Farming Video | Cotton Picker vs Stripper Data Shows a Big Grade Difference

00:00 So we did a video back in the fall of our cotton, and we had a picker versus stripper video. So we ran both. 00:00:07 We normally run strippers, and our local dealer let us demo a picker because I get tired of hearing picker versus stripper and 00:00:16 the argument back and forth. You can have both machines where we farm right here in this part of the state, and you 00:00:25 go from here south and east, it's all pickers. You go to the west, it's all strippers. We're on the bubble. So 00:00:31 we don't ever know. We've always ran strippers ourselves, so we were able to demo a picker. Running the picker, we didn't really know what the difference 00:00:39 would be. But with our gin, we got this company actually mapped our grades back onto our ops center maps. So we have all the data now. What we learned real quick by these maps 00:00:53 is you can see the yellow strips on this map are the picker, and the blue and the purple are the stripper. Well, the yellow strips match these higher grade values on the 00:01:05 cotton. So we were anywhere from five at the very low end to 10 cents better per pound grade on the picker, which 00:01:15 maybe it's an extreme case this year on our grades, but I kind of don't think it is. We're talking a minimum of 50 bucks an 00:01:23 acre difference just by having the picker. So we learned a ton. Picker could actually run earlier in the morning, later at night. 00:01:31 The humidity didn't bother it as bad. The moisture didn't bother it as bad. Service wasn't too bad. 00:01:40 So in a lighter cotton crop, the picker will be slower because it's only six rows and we're stripping 12. But in a good crop, I think the 00:01:47 picker will actually outperform the strippers by a lot. So we learned a ton by this data, just having this data, and we actually have grade data by each 00:01:59 grade back to the bale. And so that's what I always get hung up on, too, is on grades. How do you do a side-by-side on 00:02:06 cotton? It's really hard. You're running all these round modules. They get stacked. It's hard to keep up with which one came from where in the field. 00:02:14 So then it's not a fair comparison. By putting it back into the map, the grades back into the ops center map, we can tell exactly where it came from in the field, and it proved that the 00:02:26 picker's grades were significantly better. Consistently, every field we ran, it's the same story. It's consistently better. 00:02:34 Like right here, I think it's 10 cents better. It's like that in every field we ran it, which we were blown away when we got this data back. I would have never dreamed it'd be this much difference. 00:02:45 So this data has been priceless this year, and we're looking at switching to pickers now because of it. If pickers will work on a average to below average yield 00:02:56 year, then I think they'll work for us in general. So that's what we're looking at right now is maybe switching from strippers to pickers now. I really don't have much explanation 00:03:06 on why the picker was that much better. I don't really know yet. I know the color grade was better. We had less extraneous 00:03:13 matter with the picker. And the leaf grade was obviously better. That's the one given that we did expect, but the other two we didn't. 00:03:20 So to be real honest, I can't figure out why the grade difference is much as what it is. 00:03:27.380 --> 00:03:29.740