Another stop on my Texas tour brings me back to family. My aunt spends many hours in the fall at work – at the cotton gin. You know…Eli Whitney and all? Anyway, for all you Midwestern corn-growing, soybean raising types, I thought I would take you on a little trip. This is a long story, but don’t worry, it’s mostly pictures and very little reading.
Our journey starts here: a lonely West Texas field of cotton. Yes, in case you didn’t know, cotton grows on plants. At this point, many months of lush green growing have been cruelly snuffed out by crop dusters and sprayers full of defoliant – kind of an agent orange type scenario, but it’s necessary to kill the plants to get the cotton off. Back in the days of old, people (my grandparents included) would walk the fields with giant bags picking cotton. But thanks to chemicals and modern machinery, this is no longer necessary.
Once the cotton plants look like the picture above, in come the machines – cotton strippers to be exact. Here’s one in action. They cruise down the rows, stripping cotton off the plants and dumping it in big metal container. When it’s full, out spits a big chunk of cotton called a “module.”
These modules are picked up by a special truck and brought to the cotton gin. Each module will produce about 10-12 bales of cotton. At the time of this visit, the gin had logged in 3900 modules. That’s upwards of 46,000 bales of cotton.
After being dumped at the gin, each module is brought into the processing area on the “special truck” and loaded onto the conveyer.
All the action is supervised at a nuclear-reactor type control console.
The modules make their way down the conveyer where the processing starts.
Numerous fans are used to produce enough suction to move the cotton around the gin through a series of ducts. At the end of the conveyer, the cotton is sucked off and passes through a chamber full of hot air – no, not Congress. The hot air removes any remaining moisture that may be in the cotton.
After getting dried, it flows to the other side of the gin through ducts along the ceiling.
The cotton falls down the ducting into a series of vertical and horizontal “cleaners” where cotton burrs and twigs are removed.
Once through the cleaners, the cotton is sucked up again and then dropped down into machines that pull the seed out of the cotton. These machines contain a series of spinning saw blades that pull the cotton lint off the seed until the seed falls harmlessly to the bottom. Incidentally, the seeds are taken and ground up and used as filler for animal feed.
Next, the cleaned and deseeded cotton is sucked up again and flows down this trough and into large metal bins below the floor. There are two bins on a spinner. Once a bin is full, the two bins spin 180 degrees so that one bin can catch the falling cotton while the other bin is being processed.
The cotton in the full bin is pushed up and compressed by a hydraulic press to 5,000 psi. Workers band the newly formed bale and the pressure is released.
The bale is held together by the tension bands that were placed around it.
After being weighed, each bale is bagged and tagged. The average weight of each bale is 500 pounds. That’s one big cotton ball.
Finally, the bales are taken out for shipping. It seems like a long process, but the average time for the cotton to make it from being sucked off the conveyer to getting packed into a bale is about 2 ½ minutes.
Here’s what the cotton looks like after it has been processed.
MOVIES
Here are a few movies of the gin in action. The movies are in Real Media Format. If you don’t have a RealMedia Player, you can download it here for free. Click the picture to start:
This first movie shows the cotton being separated from the seed. The cotton is flowing in from the top and the seeds are dropping out at the bottom. Notice how fast this happens! (696KBytes)
This next movie shows the cotton being compressed and baled. (1.18MBytes)
This last movie shows the “special truck” picking up a cotton module. The floor of the truck is lined with chains and “teeth” that pick up the module as the truck backs up. (1.28MBytes)
Oh yeah, I almost forgot to bring the story full circle. Someone else makes the cotton into denim and sews it into blue jeans. I’m a little fuzzy on that part of it. I mainly wanted to show all you city slickers (yeah, I know…pot calling the kettle black) the simple sophistication of the modern cotton gin. By the way, at about $.50/lb, each bale brings in around $250. That would mean my aunt’s cotton gin will process over $10 million worth of cotton this year. Pretty impressive.
J