The air around my part of the countryside has been dusty and noisy with the hum of combines and cotton pickers.
First it was the remnants of a dust storm blowing in from Colorado. We haven’t had rain in weeks, so the soil is very dry which makes it very dusty in the fields while combining soybeans and picking cotton.
I rode my tractor to the fields behind my house and took several pictures of the soybean fields being combined by the Wrights. They were working into the night trying to beat the rain. The outside of combines haven’t changed much over the years expect the addition of cabs with makes it easier to stand the dust. Now they don’t have to stop to unload the beans into a transport hopper. Trying to unload a combine into a moving wagon while still cutting the beans and staying in the row takes a lot of skill. The insides now have computerization, GPS and technology, which reduce wastage.
On our dairy farm most of the tractors were older models and only the last one Dad bought had a cab on it. These early models had a lot of trouble with the filters clogging up and the air conditioner breaking down. My uncle used to ride around with the windows opened until a tree limb broke them out.
Friday Neal, Shane and Todd Isbell were picking cotton, followed by a tractor bush hogging and another tractor
with a planter sowing winter wheat. I took a few pictures and started home and got to thinking there was something new with the cotton picker. It was making these large round rolls that were scattered around the field. I didn’t see any of the pods that I’d seen in the past. I had to be nosey so I turned around, parked my truck on the side of the road and walked into the cotton field and was greeted by Neal Isbell who explained the new technology in cotton pickers. This one can do the same amount of work in a day as two pickers. It picks the cotton, rolls it and when it gets to a set size; the combine will wrap it in a protective plastic and then drop it out of the back like a hay baler.
Back a hundred and fifty years ago, all cotton was picked by hand and hauled to the gin by mule and wagon. It would take one hundred workers picking all day to pick ten bales of cotton. This new picker can pick around 220 to 225 or so bales a day. If measured in the olden days, it can do the work in one day that it would take 2500 workers to do. Mr. Isbell offered to let me ride inside the picker. I had my good work clothes on instead of my farming clothes and at first declined, and then took him up on his offer. The dirt I got on them is the good kind of dirt and will wash out. First we watched the unloading of the bale from the back of the picker. They were getting one with each up and down pass in the field. The new method eliminates the pods, which sit in the fields getting wet and dirty lowering quality until they can be hauled to the gin. The expense of a packer for pod production is also eliminated. A large fork is needed for the back of a tractor to lift the roll on a tractor-trailer. He excused himself to go and pick the bales up off the field as the tractors with the bush hog and planter where close behind. Mr. Isbell said that they were getting two bales to an acre this year. A good year.
Shane Isbell was driving the picker and held my camera while I climbed up the ten-foot ladder up to the cab. I got 
settled in the spare seat, door closed and we were off. Shane said that they used to farm a lot of acreage in Muscle Shoals, but sold it for progress and bought property in Cherokee, so they have further to travel each day from home to get to the fields and back to the gin. He said that his Dad, brother, he and three hired hands work about 3000 acres. As I watched the cotton go into the spindles I noticed the large fire extinguisher mounted outside of the cab and mentioned that the Wrights had a picker to burn up while picking cotton on property they were renting for my Dad. He said that it’s easy to start a fire in this dry weather, usually a rock feeding into the spindles causes a spark and a quarter million dollars piece of machinery can go up in flames.
After we made the rounds, I got off and took some more pictures of the loading of the bales on the tractor-trailer. As the sun set over the mountain west of the field, the work of picking, bush hogging, and planting continued into the night.
Farmers don’t have the luxury of an eight-hour day.
