The Cotton Harvest

A cotton field ready to be harvested

This is the earliest I've seen the cotton in. We had a really hot streak toward the end of summer--the first week of school it was over 100 every day when I picked up Mr. C. The heat seemed to scorch the cotton plants and I thought they were ruined. But even though the leaves turned brown early, the cotton bolls just seemed to explode. By the end of August the fields were white.

A cotton bale--the red truck in back is what harvests the plants

The green truck is what smashes the cotton into a tight bale--see the yellow mechanism on top that pushes the cotton down.

The bales sometimes sit for a couple of days before they are loaded onto a semi and taken to a mill. I don't know if you can see it in the pictures, but there is quite a bit of cotton left on the ground. It eventually just blows away. Before machines did the harvesting, these would have been hand-picked and not gone to waste. But who wants to get their hands all bloody picking cotton when there is a perfectly good machine to do it for you? Hope you enjoyed a taste of our southern agriculture.