Ginning Picker and Stripper Harvested High Plains Cotton - Update

Cotton produced in the Texas High Plains today exhibits substantial improvements in terms of yield and average HVI length and strength to that produced a decade ago.  While the brush-roll stripper is the predominate harvest method used in the area, some producers have shown interest in using spindle pickers in an effort to better preserve fiber quality.  Additionally, new picker harvesters with the ability to build seed cotton modules while harvesting have reduced the amount of labor required for harvest.  Recent work by Faulkner et al. (2009) showed that pickers may offer advantages over stripper harvesters on the High Plains with regard to available harvest time, field efficiency under high yield conditions, and fiber and yarn quality parameters.  Over the years, ginning practices used on the Texas High Plains have been adapted to handle stripper harvested cotton with varying levels of foreign matter (i.e. non-field cleaned vs. field cleaned).  The introduction of pickers to the area may require another level of adaptation with regard to ginning practices since picked cotton often contains much less foreign material than field cleaned cotton.  This work investigates the influence of cleaning equipment in sequence before the gin stand and processing rate (per unit of machine width) on fiber quality and final bale value for picker and stripper harvested cotton.