Today, we took my daughter, my uncle & aunt from North Carolina and my sister-in-law from San Antonio out to the wife's family's farm. We watched them strip cotton & build cotton modules. We like to take pictures of my daughter out there & label them "Cotton Heiress". She likes it out there, because there's plenty of dirt to play in & insects to observe. My brother-in-law let her run the gears of the module builder a little bit. [/img] [/img] Here is my nephew driving the cotton stripper and dumping the cotton into the boll buggy. The boll buggy follows the stripper and receives the cotton bolls, then takes them to the module builder. [/img] [/img] Here's my daughter riding in the tractor with the farmer (who farms the land for my wife's family) and pulling the boll buggy. Here is the empty module builder, followed by the boll buggy dumping the cotton into it. You can then see the module builder filling up with cotton. (It takes 5 dumps of the boll buggy to make enough cotton to make a module). The device on top runs back & forth across the top of the module builder & smashes the cotton down. When done, it makes a big module like the one you see here. It is about 10 feet tall. [/img] [/img] [/img] The modules will be covered with a tarp on top and tied down. Later, a big truck from the cotton gin will come out and envelope the module, pull it into the truck & haul it to the gin for ginning. And this is the beginning of your blue jeans & nice shirts!
Thanks for the piccies WT, not only of your daughter, but of the cotton picking process. You really DO learn something new almost every day here at GardenStew.
Wow, these are great pict. while we harvest corn,wheat, and bales of straw, ya'll are harvesting cotton. This has helped me see how cotton is harvested, because I had no idea how it was done. Thanks for sharing.
DO they spray there? They spray way too much here, I hate the defoilation, I hate boll weevil spraying. Everyone who has picked here has their cotton popping back up from the rain we got last week. Anyone out that way using the new grain bags?
defoliation Everybody defoliates with chemicals here - the freezes come too late to do it naturally, because it makes the cotton start falling out of the bolls to wait too long & it gets dirty & messed up & down-graded. Due to the expense of growing it in the first place, these days, they have to have an average crop just to break even. If the WTO gets the U.S. to stop assisting cotton farmers, we won't be growing much cotton here. They also have nearly eradicated the boll weevil up here. The Winters used to do that naturally, but they haven't been cold enough for long enough in years to wipe them out, so they were over-Wintering here. After defoliation, they usually come back over it with a chemical to cause the bolls to open. I understand the use of defoliants, but it used to drift at my old house & I'd swear my Virginia creepers would all drop their leaves way before time. But in West Texas (South Plains area anyway), the leaves tend to stay on the trees en masse until the first hard freeze. Then, they all turn brown & fall off all at once. And when our weather changes, it always comes with large amounts of wind, so the leaves really come off then! I hate cleaning that mess up!
How interesting to read about and see how it is done. Thank you for spending so much time sharing this, WTxDaddy.
This is very interesting and educational. Pics are great. It is a far cry from the stories my mother told of being a young (5-6) girl in east TX, having to pick cotton. She was one of nine children and said other than the fact there was no TV , that is one reason families use to have so many kids. To work their little butts off!! CPS would have had a 'hay' day with large families in the early 1900's :!:
I have massive respect for the farmers. Thank you for sharing your pics. When i lived in America i worked for the USDA, in the cotton division as a tech. keeping the grading machines running properly. So I had an idea of what all goes into the harvest. but when the gins would send over just a slice of a bail,, the shear size of it is amazing, an it just makes you wonder what all the farmer had to do to get that big of a slice, an it wasn't even the whole bail!!! I know its all machine work now,, but someone has to do,,, my hats off to you, and thank you for the pics. ohh yeah have you had your daughter make cotton angels out of the cotton balls,, great fun for kids an they can use them for decorating.
cotton boll angels We have bought some cotton boll angels at craft stores, but have never made them. I imagine we might do that some day. A friend showed us how tomake Hollyhock dolls this Summer, but we haven't tried it yet. Turn the bloom upside down & you have a hoop-skirt. Then put a little wooden ball on top for a head. I don't think these would last too long though. The "cotton picking" process comment made me laugh, eileen. In the Southern United States, the term "cotton-picking" is often used in a derogatory manner. Such as, when a child starts messing with something the child should not, Southern parents often say, "Get your cotton-pickin' hands off that!" I think it's an old term and is meant to refer to the manual labor done by slaves and sharecroppers a long time ago.
I have lived the life of a cotton picker and cotton puller as a share cropper's daughter.It wasn't a bit of fun.It the big machinery as you showed pictures of WTDaddy had be available back then it would have made life a lot easier on everyone concerned.Those boils hurt your fingers so bad. I wasn't sure of the process of today and how they worked.Thanks for the great pictures and your daughter seems to enoy all the cotton so much.
cotton My wife & her siblings had to hoe cotton when they were kids. Back in the 1960's they were picking it by hand too! mechanization changed a lot of stuff. It's ore expensive, but less wear & tear on the body. Cotton burrs will cut your fingers pretty badly! People still hoe cotton (actually, their using the hoe on the weeds in the cotton field) out in the hot, hot sun. Most are migrant workers, it seems these days. My dad is a doctor, so we did not grow up farming, but my folks grew up in the 30's & 40's and had victory gardens, so we did grow our own vegetables. I have driven tractors and ridden horses, but I would not say I am very good at either one.
I picked and chopped cotton in the 1980's. My dad was a farmer and back then they did not waste like they do now. After school in the fall we'd come home and pick the ends of the rows because the cotton picker wouldn't pick when it was being turned. Now farmers just don't plant to the edge of the fields like they use to. My trees on the field side dropped their leaves when they defoliated the cotton on that side of the house. I think one is dead, it hasn't come back out, the more expensive tree made it. But looks like we have lost the little cherry tree, my daughter planted it. Here they have had a 5 year contract (this is the last year, I think) to spray for the boll weevils. All of it smells bad, I have learned that it's killed some of the good insects, like honey bees in this area and some others ...the boll weevil? it's numbers are down, but not gone. other bad insects like misquotes? Hummm.... can't tell a difference and the stuff they spray is suppose to effect them as well as the boll weevil.
These new modulers are a life saver, every year here someone would end up running into the back of one of those old cotton trailors and usually it killed them. So these are great, And the gins have those big trucks to come out and get it.
Thanks WTxDaddy, I had no idea what was involved with cotton growing and harvesting. I sure have learned a lot today
boll weevil I believe I heard that all they're using to kill off the boll weevils is malathion. It definitely stinks, but it also knocks out mosquitoes. I am thiking of trying organic pest controls in my yard. When I was a kid, my mother tossed old tea leaves & used coffee grounds in her flower beds to deter pests. She also would spray the foliage with weak tea or coffee to make them taste bad too pests & I guess the acid in coffee & tea was unpleasant to pests too. Lord knows, I think coffee is awful, so I don't drink it at all.
