Don’t Compress My Picked Cotton!

In 1949 I was six years old. My dad farmed about eighty acres of cotton. At harvest time he would park his Model A truck along the turning row of the patch and as the hired cotton pickers had their sack full of cotton weighed, he would empty all of this cotton into the truck bed. The truck bed had four foot high side boards on it and once this space was filled to a certain level, dad would guess he had enough loose cotton on board to take it to the gin and have it processed into a bale. Usually he kept track of the pounds of cotton emptied into this truck. But on some occasions he wasn’t around on certain days when he moved houses and my mom did the weighing. I wasn’t but six years old at the time but I do remember dad saying that he had to be careful as not to bring too much cotton to the gin because a regular bale weighed about 400 to 500 lbs. I guess there was a formula to follow as to how many pounds of raw cotton it took to yield 400 lbs. of pure ginned cotton. One had to subtract the cotton seed and other debris that was extracted by the ginning process.

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