quickly slowed from the 70 mph speed limit to being parked! I was just lucky that the pickers were right alongside an area the state of Arkansas provides for truckers to pull off for a bit.

So, I saw a picker getting ready to dump its load into a module builder (that’s a big machine that compacts LOTS of cotton for transport to the gin). And I hurried pointing my iPhone toward the tree line where they had set up shop. And the old John Deere picker,  pulled up. Its basket raised and began to tilt toward the module builder (and me) and then the white fluffy stuff began to fall!

IT WAS THRILLING! Of course for me its thrilling every year to see cotton pickers rolling.

The guys working in the field noticed I had my phone pointed their way. Finally one walked away from the equipment and yelled to me. He wondered if I wanted to come closer. See it close up. I had to admit to myself I REALLY did BUT I had on shorts and some cute little sandals (no match for that mass of weeds, thorns, etc between me and the field.

I pulled to the area where there was a chance I could reach the fence. There I explained to the guy I wasn’t a city clicker who had never seen cotton harvest. Nope, I was part of the cotton industry. I just hadn’t seen pickers rolling yet in 2012 and the rush gets me EVERYTIME! He said he understood.

I gave him the card for my blog. (Betting he’s never met anyone who blogs about cotton on the weekend!) He gave me a few of the particulars knowing I was likely to understand:

• This was the first field they were picking.
• The field was a dryland one so it wasn’t yielding as much as it usually did.
• There were irrigated fields nearby that look okay and are in the process of getting prepared for harvest.
• The farm tends to use a lot of Deltapine cotton varieties which made me smile big time since I started working there a really long time ago.

The farm had several pickers all working the same field — both red and green. These pickers are a bit older as the latest ones have an on-board moduling system. If you want to check out harvest with those cotton pickers, the two big manufacturers have some important differences so check this post on the John Deere module baling picker and the Case on-board moduling picker.

Have you ever seen cotton harvest underway?

• If so, what do you remember most clearly about it?
• If not, any chance you have any questions about it?

The post Cotton 101: Cotton Pickin’ Happy Sight to See! VIDEO appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.

Farmers have several choices on how to compact their crop (full size modules, smaller modules or round modules). All of them are made so cotton, once picked, can be temporarily stored and transported to the gin.

Those modules are tagged in the field to identify what farm & field it came from. You frequently see them tagged with a special kind of spray paint but there are also physical paper tags placed on the module that begin identifying that cotton.

Module weights vary widely based on the equipment producing them.

• The round modules from the on-board baling module picker by John Deere weigh from 4,500 to 5,000 pounds.
• Modules from the on-board moduling picker by CaseIH (small rectangular modules) are 4,000 to 12,000 pounds. (They are 16 foot long.)
• The full size modules are 32 foot long and can be twice as big as the case on-board.

But all modules are transported by the same style truck which looks incredibly light empty as the cargo cover is relatively lightweight as it transports relatively short distances and only needs protect against wind and rain.

There is a creeping floor on the truck and its bed tilts to make loading and unloading easy.

A cotton gin can process a variety of modules, and you can see various sorts on most. They are typically lined up & organized by the same inventory tagging placed on them in the field. With all the module covers and wrapping to protect them from rain, a gin yard gets to be a really colorful place.

I had someone ask me why gins rush to get the modules in the yard, because they obviously get more in than they can keep up with. Well my thoughts are there are a couple of reasons. First, they need to have enough there to keep the gin running 24/7 for the season. And another is in this part of the world, you never know when the weather will change and make it harder to get in and out of some fields. Next up in the series — ginning!

This is another one of the posts in the cotton 101 series running on the blog. The others include:

• Starting a Cotton 101 Series on the Blog
• A Country Girl’s First Farm Visit
• First Field Basics of the Boll
• How Harvest has Changed in a Lifetime
• After Harvest Comes Moduling
• How a Cotton Gin Works

The post Cotton 101: Getting Cotton to the Gin 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.

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.

The post Cotton 101: A Country Girl’s First Farm Visit appeared first on Hundred Percent Cotton.