THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 30, 1994 TAG: 9410270209
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 165 lines
RONNIE TAYLOR STEPS on Northampton County cotton for a living.
Not all the time. Just enough to annoy him.
``This is a nasty job,'' Taylor said late this month, tromping around with blue rubber boots in a half-filled cotton trailer on a farm near Rich Square. ``I wouldn't want to do this every day. . . . It'll kill your feet.''
Taylor was compacting the cotton to make room for more loads from a mechanized cotton picker grunting its way down dusty rows just off Route 258.
The foot-mashing method is still a common way to compress raw cotton before it journeys to a gin, but cotton picking and packing machines have become more familiar since production of the fibrous plant caught its second wind a few years ago, and began closing out the 20th century with a puff.
More and more often in northeast North Carolina and in southeastern Virginia, cotton farms are expanding or springing up from financially fallow fields.
Bulging from the ever-increasing fields of withering snowball-hung plants are tremendous truck-sized mounds called cotton ``modules,'' which are made and covered to last weeks or months before being processed in a gin.
Experts have been talking for years about the comeback of North Carolina cotton, once a symbol of Southern wealth and prosperity. And state numbers suggest that 1994 will be the biggest cotton-producing year in nearly half a century.
The stagnating price of corn and soybeans, matched with a worldwide increase in demand for the fluffy fiber, has made cotton growing one of the more lucrative agricultural pursuits in recent years, agriculture officials said.
``It's been a tremendous comeback,'' said Tom Slade, marketing program manager with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture.
``It's a profitable crop for the farmers to grow, especially relative to what going prices have been in the last couple of years. . . . Acreage has been increasing dramatically.''
Total cotton acres rose by about 25 percent from 1993 to this year, state statistics show. Nearly half a million acres of cotton are being harvested this fall. And the expected yield of 680 pounds per acre blows away last year's productivity like a stiff breeze scatters picked-over cotton lint.
Much of that harvesting is taking place on the extreme western edge of the Albemarle.
``It's been a real good season for most people in Halifax,'' said Arthur Whitehead, associate agricultural extension agent for the county. Halifax was the state's largest cotton producing county in 1993, and its 43,000 cotton acres this year nearly double the next most prevalent plant - peanuts.
The two crops, with similar planting and picking schedules, are often mentioned in the same sentence.
``One of the things that makes cotton harvesting, peanut harvesting difficult is you have to harvest both of them at the same time,'' said Joe Josey, whose 1,400 acres in Scotland Neck were brimming with 900 acres of blossoming cotton.
``The reason everyone's gone to raising cotton is because it's profitable,'' said Josey, president of the North Carolina Cotton Promotion Association, which encourages cotton farming and provides funds for research and extension.
``This is the heart of cotton country in North Carolina right here,'' Josey said, standing amidst his snowy field of cotton marred only by an occasional weed patch. ``This is where cotton never left. . . . Now it's everywhere.''
Josey and his brother-partner Harris say they are among the farming families who stuck with cotton through the lean years, ``one of the few who hung in there during eradication.''
Cotton farmers talk about eradication of the boll weevil the way brewers talk about Prohibition: Business got a lot better afterward.
It was around the late 1970s when state and federal insect experts began sterilizing the male boll weevil in North Carolina, a project that helped drive off one of the most formidable foes to profitable cotton growing and paved the way for a late-'80s boom.
Farmers who once had to spray their fields 10 to 12 times a season are down to about two or three. Many experts say that boll weevil eradication, matched with a growing national and international demand for cotton products, are the main causes behind the crop's return to northeastern North Carolina.
``That's one of the primary reasons we have a hundred dollar an acre advantage over some guy that's dealing with boll weevils down in south Texas,'' Josey said.
Now North Carolina is surpassing strong western producers like Arizona, and new plants and soil technology will allow the crop to spread further into eastern counties. ``We'll be pushing California before it's all over,'' Josey said.
Josey spends his days driving his pickup from site to site, issuing orders and collecting information by two-way radio.
``It's like running a battle,'' said Josey, contacting his brother on the radio and then summoning a worker to the field. The Joseys' grandfather started the radio-contact tradition years ago when he got fed up with not being able to find their father.
``Saves a lot of miles,'' Josey said. ``It's a safety thing, too.''
The Josey brothers met to discuss the elder of their two-row cotton pickers, large green trucks whose two front wheels and balancing back wheel resemble a backward tricycle. A new two-row cotton picker sells for about $85,000, Josey said.
The picker, which local John Deere dealers say has been selling better and better lately, is one of the most complicated farm machines, Josey said.
Turning spindles wind cotton fiber from the boll into the machinery, and faster turning rubber devices spin it off before it is sucked into a cage atop the truck.
From the picker, cotton either goes into a trailer driven immediately to a gin, or it is compacted into a module that can sit for months until the gin is ready to process it.
There are now 42 cotton gins in North Carolina, many of which have been built in the last 10 years.
Two others sit just above the Virginia border, where cotton production also has been booming.
At the 1991-built Tarheel Cotton Co. gin in Merry Hill, operating hours began extending this week to keep pace with the momentum of the harvest.
Usually by this time of year the gin would be running around the clock, said Charles Ward, an owner of the Merry Hill gin and another in Winfall.
``The cold weather in August and September has delayed the cotton,'' Ward said. ``Everything's just running late.''
A COTTON GIN bustles with all the noise and anticipation of a major printing press, and toward the end of the process the fibers, finally separated from the seed, string down in sheets like virgin paper rolls.
It generally takes a given bit of cotton two minutes or less to hurry through the ginning process at Merry Hill.
Raw cotton is sucked through a giant tube and warmed for cleaning.
It passes through machines that remove sticks and burrs and is dried again before being separated from dirt, trash and seed into the fibrous ``lint'' that is the raw material for T-shirts, jeans and other items.
Finally, the cleaned cotton is compressed and tied into a bale, which emerges from huge metal doors like bread from an automatic oven.
Only about a third of harvested cotton ends up as good lint product, Ward said.
Ginners typically sell the ``trash'' for products like mattress filling and seed for feeding livestock.
Outside the Tarheel company's 20,000-square-foot gin building stand two huge structures with 30-foot ceilings for storing the seed, which Ward said is shipped year-round as far away as some Northeastern states.
But it isn't just cotton-eating cattle who are bullish on the plant's future in North Carolina.
``Cotton's going to be a viable part of North Carolina industry,'' said William Upchurch, agricultural marketing specialist with the state's agriculture department. ``It's here to plant its feet and grow.'' ILLUSTRATION: Staff photos by DREW C. WILSON
Color on the Cover
A mechanical cotton picker rumbles through a Halifax County field
near Scotland Neck. Cotton was planted in 42,873 acres of Halifax
County this year.
Willie Mutts pushes freshly picked cotton from the mechanical
pickers he is working into a trailer to be hauled to a gin.
A worker at the Tarheel Cotton Company gin at Merry Hill, pulls a
tuft of cotton for quality testing.
Staff graphics
NORTH CAROLINA COTTON PRODUCTION
NORTHERN COASTAL COUNTIES' COTTON ACREAGE
Source: U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, North Carolina Dept. of
Agriculture
For copy of graphics, see microfilm
by CNB