Vaughn: Cotton is a big deal in Georgia
First, it’s white, then it’s red, in five days it is dead. My grandfather used to tell me that saying he remembered from growing up on a farm with cotton being king. My family rode down to Savannah this past weekend to stay with friends and the fields of cotton were abundant. I know cotton well because my first job out of Ag School was working for a cotton company in Burke County.
Cotton is so rich in history, but it also huge for the economy of Georgia.
Next to poultry in Georgia, cotton is our No. 1 commodity in value with annual production between $750 million and $1 billion. Poultry may be king in Georgia, but cotton is at least queen or a high-ranking prince.
The process of growing and harvesting cotton is interesting and worth sharing.
Cotton is grown from seed planted from middle April until early June. The plants will germinate and grow into a shrubby like plant in the 3- to 5-foot range and in eight to nine weeks, you can sing my grandfathers song.
The white flower blooms and is self-pollinated within a few hours of opening. The second day the flower will be pinkish blush color and on the third day the flower turns red. By the fifth day, the flower will then dry and will start to develop the boll. Bolls are considered fruit and contain the cotton seed surrounded by the fibers that gradually grow and thicken. When the plant hits the 16- to 17-week mark, the bolls open and reveal the cotton fiber mixed with the seeds. At the 20-week mark, the boll dries and is ready for harvest.
The harvest part is fascinating. When the cotton is open and ready to be picked, the farmer must first spray the fields with what is called a defoliant. There are different types of defoliants, but in general terms it is a chemical that makes the cotton plant drop all its’ leaves. Losing all the leaves is important because when a cotton picker (harvester) rides over the plants, the machine wants to pick more fiber than leaves. Leaf matter in the fiber can devalue the cotton.
The cotton harvesters are these incredibly complicated machines that you could only imagine someone from NASA created because it is this series of spinning dials, fans, wheels, belts, blowers, gears and magic that ride down the planted rows and strip the cotton and seed off and deposit it in the bin in the back while still leaving the plant upright in the field.
When the bin is full of fiber and seed, the cotton is usually put into a packing machine that is placed in on the edge of a field. The picker dumps the cotton into the packer which is 32-feet long, 7.5-feet wide and is up to 11-feet high. A hydraulic packer goes up and down the module and makes it real tight. New innovations have a round baler built into the cotton picker that will build what is essentially a giant hay bale but made of cotton and dumps the finished bale out the back into the field. A module of cotton will hold 11 to 15 bales while a round bale will be four or five bales.
What constitutes a bale of cotton?
At harvest, a raw bale will have approximately 900 pounds of seed, 500 pounds of lint and 100 pounds of trash (leaf matter). A yield in a field will be somewhere between 1.5 to 2 plus bales per acre.
Once harvested, the modules or bales will be taken to a gin to remove the seed from the lint. This is how Eli Whitney got to be such a big deal. A giant vacuum sucks the raw cotton which has cotton and seed woven together into a shoot that falls into a tray and a giant circular saw blade protrudes through metal ribs. The blade rips the fiber back between the ribs where the seed can’t fit. The seed fall down the tray and is blown out to a warehouse.
The cotton fiber is sent on a conveyer belt through a drier and dumped into a hopper that hydraulically packs 500 pounds of cotton lint into a bale. Every bale has a sample pulled before it is squished. The sample is then sent to be graded on the length and strength of the fiber, color and the amount of trash mixed in the cotton. Grade scores determine what price you will or will not have to deduct off market pricing.
Cotton bales are warehoused until sold and all have their own code that will tell most everything about the bale itself, including owner, grade and total weight. When purchased, the bale can travel almost anywhere in the world.
Cotton is a big deal in the Southeast. Next time you are riding the roads out in the country, enjoy the views of an all-white field that might be part of the shirt you wear next Christmas. Happy Thanksgiving.
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Vaughn: Cotton is a big deal in Georgia
