How is cotton picked?

[applestar]

I grew cotton this year for a NEW PROJECT!, starting them inside along with peppers and tomatoes. I got the seeds from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, where the cultivation notes said gardeners should grow them once just to see what backbreaking labor it is to pick them.

Well, they're right in that the 3~4 foot plants all have tendency to fall over, so the pods are no more than a foot above the ground. they also won't open unless we have a good hot dry day. I have to check by bending over or lifting up the leaning plants for any bolls that might have opened up.

I was cutting a few of them the other day -- thankfully before we had all this rain -- and thought: The cotton pickers wouldn't all have been supplied with pruning scissors... The pods don't snap off the plant like peppers, and the hard dried pod shell corners make them difficult to grasp....

HOW DO/DID THEY PICK THEM

[gumbo2176]

By machines today, thank goodness say the old time hand pickers. You got me curious so I did a search and got a site that tells just how backbreaking it truly is. The author tells of 12-14 hr. days in the blazing sun picking upward of a ton of cotton required to make a livable wage daily. He advised a straw hat and long sleeves for protection in fields that get upwards of 110 degrees and good leather gloves to protect the hands and wrist from nasty cuts from the plants. He also said they pulled sacks that were between 20-30 feet long to fill during the day. That's a lot of cotton

I'm not afraid of hard work but those conditions would likely send me home with little to no pay.

[Ozark Lady]

At 6 years old I could pick 60 pounds per day, and was mostly playing! I was the perfect height for cotton picking! My mama made me a pick-sack out of a pillow case, and when I would get it filled I would dump it into her bag. Bags are made with a strap that goes over your shoulder and drags on the ground, they are heavy canvas.

We only picked that one year, before I started to school, but it was fun!
You climb up on folks bags, and get a ride through the field, till they see ya!

It isn't so bad, you just bend over and stay bent over. And you grab the cotton and leave the hull! Those hull tips are sharp though.

Then when you have 5-6 picked your hand is full, so you stuff it into your bag and go for the next. You do best if you pick with both hands!

When your big bag is full, you go to the trailer, and there is a man there with a hanging scales, and he hangs your bag, weighs it, and writes it down, you sign the sheet, and get your bag back empty. If you get alot of hulls, leaves, or dirt, you get less on your pay, they mark it too! And you don't ever, pick cotton when it is wet!

Most adults after they get on a roll can pick 200# in a reasonable day, and the really good ones go over 300#.

At the end of the day, grown ups hurt everywhere, kids only have sore fingers.

I saw folks chopping cotton, never did it, they had to get all the weeds out of the field. That looked like hard work to me!
I would much rather pick than chop it!

In a cotton field the plants are close enough together to help prevent them from falling over, but you never, ever pick cotton that is not opened. So, you just wait and watch for the right time, and that is when you pick. Then a week or two later, that field is picked again, and on until it is all done. You can't get it all in one picking, you have to pick as they open, dry, and are ready! No scissors needed or allowed. You can't get the bolls or hulls, only the cotton!

[applestar]

I was expecting/hoping for more responses so didn't respond right away. Thanks for relating your experiences, OL, and sharing a snippet from your past. I can just picture you as a child running around in the rows of cotton "helping" . I was recently telling people that I really like the Little House stories, and yours is like that.

[tedln]

Today, cotton growers hire companies with airplanes to fly over the field and spray a chemical which causes the plants to die and the bolls to open. A mechanical harvester then follows each row and harvests the cotton at about ten rows per past. The harvester has the ability to separate most of the hull and seed from the cotton which is then compressed into the bales which are transported to storage. When the market price is stable for raw cotton, the farmer sells it to a processor who finish cleans the cotton and repackages it to sell as cotton fiber. The hulls can be burned as fuel to make electricity or as compost. The seeds are pressed and solvent washed to collect the cotton seed oil. The remaining pulp is sold for many purposes such as animal food and human food filler. It must be treated before consumption to remove a toxic granule similar to ricin found in caster beans.

In the old days, the mechanical cotton gin had been in use for a long time before a mechanical cotton picker was invented. The cotton could be mechanically cleaned and separated from the seed a long time before it could be mechanically harvested. People had to pull the long bags behind them for many more years and then load it into a trailer for transport to the gin.

Picked (hulls removed) cotton was worth more at the gin than pulled (hulls attached) cotton. The cotton pickers were paid more per lb. for picked cotton versus pulled cotton. Some peoples hands had simply lost the ability to separate the hulls from the cotton and they could only barely earn a living as a cotton puller.

My mother and father met in the fields as cotton pickers and cotton choppers. They did it from childhood to adulthood. Then wwwaallllaaa! here I am. No cotton picking for me thank you.

Ted

[Ozark Lady]

I was the "early" version of a cell phone during those cotton picking days.

My great-grandparents were at our house, and we weren't that far from home, but you couldn't always see the house, and you sure couldn't hear from the house. Every hour or two, I would be sent to the house to see if they needed anything, a drink or whatever, and relay the message to my "mom" (grandparents raised me). But, it was my job to check on them, and not stay too long, cause I had to check on mom too.
It was a big responsibility to make sure that everyone was okay, and had cold drinks, when you were 6!

It was during those weeks, that early one morning, I awoke to noise really early. And doctors were coming in, to carry my great grandmother out. She had passed away as everyone was getting up for breakfast. She had even stated what she wanted for breakfast. Apparently, she had a sudden heart attack, and that is what woke me up, everyone trying to figure out what to do to help her.

It didn't occur to me at the time, that she could die. Only years later was I mature enough to know what I was checking on them for! I thought it odd to check so often on getting them a drink. It wasn't like they couldn't get their own drink!

They didn't live with us, they were just visiting with us for a couple weeks.

[applestar]

My grandmother died while I was away at college. Only my uncle, and none of her daughters, was there at her passing. It feels like your grandmother was luckier to have been surrounded by her family, all the way to ordering breakfast. It must have been devastating for you, though, at such a young age.

DD8 helped me pick the cotton today, including "pulling" (thanks tedln) any pods that are starting to crack open since we have 2 days of rain in the forecast. Afterwards, she played with the dry and opened cotton pods until she figured out how to remove them from the pods and deseed them.

Later on, since DH was watching the game, I came upstairs to watch something else. Soon after, both DD's joined me with some of the picked cotton and started working the seeds out. " This is FUN! you gotta TRY this!" So I turned on Warehouse 13 on Demand, and we all sat around picking the cotton bolls apart, deseeding and sorting the naturally green and brown cotton fibres while catching up on the last three episodes.

DD8 is determined use the harvested cotton as stuffing to make a stuffed toy... So much for MY plan to try spinning them into yearn (hence the long staple naturally green and brown cotton varieties), but she's very excited. She was looking through her tub of fabric for the stuffed toy too.

Before she went to sleep, DD11 decided that the freshly picked cotton seeds somehow smells like bread.

[applestar]

Ted, I guess it's different when we're doing this for fun. We've tried our hand at raw sheared wool too -- that was pretty messy work, especially the washing part. Carding the wool involved a significant am out of plant matter entangled in the wool.

DD11 wants to try using our carding tools with the cotton fibers to make them fluffier. I guess we'll do that tomorrow.

[tedln]

Applestar,

If I remember correctly from my childhood, the cotton boll is comprised of the outer hull which opens on the end opposite from the stem like a flower. Inside the boll, the cotton is arranged in tight, compressed segments similar to an orange. If the boll has fully matured and opened by itself, the cotton extrudes from the boll in a fluffy manner. Each cotton segment contains the seeds buried deep within the cotton. The seeds have a fresh, barnyard, or earthy odor. The outer shell of the seed is hard, but thin and can be crushed easily. Inside the seed, the oil and meat have a yeasty odor and taste. I think I enjoyed the taste of the meal and oil, but I don't recommend tasting it. It does contain a toxin, but I don't know what quantities are required to actually be harmful.

Ted

[applestar]

Here are some photos of our cotton harvest so far.
(There are more tightly closed pods still growing outside)
Cotton Flower:
[img]https://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll272/applesbucket/Image7795.jpg[/img]
Green Pod:
[img]https://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll272/applesbucket/Image7794.jpg[/img]
Pods that had cracked open were "pulled" green and dried indoors. Most of them opened up completely
[img]https://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll272/applesbucket/Image8176.jpg[/img]
Carded Cotton "wool":
[img]https://i290.photobucket.com/albums/ll272/applesbucket/Image8178.jpg[/img]
(Brown mass is about football sized, Green mass is about coconut sized)

[applestar]

I revisited this thread because I sowed some saved seeds that were labeled Irene's Green Cotton this year. They were fuzzy with cotton fibers that didn't come off cleanly, but the fibers were brown I remembered that one of these -- brown or green, the fibers came cleanly off the seeds and the other one didn't and I was hoping I'd mentioned it here, but I guess I didn't.

I just asked my kids though, and older daughter distinctly remembers that it was the brown cotton that slipped completely off and the green cotton would always end up with fuzzy seeds. So I guess the fibers on the seeds discolored in storage.

[gixxerific]

I saw that post a minute ago. That is cool, what do you do with it Apple?

I suppose you figured out how to harvest cotton. I can't help much there. There is one thing I know, you are supposed to sing a song I belive while doing it.

[hendi_alex]

Not 20 miles from my home, they probably plant and harvest 2000 acres of cotton. The pickers harvest the cotton which is tossed into big rectangular square bins on wheels. The bins compress the cotton which makes about a 10 foot by 10 foot by 30 foot rectangular solid. Those are loaded into a big truck and hauled off to be processed I guess. This past season, one of the large 'bales' in transit broke apart. The road appeared to be covered in snow. This all takes place in a backwards little town called Bishopville SC where all of the white kids still attend private school. They have a small Cotton Museum in the rural town.

One superlative of Bishopville is the fact that Pearl Fryar lives there. He is just an ordinary man who has taken an ordinary hobby to an extraordinary level.

Here are a couple of photos from his yard and a link to my full set of photos at flickr.





https://www.flickr.com/photos/aghenderso ... 697406224/

[Ozark Lady]

I ordered cotton seeds from the government and they were all slick.

All the ones I was given were fuzzy.

When I spin cotton off of the seeds it leaves fuzzy seeds.

I don't have any brown cotton, I do have white or green.

I haven't spun any green off of the seeds.

I suppose you could plant the seeds and name them 'slick' or 'fuzzy' until you know for sure which is which?

I now have a set of carding tools, but I haven't tried them yet.

Any advice for first attempt at carding?

[ElizabethB]

Prior to mechanical pickers cotton was picked by hand. My maternal grandparents had a small plot of cotton that my mother remembers having to harvest cotton by hand. It was back breaking, brutal work from dawn to dusk in sweltering heat. Adults carried a 100 lb sack on their backs to put the harvested cotton in. They were paid by the pound of harvest. Mother tells about the sores on her hands from the cotton burrs.

In the bad old days cotton was harvested by slaves. Some of my ancestors were slave owners. My uncle did a genealogy on my Mother's family. The records are almost unbelievable. Female slaves gave birth by squating in the cotton fields. They slung their new borns into sling next to their breast and continued harvesting cotton.

We have no clue of the brutality of hand harvesting cotton. The same goes for sugar cane. Brutal, back breaking work in fields infested by rats and snakes. Cotton and sugar cane flourish in harsh climates - harsh for humans. Hot and humid.

As a child I remember seeing acres and acres of coton fields. Not much any more. It was pretty to look at. Snow in summer. Glad I never had to harvest either cotton or sugar cane.

[Ozark Lady]

I am surprised that the bolls harvested green continued to ripen and actually opened up.
When cotton is ready to harvest it pops right open, the cotton almost spills out. The edges are sharp and fingers, especially around the nails are in danger. You grab it like getting Kleenex out of a square box!

I remember living near folks who did "share-cropping". The spring was cotton chopping time, no one looked forward to that job.

In the fall, excitement was high, as the cotton ripened. Picking the cotton was: new shoes, new school clothes, Christmas presents. Students were even allowed to miss school to pick cotton, within what they considered reason.... a week maybe two. In my generation, you had your transistor radio in your pocket, and a nice picnic lunch and snacks in a cooler in the car/truck waiting for you. It was hot, it was humid, but there was a goal, monetary rewards were important for families living to share-crop, so it was also joyful. A bad cotton crop, a wet year, was really hard on the share-croppers whose only cash came from cotton. They had gardens so they wouldn't starve, they had soybeans to make enough to cover the electric and things, but cotton was so much more. At least to the children, who were my classmates.

My grandparents were not share croppers, they worked in law enforcement.