Comment on Farmers struggling to make profit as price of cotton drops

By BEN RAINES, Al.com, San Antonio Express-News: World
Fri, 11/27/2015 - 2:12pm

Farmers struggling to make profit as price of cotton drops

Farmers struggling to make profit as price of cotton drops [...] for farmers across the southeast, these are the days of low cotton. On Nov. 12, Gov. Robert Bentley applied to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for emergency disaster assistance to help cotton farmers in counties hit hard by rain right at harvest time. Rain at the wrong time can delay harvest and allow time for seeds to sprout in the wet cotton before it is picked. Standing on the edge of a Baldwin County cotton field, trying to get the last of his crop picked hours before another rain-bearing weather system is supposed to arrive, farmer Mark Mullek was ebullient, despite the slack prices in the market. In 2011, the cotton market was at its highest level in a quarter century. Demand in the developing world was growing, and bad weather that year devastated the cotton fields of China and Pakistan, ranked number one and number four in the world for cotton production. Cotton prices this year are in a slump due in part to really good crops the last few years. Mullek's cotton picking machines steadily dumped load after load of picked cotton into the 30-foot long, 12-foot deep metal troughs of the module builders. If you've ever seen the huge rectangles of cotton sitting on the edge of a just picked field, that was the work of a module builder. Employing the same hydraulic compaction technology as a garbage truck, the module builders are able to mash 22,000 pounds of cotton -- about 30 acres worth -- into a rectangle that will fit on a specially designed trailer. To load the 10-ton bales, a ramp slides down to the ground and the truck driver slowly backs into the cotton, which slides into the trailer.

 

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