Late Fall work in Northeast North Carolina

[nctobfarmer]

I was driving around meeting with clients this week and caught some photos from the car of the farm work going on here in NC. Cotton picking is starting up in full swing, corn is mostly done and stalk shredding and disking the corn land is going on. Peanuts are almost done being picked and sweet potatoes are being dug. Beans are not yet ready, but will be soon. Here are some pictures:

Traditional cotton crew at work. You see the picker a JD 9900 series, the KBH module builder with a 4440 pulling it, and a boll buggy pulled by a 8120. You can't really see the stalk shredder and tractor in this picture, but it was there.



Deere revolutioned the cotton picking process in 2010 with a machine that will pick and make a round bail inside the machine. This is a JD 7760 round bale picker. This machine cuts out several steps and a lot of labor. The round bales are also wrapped in plastic which helps keep the cotton dry and has less loss at pick up by the trucks. New machines like this run about $600k, so they are still not as common as the traditional set up above.



Rear view, the machine can carry one bale on a rack while making one inside.



Here are the bales. You can see a Case tractor with stalk shredder between the bales in this photo.



Peanut digger/inverters. You can see how these machines flip the peanuts out of the ground and upside down to dry. In a week or two, they will come back with a peanut combine to pick them up. These are JD 7930's with KMC 6 row digger/shaker/inverters. Sorry, no photo of the peanut combine yet, but you can see one at kelleymfg.com




Case spreader going down the road. Time for lime and other fertilizer! Wheat's going in the ground soon.

[Southern]

Cotton isn't ready in my area yet. The other week I saw them getting boils on them. However they wasn't fully filled out yet. I need to go by there to see how they are doing. Our guys still do the wagons. Only 1 farm has a KBH cottonhouse. Since our local gin don't do moduals. The farm that runs the KBH has the gin in SC come up to get them. Which is like 2 hours away. After cotton fell out in the 1980s. The gin never bothered to upgrade, and the farms that do cotton is low in my area.

[nctobfarmer]

Southern, cotton made a real come back here in the early 1990's. When I was living on the farm, 1977-1989, no cotton was ever grown. Then, it picked back up and has become a major cash crop in eastern NC. Almost every county has at least one gin, and it has become more prevalent than corn in a lot of places particularly since prior to this year, the last four corn years have been awful. Most farmers supplement their cotton income with either tobacco, peanuts, or sweet potatoes. A lot of folks here have a cotton, tobacco, soybean rotation or a cotton, cotton, soybean rotation with just a little corn or winter wheat mixed in. Cotton is a heavy nitrogen user, so the beans give the land a rest, and allow a little rebuilding of N in the soil.

[Southern]

Cotton has made a slow comeback here. But nothing like what we had in the mid 1900s. Where nearly every farm grew it. I still see it won't make it to peak production like what we used to have.

I went by those fields again coming from town. They are almost ready to pick. The local gin already had a couple wagons unloaded, and waiting in the yard for pickup. So our picking is starting.

[duplin97]

A couple of fields around are ready for harvest. However a few are REALLY weedy. I see what your saying about the cotton, soybean rotation. The BTO a few miles south from me runs the same rotation, however a younger farmer across the street is growing grain sorghum (first time I have ever seen the crop in real life). He has about 30ish acres of it.