Still Stripping

Maybe one too many https:// ?

Reindeer, ideally it's just over knee high, but it varies field to field. The day after I filmed that we were in some bottom ground and that stuff was pretty tall, just over waist high on me. The broadcast headers the Allis machines use are primarily for short cotton, although with the right mods I've heard of them stripping cotton 5' tall. That's not much fun though, as the reels tend to break the tall stalks apart, and running the whole plant through the machine isn't very efficient. You can remove the front reel for tall cotton, as well as remove some of the reel fingers to make the stripping less aggressive in the tall cotton. Usually in SW Oklahoma though we are short on water, so the plants don't get that tall anyway. 

The field in the video was very sorry, and full of waist-high tumbleweeds. We found one clean spot for filming. The guy that farms it needs a cultivator I guess. We got the job because the first custom crew composed of new $750,000 Deere strippers couldn't strip it with all the weeds. They use row unit headers and weeds plug them up bad. The reels on these broadcast headers kinda chop the weeds up and they usually go through the machine alright. 

If we were stripping this field in October like it should've been done, the field would be stripped perfectly clean. By now a lot of the lint is stringing out of the bolls and falling on the ground. 

Haha! I wish, but no. We don't get paid until the cotton is picked up from the field, taken to the cotton gin, and ginned out. So could be this summer, as the local gins are all backed up with months of work. After they remove the rest of the foreign matter and seeds from the cotton, we get a report back on how many clean lint pounds there are, and we get paid according to that. 

The ether system? PO installed it. 

A cotton picker is. Cotton strippers are common.

A stripper strips (hence the name) everything off the stalk, leaving just bare branches. A picker only picks the lint, leaving the burrs, leaves, etc. behind. A picker yields a cleaner product, but has an overwhelming number of parts per row unit and costs a lot more to operate and maintain. 

Allis explains the two pretty well in these videos. 

Cotton picker

Cotton Stripper. Early on there were 2 types...one with and without the burr extractor. Shortly after this film was made the burr extractor became standard equipment, because they do such a good job of cleaning the cotton.