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Today’s modern cotton harvesters can cover up to 6 to 8 rows at a time and can harvest up to 190,000 pounds of seed cotton a day. These new cotton harvesters are a major improvement over the hand methods of the past.
Prior to the development of the module builder, most cotton picked by machines was dumped into cotton trailers and hauled to a cotton gin (a place where seed and fiber are mechanically separated). This system became inefficient when the trailers were filled faster than the gin could process the cotton and the cotton pickers had to cease harvesting while waiting for trailers to empty. This challenge was met with the invention of the module builder in 1972. This implement allows cotton to be dumped from the picker onto the ground and be compressed hydraulically to form a module (tightly pressed stack) of cotton. Each module holds 12-14 bales. This module can be left in the field for storage and later be hauled directly to the gin or transported by a module mover to the gin’s storage yard. The use of these builders allow the pickers to continue harvesting, unimpeded by ginning problems or delays.
Cotton Trailers were the primary method of moving harvested cotton from the field to the cotton gin. Until the mid-1940s, cotton was primarily hand harvested and there was a limited effect of trailer capacity on timeliness of harvesting. The advent of mechanical harvesting significantly increased the harvesting capacity and made trailers the limiting factor in the harvesting-ginning system.
Cotton Module Builder, a machine used in the harvest and processing of cotton. The module builder has helped to solve a logistical bottleneck by allowing Cotton Gin, a machine that quickly and easily sepa-
cotton to be harvested quickly and compressed into
rates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much
large modules which are then covered and temporarily
greater productivity than manual cotton separation.
stored at the edge of the field. The modules are later
The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton
loaded onto trucks and transported to a cotton gin for
goods, and any undamaged cotton was used for
processing.
produce cottonseed oil and meal.
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clothes. Seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to