Loading Cotton

Last Saturday morning we loaded whole cotton seed in Slaton, TX. We delivered it this morning to Wiggins, Co, which is east of Fort Morgan on I-76, to a Co-Op. It is fed to cattle. It was hot in Texas, around 98 degrees, but it was a dry heat and the wind was blowing so it didn't feel to miserable...at least not to me sitting in the air conditioned cab and walking around taking pictures. It might have been hot to Malcolm and the guy that was loading us.

I thought I'd post pictures of us loading, because you havn't seen this yet, and this is another way they load/unload us. You've seen the pictures of us sitting in the elevator and dumping into a chute. This is different. The loader dumps the seed into the end of the auger, and it carries it up and dumps it into our trailer. They can also unload us this way. They put the one end of the auger under our hopper doors and we crack the doors open. As the product falls out, it is augered up and dumped into whatever they are storing it in. And once we unloaded this way, and they were just augering it out onto the ground in one big pile.

Also, I thought maybe you hadn't seen cotton seed before, so I took a picture of it as well.

When they unloaded us this morning they had a time getting the stuff out of the trailer. They had a guy there who climbed under the trailer and stuck an air hose into the cotton seed from the bottom and blew air up into it. Then he climbed up onto the cotton and sat on the edge of the trailer poking a long sick down into the cotton seed to force it through the hopper door. I guess because of the fiber still on the seed, it all sticks together terribly.

Anyway, so thats cotton seed hauling. It was a nice drive up through Texas, the pan handle of Oklahoma, and through eastern Colorado. And I didn't take pictures to prove it, but no one gets to complain about lack of rain and being dry anymore. Western Texas and southern Colorado take the prize. You havn't seen dry till you've been there! And the wind was blowing all their dirt away in Texas. The sky was just brown.