During WWII, more than 170,000 men and women from this state served in the armed forces; many were drafted away from their farms. Like every coin which has 2 sides, the horror of war brought separation and death, but it also brought about a natural industrial recovery.
The war years saw cotton production more than double and prices rise. Change was happening.
By the mid-1960s, cotton picking machines replaced hand-picked cotton. At the time this museum was constructed, South Carolina farmers planted 280,000 acres of cotton, while farmers in the rest of the U.S. planted 16.2 acres.
The modern-day cotton farm averages 1.33 bales per acre, which is about 2x as much as in 1950. This improvement was possible because of better land use, improved plant varieties, mechanization, fertilization, and irrigation. Added to these improvements are better control of disease, weeds, and insects.
Remember how we learned that cotton farmers had to over-seed and then use a hoe to thin out plants so the strong ones could flourish? By the 1960s, chemical weed control replaced the hoe. Scientists began to manipulate cotton genes to develop new varieties.
growing cotton today
After cotton is harvested in the fall, the stalks are cut and turned into the soil.
Here’s the rest of the process:
- Seeding is done by mechanical planters that can cover as many as 10-12 rows at a time.
- Cultivators are used to uproot weeds and grass.
- About 2 months after planting, flower buds called squares appear on the cotton plants.
- In another 3 weeks, the blossoms open, and the petals change from creamy white to yellow pins and finally to dark red all within 3 days. Then the flowers wither and fall, leaving green pods that are called cotton bolls.
- Inside the boll that’s the shape of a tiny football, moist fibers grow and push out from the newly formed seeds. As the boll ripens, it turns brown.
- The fibers keep expanding under the warm sun. Finally they split the boll apart and fluffy white cotton bursts forth, looking like white cotton candy.
The cotton is harvested by machines that gather the cotton 50x faster than workers could pick by hand!
ginning the cotton today
After harvesting, seed cotton is either stored at the edge of the field in big mounds called “modules” or loaded onto trailers or trucks to be transported to the gin.
Here are the next steps:
- At the gin, powerful pipes force the cotton into the building so it can go through cleaning machines that remove such trash as burs, dirt, stems, and other material from the cotton.
- The cotton goes on to the gin stand where circular saws with small sharp teeth pull the fiber from the seed.
- At this point, the fiber and the seed go in different ways (seed information in later bullets).
- The ginned fiber, now called lint, is pressed together and made into bales weighing about 500 pounds.
- Value of the cotton comes from taking samples from each bale and comparing them according to fiber length (staple), strength, width, color, and cleanness.
- Growers usually sell their cotton to a local buyer or merchant who sells it to a textile mill either here in the U.S. or a foreign country.
- Back to the seed: it is sold by the grower to the gin who either sells it for cattle feed or to an oil mill where the linters (downy fuzz) are removed in an operation much like ginning.
- Linters are baled and sold to the paper, batting, and plastics industries.
- The seed can also be processed into cottonseed oil, meal, and hulls.
Did you get a little confused in the previous set of bullets? I did. This next piece of information may help.
Cotton is made up of fiber (40% by weight) and seed (60% by weight).
Cattle seed is rich in oil and high in protein. It’s a common ingredient in cookies, potato chips, and prepared foods.
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