Farming Video | How Cotton Grows: From Flower to Fiber with Brian Adams

17 Aug 252m 43s

When you put on a pair of jeans, you probably don’t think about the cotton field it came from—but Tennessee farmer Brian Adams sure does. In this video, filmed just ahead of harvest, Brian walks Damian Mason through the stages of cotton growth, from the start of the “square” (which isn’t square at all) to the fully mature boll that holds the fluffy white fiber. He explains how cotton behaves like a perennial but is managed as an annual, with hormones and chemicals helping prepare it for harvest.

Cotton flowers transition from white to pink as they pollinate, then drop off, leaving the boll behind. By harvest in October, what looks like a leafy green tree now will become a dry twiggy field with bursts of white. And in terms of yield? This Tennessee field will bring in around 1,200 pounds of cotton per acre—enough for about 800 pairs of jeans. It’s a simple, fascinating look at one of America’s most iconic crops, straight from someone who grows it.

00:00:00 Good Gene, you've been hearing the controversy from the American Eagle, but we're talking about cotton before it becomes your jeans. 00:00:07 I'm with Brian Adams here in a field in Tennessee. This is cotton before harvest. I'm holding the bull 00:00:13 and you've got every stage of maturity from after it starts to become a big plant. Till then. Talk to me, Brian. 00:00:19 Yep. So cotton, um, cotton, oddly enough for viewers I guess, that are outside of cotton country, cotton's actually a perennial, it's a tree by nature, 00:00:28 manages an annual every year long story that we can go into later. But the marketable fruit, 00:00:33 obviously Damien's holding, is a bowl. And at the end of the year when that's material, it will break open and you'll get that dry fiber. 00:00:38 You have to do that with hormone and chemical to get it there. Again, it's perennial managed 00:00:42 as an annual, and that's how you get it there. But it starts with what's called a square, and it's the most poorly named fruiting structure 00:00:47 ever because it's not a square. It's not a square, it's a triangular prism. Um, but you start and you open it up 00:00:53 and Damien, you open that one up and see what it looks like. And The bottom of it, You see 00:00:57 that very immature flower inside this Bracket. That is essentially what becomes this, 00:01:01 Uh, it will give rise to that. So once you get past that, what we call a square, that immature flower will 00:01:07 eventually turn into a white flower. Once that white flower emerges 24 hours, it'll pollinate become a pink flower. 00:01:13 Okay. All right. At that point, it's been pollinated. After that, you'll see it die off into what we call a bloom tag. 00:01:19 It'll just fall right off. And then as you open that up, you've got the, the very beginnings of that right there. 00:01:26 So that is kind of the progression of what the fruity are. It comes, it becomes a bull, and you talk about the number 00:01:31 of locks, which is these little things on here. It almost looks like it could be a, an almond or something like that. 00:01:35 Yep. It opens up. And then this plant, which is almost like a tree, as you said, Brian will dry down and by October, 00:01:41 October in this part of the world, October Here in West central Tennessee, this will dry down. It'll look like a bunch of twigs or almost small trees. Yep. 00:01:48 With a bunch of cotton, uh, white fiber cotton on 'em. And then the cotton machine comes through and harvests 'em. Absolutely. It's 1st of August 00:01:55 right now when we're doing this, and they're harvesting right now in the coastal bend to Texas. 00:01:58 Yeah. So we'll be another almost two months out to harvest this, because obviously this is still a green tree. 00:02:02 And then roughly how many pounds of cotton we gonna get outta here? How many pairs of jeans? I don't know how many pairs of jeans, 00:02:07 but 12 to 1500 pounds of cotton is, uh, you know, 1200 is probably the average around here. So 1200 pounds of cotton comes off of every acre 00:02:14 and, uh, let's call it pound, about a pound and a half per pair of jeans. So we'll call that 800 pair of jeans off of this right here. 00:02:19 Yep. Anyway, his name's Brian Adams. My name's Damian Mason. We're coming at you from a field. 00:02:22 We're talking about cotton. Now you know a little bit about the reproduction. It starts as a seed grows into a plant, 00:02:26 produces all the stuff that Brian showed You tell with a bull this opens up, cotton is there, and that's when it starts looking like a whole bunch 00:02:33 of small trees that are dead with just a bunch of cotton on them. And then it becomes your jeans. 87 00:02:36.965 --> 00:02:38.245