Cotton

V

Processing

When cotton arrives at the cotton gin, it is sucked into the building through pipes placed in the trailers or trucks. In many plants it first enters driers that reduce the moisture content for easier processing. The cotton travels next to equipment that removes burrs, sticks, dirt, leaf trash, and other foreign matter. It then moves to the gin stand, where lint is separated from the seeds. After separation from the seeds, the lint is packed tightly into bales. For the processing of cotton fiber to make yarn, cloth, and cordage, see Spinning; Textiles.

VI

Marketing

In determining the value of cotton, workers class samples from each bale according to staple, grade, and character. Staple refers to fiber length. Short staple accounts for about 25 percent of the domestic crop and is used in many coarser textiles. Medium staple accounts for about 70 percent of U.S. cotton, and long staple and extra-long staple for about 5 percent.

Grade refers to color, brightness, and amount of foreign matter. Standards for grading U.S. cotton are established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and revised from time to time. The highest of the grades are Good Middling and Strict Middling. Six color groupings indicate the degree of whiteness from white to gray. Character refers to the diameter, strength, body, maturity (that is, ratio of mature to immature fibers), uniformity, and smoothness of the fibers.

VII

Cottonseed

Once a waste-disposal problem for gins, cottonseed is now a valuable by-product. The seed goes to oil mills, where it is delinted of its linters in an operation similar to ginning. The bare seed is then cracked and the kernel removed. The meal that remains after the oil has been extracted is high in protein. Linters are used for padding in furniture and automobiles, for absorbent cotton swabs, and for manufacture of many cellulose products such as rayon, plastics, lacquers, and smokeless powder for munitions. The hulls, or husks, are used as feed for cattle. Kernels, or meats, provide cottonseed oil. The cake and meal are used for feed and flour. Foots, the sediment left by cottonseed oil refining, provides fatty acids for industrial products.

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VIII

Production

Cotton ranks just behind corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay among the leading cash crops of United States agriculture and is among the nation's principal agricultural exports. The leading cotton-producing states are Texas, California, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Arizona.

Surplus stocks of cotton on hand in the United States fluctuated widely during the 1970s. The world economic recession of 1973-74 ushered in a period during which both production and consumption of cotton dropped. Production, however, fell faster than consumption, and by the mid-1970s the U.S. surplus had been reduced to the lowest level in 50 years in order to compensate. Toward the end of the decade, rising prices caused by the shortages had stimulated increased production, but at the same time these higher prices made domestic cotton more vulnerable to competition from artificial fibers and imported cotton goods. World demand for cotton continued to be erratic, and some groups lobbied for increased price-supports, but an upward trend began in the 1980s.

Cotton is still a principal raw material for the world's textile industry, but its dominant position has been seriously eroded by synthetic fibers. In the United States, cotton accounts today for about 35 percent of the materials processed in textile mills, as against 80 percent before World War II. Net per capita consumption of cotton fibers in the United States, after declining by more than one-third between 1950 and 1970, increased during the 1980s and by the early 1990s was about 12 kg (about 27 lb) per year.

World production of cotton in the early 1990s stood at 18.9 million metric tons annually. In the 1930s, the United States produced more than half the world's cotton; by the early 1990s it was turning out about a sixth. The other leading producers included China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, and Turkey.

Contributed by: National Cotton Council of America

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