A Cotton Pickin' Good Time

What does it mean when the fields of cotton are this white?

It's pickin' time!

Here's Lance picking some cotton right behind one of our chicken houses!

This is the view from the cab looking down into the picker heads.

When it's this time of year, even darkness doesn't slow us down! The only thing that does is when the dew falls. If there is no dew, we can pick all night, whoopee!

Nope, not an alien spacecraft, just Lance's picker.

When the picker basket is full, it can hold 3-4 bales of cotton. 1 bale weighs 500 lbs.

And it gets dumped into the module builder.

Not all of it makes it into the builder, as you can tell by the pile of cotton and blue bucket here.

This is what the inside of the builder looks like after the cotton is dumped.

And I use these levers...

To work this tramper, to pack the cotton.

When I'm finished packing, we pull the builder forward with a tractor. It leaves a nice, tarped cotton module behind. Each module is about 15 bales of cotton.

Then we call the gin, and they come pick it up in a module truck.

Then it's time to start again!