Owen had employed a contractor (Adam) to pick his cotton on Mum and Dad's place "Sunrise". I did a round on the cotton picker with Adam to get some first hand knowledge and videos of the process.
Adam's picker (the green John Deere in the photos) makes bales of cotton and does the whole process with the one machine without stopping. The John Deere picks the cotton, builds it in to bales and wraps the bales in plastic then spits the bale out the back of the picker, then starts the whole process again. The picker is totally computerised - all Adam has to do is steer the picker and keep his eye on all the read-outs on the computers in front of him and if something goes wrong eg. something clogs or jams up a buzzer warns him to check the computers. Some of the other things the computers show him are his ground speed, hectares picked, total bales picked, number of bales picked in each hectare, how much of the paddock he has picked, fuel usage per hectare, bales picked in each section of the paddock, the building of the bale, wrapping of the bale. He also has a rear camera that shows him a picture of the bale building, wrapping, etc.
As you can see from the video Owen's cotton is planted skip row so the middle two heads of the picker are lifted up and not in use. So that style of picker is a one man operation from cotton plant to cotton bale wrapped. A bale weighs two and a half tonnes and is much higher than me and you can see the size of the picker with David standing beside it. (It is the same size and brand of picker as Greg's that burnt). These pickers are worth approx. $850,000.00 dollars. The round bales then have to be loaded onto semi-trailers and taken to the Cotton Gin to be processed.
In Adam's picker
Dad moving the bales into a line for the semi trailers to collect
Loading bales onto the semi
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| Adam's picker |
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| Some of the computers in the cabin |
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| Completed Wrapped Bale |
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| Semi-trailers waiting in line to be loaded with bales |
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| Bales on their way to the Cotton Gin |
The other way to pick cotton is with Owen's picker (the red Case International) but it only picks the cotton, one row at a time. Then the cotton has to be transfered into a Boll Buggy to take it off the paddock then transfered into the module builder which compresses the cotton and makes it into a large module 40ft x 8ft x 8ft which weighs 15 tonnes. This whole process needs 3 men and 3 machines. Then the modules have to be picked up on trucks also and taken to the Cotton Gin.
Owen's Cotton Picker
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| Boll Buggy |
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| Cotton ready to pick |
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| Completed Module |
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| Module Builder |
Module Builder pressing down the cotton to make the module
Very educational! :)
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