Cotton Harvest This Year

A cotton picker is supposed to only pick the white lint off of the plants. Used to be (and maybe still is in the Deep South) fields were picked twice, both while the plants were still green and growing. Cotton is  indeterminate, so it will continue to produce new bolls while older bolls have already opened. Nowadays a lot of people chemically defoliate, then just pick once. Pickers have been in use since the 1940s for the most part, although a few machines existed in the 1930s they were mostly of the prototype nature. 

A cotton stripper strips everything off the plant. Leaves, burrs, lint. They can only be used after a killing freeze or after the field is chemically defoliated before a freeze. Limited production cotton strippers of different forms have been around since the horse drawn days, the earliest production machine I know of was a horse drawn single row unit by John Deere in the 1930s. Production rapidly increased among many brands in the 1950s with two-row tractor mounted units. In those days, strippers didn't have any type of cleaner on them, so everything off the stalk went to the cotton gin. Imagine a combine with no chaffer or sieve, everything goes to the bin. Gins charge more to clean dirty cotton, so in the early 1960s Allis and Hesston began offering machines with on-board cleaners, which reduced trips to the gin and saved on cleaning costs. Hesston is rumored to have beat Allis to it by a year, but Allis made up for it by producing larger quantities of these burr extractor-equipped machines, and building a more user-friendly machine. This was circa 1966. By contrast, Deere didn't offer a stripper with a burr extractor until around 1984, yet they continued to sell a lot of them, although the Deeres were only two-row until 1977, while Allis was offering 4-row headers in 1970. (Still, Deere advertises they were the first with a 4-row head, imagine that). IH never offered a stripper with burr extractor to the best of my knowledge. 

A cotton stripper is much cheaper to buy and operate than a picker. They have fewer parts, and cotton pickers require daily (sometimes twice daily) power washing of each row unit to clean out build up of lint and spindle grease. It slips my mind how much water and spindle grease a picker uses daily, but the cost of the daily maintenance was enough to cause more than one owner around here to either go broke or trade for a cotton stripper. After hearing that you may ask why anyone would run a cotton picker. The only answer I have found is if the cotton is yielding greater than 1,000 lbs/acre, they tend to outperform a stripper since they are not processing everything off the plant. In yields below 1,000 lbs, a stripper excels. When the crop is thin, pickers tend to leave a lot more lint on the plants, due to the picking chamber not being crowded full. In our area of Oklahoma, if you can make 500 lbs/acre on dryland cotton, you're not doing too bad. Hence why you would be hard pressed to find a picker around here. In the areas of the state with irrigation, they're more common because they can achieve those higher yields easier than we can. 

My other post just now answers some of this, but after ginning it's taken to regional warehouses. It's packaged in 500 lb bales and each bale receives an ID number with the grade. Different grades bring different prices. It's typically planted mid-May through mid-June around here, although in the Deep South they plant much earlier. I don't have any photos of an un-harvested field handy at the moment, but a quick google search will yield a bunch. 

Creston are you using a module maker, or wagons? From what I see advertised module makers are selling for scrape price more or less out here. The wagons have been parked on the edge of a field and banners tied to the sides as billboards for 30 years already. The state that has not allowed a new billboard in 40 years.

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Seeing another side of the business here.

I've watched Griggs Farms YouTube channel. He just bought a new used JD picker/baler after having a rectangular module builder. He said new cotton machines are over a million dollars now.

I'm way too far North to use any of the cotton education. But I watch because he's doing a lot of Regenerative Agriculture for corn, beans, and cotton. Biggest cotton harvest he's had, I think he said three big round bales per acre.

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Creston, Awesome photos & descriptions. I used Norm's book to look at specs of your 3 AC cotton machines. See if I got it correct?

1969 760XTB, AC 226G, 520cu.ft basket, Gleaner K frame/drivetrain, custom cab.

1975 860, AC 2800 diesel 301 84hp, Variable speed, Gleaner L/M cab curved windshield, Gleaner F frame/drivetrain?

1980 880, AC 433I diesel 200 95hp, hydro drive, electro-hydraulic tilt, Gleaner F2 frame/drivetrain?

Your maroon 7080 looks great. It seems not too long ago, you had just bought it and were making it ready for approaching season?  What is your typical post cotton harvest season involve - stem shreader? (flail, bush hog?), disk, plow, etc? Or, can you no-till into last season's cotton stems?  Thank for sharing.

Yes, I'd be interested in your tentative 2024 AC cotton harvest field day(s). I've never been around cotton. Who knows, may bring a car-load of siblings with me?