Cotton bales, holding the ginned fiber, don t even look the same. Bales are a lot smaller, but they weigh the same, about 500 pounds. They re just compressed, Brown explains. They don t even cover them in burlap anymore. We use shrink-wrap.
Mechanization is complete on big Louisiana farms.
We use a spindle-type picker, Brown explains. They spray now instead of dust, and the planes are mostly turbo props, he adds. They still fly low, though. Like most other agricultural commodities, cotton is now trading on the low end of a 10-year range, Kohlmeyer says. As a research leader in the Cotton Textile Chemistry Group at the U.S. Department of Agriculture s Southern Regional Research Center, Bertonniere spends her time finding ways to give value-added properties to cotton to make it compete with synthetics.