As I understand it….. ( have so many photos I’m having a hard time picking out just a few 🙂 )

Cotton is not PICKED in this part of Texas—it is stripped.  Which means the whole plant is picked all at once with a stripping machine.  The machine works just like most combines, picking off the bolls (and the leaves and any other part of the plant) selecting the cotton and spitting out the trash…leaves, sticks and the dried boll.

The deep south the cotton picking machine only picks the ready bolls and then they come back and pick the bolls that are ripe again, doing this until all the bolls have bloomed and picked.

When the hopper gets full a cotton buggy comes and picks up the load. 

This is the cotton buggy.  It is not full at the time of the this photo.  It will be too the top when full.

Then the cotton buggy takes the load back to the module maker.

Here the buggy is dumping into the module maker.

The module maker smashes the cotton balls into a tight fitting well pack module.

When the module maker is good and tight– a tarp is put over the top of the module to keep the cotton from blowing away and seal it off from rain.  Here Terry is helping Roy, the farmer, and his helper get the tarp ready for this module.

Here is another module being covered.  The module maker is pulled away and the tarp is pulled on.  Pretty slick, if you ask me.

Finished!  They are tying it on at this point.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the cotton gin.

Our corn is ready for harvest. Moisture content is 14.3% so we start tomorrow. 

Today we have to put in a new hot water heater as ours went out last night.  😦  Sigh.

Linda