WHAT IS IN A COTTON BALE?

WHAT IS IN A COTTON BALE? It is that time of the year when Cotton producer harvest their crop. This year the price is higher than ever recorded in history. Agriculture people talk about bales of cotton. So while eating breakfast at a local café I was asked what is a bale of cotton, is it like alfalfa? Which reminded me how far most Americans are removed for the production of product they use or eat every day? Over the past 6,000 years or so man (most likely it was really a woman) has tamed the cotton plant, like all our crop and livestock cotton has a wild beginning. Much like the common dandelion cotton produced lint to help disperse the seeds to other areas. Some time in ancient time someone in the Egyptian part of the world spun this lint to make a thread. So though genetic manipulation and selection which continues to this day, cotton now produces a lot more lint than it need for seed dispersal. Modern cotton production has evolved in time to become highly mechanized and is grown on every continent except Antarctica. It is truly a worldwide market. I thought I would go briefly over the process from plant to pants. Cotton is picked or striped form the plant. In eddy county most is picked using a cotton picker that has rotating spindles that catch the lint and attached seed and pull it from the plant and blows it in to the picker basket. This is called seed cotton and it can be dumped either in to a cotton trailer or into a modular builder. A module builder is a lot like a garbage truck, it collects the seed cotton and compacts to make it more efficient to transport to the cotton gin. These big bread loaf look modules setting in the field are not a bail of cotton. Once it is transported to the Gin either by module or trailer it is sucked up by a big vacuum device. Gin is short for Engine. Once it is picked up in the gin the lint and seed is separated from the sticks, green bolls, and other trash. The gin in Eddy county are saw tooth gins and can gin upland cotton pulling the lint from the seed, the seed fall to the bottom and goes one direction the lint goes another. The seed can be sold as livestock feed, sent to Texas for acid deleting and future planting by the producer or seed buyer or it can be sent to a seed press where the oil is separated out and the remains are dried into cotton seed meal. Most vegetable oil has a lot of cotton oil, I like buy it exclusively for cooking. So you many not think of it but you eat cotton in a lot of different forms other than just oil. Cotton seed oil can be used as diesel fuel after treatment. The lint goes through some other process and is comb into a nice straight fiber and placed in a bale press to make a uniform size and weight product of 480 pounds, 54 inches long, 20 inches wide and a tie width of about 33 inches. This is roughly 17 cubic feet of cotton fiber. Sample are taken and analyzed for classing. The longer thinner and stronger the fiber the higher the value is. This can change by verity (genetics), growing conditions, and maturity at harvest. So based on the quality the producer price will change, if a bail has a contaminate in it like hay twine, plastic bags, which can end up in the final product of a shirt, jeans that bail is condemned, as is the bale in front and the bale behind. Each bale cotton can be traced back to the gin and the producer. Cotton can be traced from the finished product to the farm it was grown on. These bales are sold through a lot of different markets onto the international market. When I came to Eddy county we had 4 operating gins, in 1974 we had 14 operating gins and now we have 2. When the cottonwood gin was in operation, the ginner Mr. David Cloe had received a letter from a spinner in Germany. A spinner is a textile mill which manufactures thread. Stating that the cotton he had received from Eddy County NM was to highest quality he had ever had the pleasure of spinning. Once it is made into thread it is woven into cloth. One 480 pound bale of cotton produces 8,340 handkerchiefs’, 760 men’s dress shirts, 290 Men’s jeans, 900 Women’s blouses. 350 women’s jeans, 210 full size sheets and 3,670 men’s socks. The producers in Eddy County are truly helping to Clothe and feed the world. Once it is placed in a bale 100% of the cotton produce in Eddy County is exported out of the state, most out of the nation the money received for this product is economically speaking new money to the local economy and national economy to help with our trade deficit. Currently China is the largest international buyer. Eddy County Extension Service, New Mexico State University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and educator. All programs are available to everyone regardless of race, color, religion, sex, age, handicap, or national origin. New Mexico State University, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Eddy County Government Cooperating.