By ALYSSA DIZON
AVALANCHE-JOURNAL
A south Lubbock County cotton gin hopes to speed up its ginning efficiency with its new equipment, especially since the High Plains is expected to yield a record crop.
Lubbock Cotton Growers purchased brand-new gin equipment two years ago to increase its daily production of bales and the overall capacity for high crop yields.
“In 2004, we ginned about 94,000 bales. In 2005, it was right at 100,000,” said Rex Kennedy, a cotton producer and member of the LCG board of directors. “In 2007, we did about 105,000, and it looks like this year we’re going to gin between 85,000 and 95,000 bales.”
He said LCG’s 90 grower owners decided to build a new $7.5 million gin that will be able to handle the high number of bales and the numerous cotton varieties from producers spanning from Plainview to Post to Smyer.
With the new Lummus gin equipment in place, Jerry Butman, LCG gin manager, said the gin produces an average of 1,300 bales per day, which more than doubled the old gin’s output. He would like to eventually reach 1,500 bales a day.
The new gin is bigger, faster and much better at drying the cotton, he said. The old gin could make seven to nine bales per hour with cotton at an 18 percent moisture level compared to the current 40 to 50 bales-an-hour rate.
There was a slight setback for the gin after an Oct. 21 storm dumped rain and hail across parts of the South Plains. It flooded fields, knocked cotton bolls to the ground and delayed harvest for a few days, but it also affected LCG’s bale production speed because of standing water and slick mud
surrounding the modules in the yard.
In order to bring the gin up to the speed owners would like it to operate at, there are some mechanical issues that must be worked out, Kennedy said, but the basic idea of ginning technology itself has not changed very much since Eli Whitney’s hand-operated cotton gin.
Ginning process
Trucks pick up tarp-covered modules sitting in the LCG yard and transport them to a large platform with rollers. Gin workers remove the tarp and the rollers carry the modules to the module feeder that tears them into pieces or locks of cotton. Those locks travel down a large chamber into the Steady Flow unit where they are stored until the ginner asks for them.
Once the ginner — the worker managing the ginning process from a control booth — is ready to start, the cotton in the Steady Flow unit is sent through two large separate pipes to two separate shelf dryers. The cotton moves through a series of shelves, which dries out the cotton and prepares it for ginning.
The dry cotton goes to machines for first-stage cleaning and second-stage cleaning; next, it travels to the distributor; and then, it is divided among five gin stands.
At each stage of cleaning, including the gin stands, the cottonseed and trash — burrs, sticks and leaves — are removed and transported outside to the seed house or the burr house. Trucks collect the trash and burrs from their respective houses and take them to companies that will use them. The trash goes to a compost company and the seed goes to a compress for storage, Kennedy said; the sale of the seed pays for the producer’s ginning fee.
For each gin stand, there is a lint cleaner behind it that removes any remaining trash. After the lint cleaner, the cotton travels to the condenser, which injects humidity into the cotton using three humidifiers.
The final stage is the two bale presses: about 40 to 50 roughly 500-pound bales are pressed and strapped every hour. When the finished bales roll out, workers grab two 8-ounce samples from each bale for the classing office. They wrap the whole bale in plastic and send it to a forklift operator who loads them onto trucks that will take the cotton to a compress for storage.
