Macon, GA |
With harvest season for cotton winding down here in the state, it’s now time to see what months of hard work has produced for the growers. And while quantity is always important, quality is equally as vital. Determining that grade starts as soon as the crop gets out of the field.
“At the gin, they separate the seed from the fiber, and the fiber, they develop a five-hundred-pound bale. We get a sample from both sides of that bale. They put a permeant ID tag within that sample, roll it up, put it in a government issued sack, then it’s transported here to the classing office. Once it’s here at the classing office, we unload it and we bring it to our receiving room and that’s when we start processing it,” says Noah Bell, Director of the Macon Classing Office.
The higher the grade, the higher the prices. And that is now more important than ever for growers as the market is less than half of what it was just two years ago. However, in order to receive those high marks, it must first go through a rigorous testing process that evaluates eight different factors.
“We’re looking at it on the instrument and it’s testing it for the micronaire, how fine and mature the fibers are, the strength, length, uniformity, whether or not they have trash, the amount of trash within it, whether or not it’s got bark or grass, which we call extraneous matter. The better the quality is, the higher money they’re going to get for the cotton. It comes off the government loan, which is you get premium and discounts if it’s premium cotton, you’re going to get high quality for it. If it’s low-quality cotton, they’re going to get discounted and it’s going to be lower prices for that particular bale of cotton,” says Bell.
Fortunately, that shouldn’t be a problem for most of the farmers here in the Southeast, as this year’s crop is looking relatively strong despite a number of different challenges.
“The crop is looking real good right now. We started off a little bit low in quality, but over the last three weeks, the quality has improved. We get some real top quality cotton coming in through the classing office. Even with the hurricane, which happened about a month and a half back, getting some of that cotton in now because a lot of those gins just started up, but the quality is holding up,” says Bell.
Just like any other sector of agriculture, this facility is keeping up with the times, as they recently implemented a new and improved system of grading that requires less handling of the cotton.
“We have an automation system that we put in this spring. It’s supposed to be more efficient, which it is helping us out. We’re having to hire fewer employees and the efficiency part is moving quite well. I think we are able to put out about the same amount of cotton we had with the old system where it was more labor intense. The new automation system, the operator, the only thing they’re having to deal with now is just touching the cotton samples,” says Bell.
By: Damon Jones