Originally Posted by mollymct
I just came from a visit to my grandmother's town, where the cotton gin was hoppin' and the roads were lined with white fluff! I eyed the stuff with new interest as a quilter and wondered how many yards of quilting cotton might come from a bale of cotton (these bales were huge rectangles)!
I was wondering these days, too, what happens to the "scrap" cotton left after the pickers have picked? Anyone know? I know it wouldn't have been wasted in my Gran's time.
Your Gran's day was probably before mechanical harvesting. Cotton was picked by hand, by poor people who had no easier way to earn a living. And it was a miserable way to make a tiny amount of money. At least, I've been told by someone who picked cotton as a child that even walking soybeans is better than picking cotton. And walking soybeans used to be the most miserable summer job in Iowa.
Mechanical pickers are faster at harvesting and they are ultimately cheaper than paying hundreds of pickers. But like everything in modern life, there's a trade off: there's quite a bit of cotton left in the field.
It doesn't go to waste, though, because it gets plowed under and contributes organic matter to the soil. Not enough to adequately fertilise it (cotton is the heaviest feeding crop in the US), but enough to help improve the physical structure of the soil.