Shawn Holladay pulls to the far right of the county (dirt) road that divides two Dawson County, Texas, cotton fields that are shining white in a clear, late October afternoon. He motions for us to stop, rolls down his window, and suggests we pull up next to the oil well pump jack and park.
“How’s the cotton?” I ask, as Mary Jane Buerkle, Plains Cotton Growers director of communications and public affairs, and I step out of her truck, climb into Shawn’s vehicle, and settle in for the short drive across the road and down rows of brown, bare cotton stalks, stripped by Shawn’s John Deere CS690 cotton stripper/baler, which continues to move across the field, slowing slightly to drop a 94-inch diameter, yellow plastic-wrapped cotton bale that is quickly picked up by a tractor-loader and plopped down next to several others near the field edge.
“It’s doing all right,” Shawn says, in answer to my earlier question about crop prospects. “It’s about what I expect — but not what I want.” He says this field, non-irrigated, is making about a bale and a quarter.
“You wanna ride?” he asks. I do.
He raises his operator on the radio, instructs him to stop, and we swap places in the harvester. I settle in, riding shotgun as Shawn shifts the controls, lowers the 8-row header, and starts down the rows as the machine hums to life. Cotton bolls move into the machinery that separates lint from burrs, then packs the cotton into large round bales.
“How’s the stripper working?” I ask.
“It’s doing really well,” he replies. “But, it comes with a pretty long learning curve. The headers, the saws, and most everything else in the stripper are the same, but the baler mechanism is so different.”
Efficiency is improved over the old stripper/boll buggy/module builder system, he says. “In cotton like this (1.2 bales per acre, according to the onboard monitor as we move through the field), I can’t do what I could with two 8-row strippers. But when I get into three-bale cotton, I’ll do as much as two strippers will do. I also got rid of two boll buggies and the module builder, so in my mind, the efficiency works out.”
We’re going about 7.5 mph through the dryland fields. “We have to run 7.5 mph to 8 mph to be more efficient than a conventional stripper,” Shawn says. “When we’re pulling 3 bales, we run about 4 mph — and that’s quite a bit faster than we used to go.”
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