Location: Cotton Production and Processing Research
Project Number: 3096-21410-009-026-R
Project Type: Reimbursable Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jan 1, 2025
End Date: Dec 31, 2025
Objective:
The objective of our work is to develop technologies that help to protect and manage seed cotton in modules during harvesting and ginning.
Approach:
Cotton has been machine harvested using cotton pickers and strippers in the United States for over 80 years. Extensive work has been conducted on improving and optimizing the current harvesting mechanisms but limited work has been conducted on developing new methods for harvesting cotton. A new concept is being investigated that collects whole cotton plants from the field and makes the total biomass grown available for post-harvest processing and utilization. A portion of our effort in 2025 will facilitate research efforts focused on the development of this new cotton harvesting approach. Specifically, in-field studies to determine the storage characteristics of whole-plant harvested cotton compressed into bales ranging in bulk density from about 10 to 18 lb/ft3 will be conducted. Cotton plants will be compressed using CPPRU’s mobile seed cotton sampling unit and the compressed bales will be stored under cover at CPPRU in Lubbock for storage durations ranging from 0 to 4 months. Samples of the bales will be collected after storage for fiber, seed, and vegetative material characterization. Another portion of our work in 2025 will aid in the development of a post-harvest machine system designed to open compressed bales of whole-plant harvested cotton and separate the seed cotton and vegetative materials for downstream processing. Separated seed cotton would pass into a traditional ginning system configured for stripper harvested cotton while the vegetative material will be made available for production of bio-fuels, bio-composite materials, or other value-added products.
Work in 2025 will continue to investigate the change in fiber and seed quality of cotton stored in round modules as a function of harvest moisture content and storage duration. Two years of commercial scale data have been collected from testing locations in Texas and Mississippi. Work in 2025 will focus on data analysis to determine if additional data collection is necessary to help elucidate the relationship between the change in fiber/seed quality parameters as a function of harvest moisture content and storage duration. Differences in growing environments, production practices, and cultivars among locations produced varying crop conditions at harvest that will make the findings of this work applicable across the US cotton-belt.
The development and demonstration of a system of tools for managing cotton modules using RFID technology contained in round module wrap that functions independently of manual/paper-tag based systems has been a primary goal of our research over the last several years. The system developed to date includes a suite of hardware and software tools custom developed to automate the identification and tracking processes associated with moving cotton from the field to/through the gin. System installations at cooperating gins in Frogmore, LA; White Oak, MO; Spade, TX; and Levelland, TX aided in testing and development efforts. A goal of our work in 2025 is to work toward the preparation and publication of manuscripts detailing the design and testing details for each of the tools comprising the electronic module management system.
