How is cotton harvested

The crop must be harvested before weather can damage or completely ruin its quality and reduce yield. Cotton is machine harvested in the U.

Stripper harvesters, used chiefly in Texas and Oklahoma, have rollers or mechanical brushes that remove the entire boll from the plant.

In the rest of the Belt, spindle pickers are used. These cotton pickers pull the cotton from the open bolls using revolving barbed spindles that entwine the fiber and release it after it has separated from the boll. Harvest aids help farmers maximize harvests by stimulating plants to shed leaves, eliminating the main source of stain and trash in harvested cotton fibers. They also help to dry out the crop enough that bolls are easily separated from the plant during mechanical harvest.

Other harvest aids can stimulate boll opening and maturation and help preserve fiber quality as farmers work to harvest the crop. Harvest aids are applied either using a sprayer or by crop dusters , which are specialized airplanes. In both application methods, only a small amount of active chemical is used.

The chemical is mixed with water and adjuvants before being applied to the cotton crop in a fine mist. These products are also often very expensive, so farmers are careful not to overmix the chemicals or waste them by spraying in unintended areas. Stripper or picker? Although they sound funny, these are common terms in cotton farming. They refer to the different types of machinery used to harvest cotton.

A cotton stripper pulls the entire boll off the plant, along with its leaves and branches. After being separated inside the harvester, the resulting fiber, called seed cotton, is directed separately into a basket.

Just like with the cotton picker, the seed cotton is collected in a big basket. Farmers decide whether to use a cotton stripper or picker based on the variety of cotton they grow. Then, the person driving the boll buggy will pull alongside the harvester. The cotton picker or stripper operator will dump the full basket of seed cotton into the boll buggy, and the tractor driver will then take the fiber to a cotton module builder.

This tactic is called genetic dilution. Squares flower buds develop several weeks after the plant starts to grow, before flowers appear a few weeks later. The flowers then drop, leaving a ripening seed pod that produces fruit, known as bolls, after pollination. On irrigated cotton farms, the initial irrigation watering is usually followed by several additional irrigations at two-to-three week intervals depending on soil type and weather conditions from mid-December to late-February.

This differs depending on the region, average seasonal temperatures and soil type. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation defines IPM as "the careful consideration of all available pest control techniques and subsequent integration of appropriate measures that discourage the development of pest populations and keep pesticides and other interventions to levels that are economically justified and reduce or minimize risks to human health and the environment.

Growers conserve beneficial insects natural enemies to pests , and manage their natural resources to help suppress pests, which is at the heart of IPM. The use of biotechnology in cotton has made a significant contribution to the dramatic reduction in insecticides applied to Australian cotton crops. Growers usually choose to harvest the cotton crop once most bolls have opened and fully matured. It is extremely important that cotton is dry when it is picked, or discolouration may occur and reduce quality.

When mature, the crop is harvested mechanically and placed into large modules. The modules are loaded onto trucks and transported from the farm to a cotton gin. Cotton gins are factories that separate cottonseed and trash from the lint raw cotton fibre.

After ginning, the cotton lint is tightly pressed into bales. An Australian cotton bale weighs kilograms.

Once the cotton bales are ginned, pressed and containerised, they are loaded onto trucks and trains and sent to ports for shipping, mostly to overseas markets. Cotton classing sorts the fibre into different quality-based grades.