Cotton Pickin'

So we've posted photos of cotton bales along the roads before but today we saw more of the process.

I made a wrong turn but look what we found... a cotton field being harvested.

This is one of the cotton compactors that form the bales. The box is lowered to the ground before they start.

A belt inside the hopper moves the cotton to the edge where it drops into one of the compactors. The blue rail on tops of the red box is the actual compacting parts. It moves up and down plus pushes the cotton to the rear of the box.

Up close of the picker.

Here you can see the compactor in a different position. The hopper is being dumped in front of it.

The hopper operator sure dumped a lot of cotton on the ground. You can just make out the guy beside the compactor throwing some back into the box.