Farm Report #5
The 1996 Cotton Harvest

My neighbors, the Teicheiras, and their employees harvested my cotton on November 8-10. Teicheira is a Portuguese name, and it's pronounced (locally) "Ta-chair-ah", with the second syllable accented. Gilbert Robles drove the cotton harvester, a John Deere 9965 four row machine.

The cotton picker has barbed spindles which rotate as they travel into and out of the rows, snagging the cotton from the open cotton bowls. A very complicated collection of gears and gadgets accomplishes this action. The moistener pads supply the spindles with water mixed with a concoction somewhat like detergent and soluble oil. This mixture keeps the spindles clean and facilitates the doffing process. After the spindles have picked the cotton, the doffers whisk the cotton off the spindles. Then the cotton is blown up into the basket.

When the basket is full, the driver dumps the cotton from the basket into the module maker. The module maker compresses the cotton into a module, which is later picked up by a special truck called a module mover and hauled to the cotton gin.

The Upland Acala cotton was ginned at Anderson Clayton Corp.'s Los Banos Gin. The Pima cotton was ginned at their Idria Gin, near Five Points. For all you etymologists out there, "gin" is a shortened version of "engine." There is no connection to the popular gin drink, although cotton farmers have been known to find comfort in that, mixed with a little tonic, after a particularly bad harvest.

At the cotton gin, the module mover is weighed on the scales at the office. Later, the module is placed under the suction, which takes the cotton into the gin. The ginner, Roberto Monteon, oversees the entire ginning process and runs the operation through the control panel. The cotton goes through a gin stand, which removes the seeds. The entire ginning process, which includes cleaning and drying, is too complicated to fully cover here. After the cotton is ginned, the bale press compresses it into bales. The bales are wrapped and loaded onto trucks for shipment to a warehouse or other destination.

The Upland Acala cotton yielded about 3 bales (1500 pounds) per acre. The Pima cotton yielded about 2.6 bales (1300 pounds) per acre.

You who are knowledgable about cotton farming may think this is a very profitable outcome, since these yields are so much higher than the national average. But we in California spend much, much more money growing our cotton than do the cotton farmers in the rest of the U.S. We need high yields to pay our costs, and when we have a bad year, such as last year was, we can lose a lot of money.

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