tbran
Guest
AC quit the pickers in the 60's. The cotton STRIPPER was built into the 80's -82 I think. The AC bean counters hated them, they were used as a salvage machine in drought years, build em and ship em to Ark, Miss and Al and lA then truck them to TX and AZ etc the nest year. Again a case of a great product (many strippers are still running) but no effort into marketing. There was a AC blockman Clyde Hamer who lived for cotton products. He went to gins and got them to put in stick machines to accomodate stripper cotton for the customer he sold the stripper to. He then worked with univerity of Ark in plant and chemical research. He did this on his own with only the support of Felix Patterson who was his sales manager. No one else in the company knew what the heck cotton was except that it shrunk when washed. Their request for market funding fell on deaf ears. Now lets jump forward. Today a 6 row picker machine from Case or Deere cost $333,000. They last about 4-5 years. Most farms have 2-3-4 or these. They also cost about 5-10$ _ acre harvested to run and keep up, maybe more. You can do the math as to cost to the farmer. A common sense educator by the name of Bradly ran the Milan no til experiment station. He had the idea of ultra narrow row no til cotton harvested by a stripper (not the ones bound in bars now)which would cost about $150,000 and run 20 years and have virually no upkeep. You do the math again as to the bottom line profitibility. (A farmer who still grows stripper cotton quietly told me last year by running one picker and doing the rest with a couple of AC strippers he had put over a million bucks in his pocket in profit over what his brother in law did with the same acreage in the last 12 years. That ain't chicken change. His local gin will not except stripper cotton from anybody else because they make a mess of it. It is an art as much as a science. But doable.) A really strange thing then happened. Deere and Case came out with prototype strippers, both using old AC heads. Then from the top word came down that case and deere had given a huge grant to work on super staple cotton - for pickers. They then declared the stripper not feasable and canceled the program. Bradley went to work for Monsanto I think. Do you think this strangeIJ let us do a hypothetical. Suppose AGCO or some company revived the AC super stripper of which one was built. With 24-30' tilt head , twin continental saw_burr extractors side shift dump with basket packer etc. Then on the market side pay the gins a royalty to take stripper cotton, pay the universities a grant for research , and the chemical companies to kick in..... The possible demise of the cotton picker would break CIH and would be a serious blow to the green guys. Picker sales in the thousands at $100,000+ gross profit each is serious income. Oh well, just a science fiction story for a cold wet winter dayIJ - or could it be,,,,,