The cotton module builder is a machine used in the

harvest Harvesting is the process of collecting plants, animals, or fish (as well as fungi) as food, especially the process of gathering mature crops, and "the harvest" also refers to the collected crops. Reaping is the cutting of grain or pulses fo ...

and processing of

cotton Cotton (), first recorded in ancient India, is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure ...

. The module builder has helped to solve a logistical bottleneck by allowing cotton to be harvested quickly and compressed into large modules which are then covered and temporarily stored at the edge of the field. The modules are later loaded onto trucks and transported to a

cotton gin A cotton gin—meaning "cotton engine"—is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.. Reprinted by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, 1926 (); ...

for processing.

History

In 1971 the first experimental cotton module builder was designed and built by a team led by Professor Lambert H. Wilkes at

Texas A&M University Texas A&M University (Texas A&M, A&M, TA&M, or TAMU) is a public university, public, Land-grant university, land-grant, research university in College Station, Texas, United States. It was founded in 1876 and became the flagship institution of ...

in cooperation with Cotton Incorporated.The Module Builder
Cotton module builders have been in use since 1972. In the US today more than 90% of harvested cotton is compacted with module builders. Module builders are also widely used in other countries where cotton is mechanically harvested. In 2002 the ASABE (American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers) dedicated the cotton module builder as an historic landmark of agricultural engineering, naming it "one of the top three inventions in mechanized cotton production."

Module Building

Though many varieties of module builders and even combined module builder pickers exist, a typical module builder is a large trailer that is moved by a tractor and remains stationary when used. The wheels are often hydraulically retracted when the module builder is operational. A module builder is about 9 meters (30 ft.) long, 4 meters (12 ft.) high and 3 meters (10 ft.) wide. It works similarly to a

garbage truck A garbage truck is a truck specially designed to collect municipal solid waste and transport it to a list of solid waste treatment technologies, solid waste treatment facility, such as a landfill, materials recovery facility, recycling center ...

. When loading the cotton from the cotton picker into the module builder it should be distributed as evenly as possible. After loading the cotton into the module builder, a hydraulic compactor moves up and down along the length of the machine. This process is repeated every time that a cotton picker is unloaded into the module builder until a module is built up and discharged through the tailgate of the machine. The module is stored on the field and the module builder is moved into a new position to build up another module. The weight of one module is about 10 metric tons.

References

External links

{{Commons category-inline, Cotton module builders
Cotton Module Builder to be Designated a Historical Landmark
Agricultural machinery