Tonight I was asked to answer a question about cotton on Quora and I decided to go ahead and post my reply here on the blog too since I had already taken the time to write it all up.   The question was “How is cotton picked nowadays?” The answer I gave them follows with a few minor modifications.

There are a few ways that cotton is currently harvested.

In the US the two predominant ways to harvest cotton on farms is either using 1) mechanical cotton pickers or 2) using a mechanical cotton stripper. A cotton picker pulling the lint from the plants bracts that hold it on and leaves the rest of the plant as is. This is what is used in the Southeast, Mid-South and Far West (CA & AZ). Some areas of Texas and Oklahoma use pickers but on the High Plains (Lubbock & Amarillo, Texas are two of the bigger cities in that area) cotton strippers are commonly used. Strippers pull more of the plant into the equipment which means there will be additional cleaning or ginning needed. Its interesting to note that within the cotton picker segment there are some differences in machinery and labor requirements. The latest state of the art pickers include the ability to compact cotton on-board, pressing it into a module as it rolls through the field. These pickers can pick six rows of cotton at a time and are rapidly becoming the market standard in the US as they eliminate the need to a separate module builder and other equipment and people to run those. Most of the more developed or advanced agricultural systems in cotton producing nations use pickers so its similar in Australia and Brazil.

There are a few photos & videos of cotton harvest on my blog if you’d like to take a look.

• a bit of recollection from a friend who drove a one row cotton picker in the 1970s as well as a video of one of the new on-board moduling pickers that produces rectangular modules.
• another current day picker running through the field and shows you what the round modules look like.
• shows you what I mean by moduling that’s needed with pickers that do not have the on-board moduling system and shows how those modules are transported.

Hand-harvesting is still the standard in many other countries and you can see that done in many areas of Turkey, India, China, Africa, etc. In these places, the people who harvest are still picking cotton the way it was done in the US many decades ago. Usually people are paid per pound or kilo of cotton harvested. Cotton in these countries may be brought to the gin in trucks, still in bags or in wagons pulled by tractors. (The photo at right is from a trip I took to Turkey and ended up visiting farms during my vacation.)

I can also tell you that I have picked cotton in the very recent past here in the US but that was part of research efforts where researchers pick individual plants or even selected bolls for testing and breeding purposes.

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I have a lot of posts in a Cotton 101 series as well as even more tagged as cotton. Feel free to add topics to my blogging list! I sometimes wonder what others would like to know about my favorite fiber crop!

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I thought I may pull up some things from international agriculture experiences I’ve had. It’s a bit of a change of pace so I guess we’ll see whether folks like this one before I do a bunch more.

One of my passions is travel and another is agriculture, cotton in particular, so it should be no surprise to find out that when I took a vacation to Turkey, a country that is famous for both the crop and textiles, that the two would come together. And while the vast majority of my days were spent sightseeing and relaxing (Celsius library, waterfalls, beaches, etc.), I also planned to visit a textile mill and a few cotton fields.

The first few days were all tourist… other than to see cotton friends in Izmir and seeing a few fields as we passed at highway speeds since my travel mate wasn’t an avid photographer or willing to indulge all my stopping requests. Those tourist stops included an incredible visit to Ephesus, yes the place known Biblically for the Ephesians who lived there as well as the home where Mary, the mother of Jesus, reportedly spent her later years. Shortly after my trip the Pope went to the same places, yes, THE POPE.

The first “cotton” stop was only a couple of days into the trip as we drove from Izmir on the Aegean Sea to Fethiye and the area that opened up into the Mediterranean, we stopped at a place called Pamukkale. “Pamuk” is the Turkish word for cotton and this place was given the name because the hot springs had turned much of the area as white as premium grade lint. But it wasn’t really the crop, it was calcium deposits.

As the days went along, we worked our way to Antalya and while there, a customer called the friend I was traveling with and asked if he could come by and look at something. We had a great visit with him, his niece and the proprietor at the local cafe. But I think a visit to a farm a few days later left a bigger impressions.

This family farm — a father, his son & daughter — seemed like so many I had been to in the US from the discussion. Topics included how to cover more land to be more efficient, selecting the crops and varieties that would best produce, what to do with such a dry summer, etc. The topic that was unique was how they had decided to be among the first to machine harvest cotton. The daughter was pivotal in some of these key decisions, reminding me of a few US farm families I know.

I’ve got to find a chance to go back there! Great people, great food and great cotton products… who could ask for more?  Oh yeah, great beaches — they have that too!

Have you ever been to Turkey?

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