Cotton Pickin'

Sandy & I recently went to see Memom & Pawpaw Tex (her parents), who live on a farm near Bellville. During our visit we got to see something that a lot of city folks don't have a chance to see -- cotton harvesting.

The top photo shows the harvester (which you could call a Cotton Pickin' Machine). You can click on the photo for a closer view (then press backspace to return to the post). Notice the 8 silver-colored arms in the tractor front (just below the driver). Those act like powerful vacuum cleaners and they neatly whisk the ripe cotton right off of the plant stalks, and then the cotton is quickly blown into a large storage bin behind the driver.


The next photo shows the harvester driving down rows of cotton, harvesting thousands of cotton bolls from 4 rows at a time. If you look carefully, you will notice that the harvester driver is talking on a cell phone.


Whenever the harvester gets a load full of cotton, the driver hauls the load over to the processing area. Once there, the harvester driver dumps the load of cotton into a huge steel-framed compressor bin and another worker begins to tightly pack down the cotton in the bin using a powerful hydraulic compressor. The photos show the driver off-loading the cotton into the steel-framed bin, and then the hydraulic device tamping down the cotton inside the steel casing. You really have to click on the smaller photos and access the larger photos to get a better view of the operation.

When the compressor operator cannot pack any more cotton into the steel case, then the sides of the case are loosened and a tractor moves the large bin to a new location so that the filling and compressing process can start all over again, as illustrated by the photo at left. Tex stated that one large block of the tightly compacted cotton is the equivalent of about 16 standard bales of cotton. The large blocks of compacted cotton are loaded onto big trucks to be hauled away for the wonderful transformation into cotton clothing (the "fabric of our lives" as the advertising slogan so aptly describes it).


The next photo shows some of the very straight rows of cotton as the fluffy stuff ripens in the sun and awaits the harvesting process. And the subsequent photo provides a close-up view of a cotton boll. As we watched the workers harvesting and compressing the cotton, Sandy and I would sing snatches of the familiar song that was a Credence Clearwater Revival hit a few years back:
"When I was a little bitty baby my momma would rock me in the cradle, in them old cotton fields back home.
"It was down in Louisiana, just a half a mile from Texarkana, in them old cotton fields back home.
"Now when them cotton bolls get rotten, you can't pick very much cotton, in them old cotton fields back home.
"It was down in Louisiana, just a half a mile from Texarkana, in them old cotton fields back home."