Cotton stripper pics

Lol....another prime example of JD copying A-C....

He was glad when his Dad got a 2 row stripper mounted on a JD 620. His work was over! 

But....then he had to walk around the cotton wagon and stomp the cotton down. Being back there in a storm of cotton and dirt was no fun either....

This was in November of 2015. A buddy of mine has 3 of these 860s, and they do a great job. This video isn't a very good representation because there was a ice storm before they got to this field. The ice forms on the cotton, and pulls it out of the bolls, and a lot of time it falls on the ground. In favorable weather conditions, they strip the stalks very clean. 

As stock machines, these strippers are really pretty crappy, especially with today's high yielding varieties. He sped his 3 860s up, and did a couple hyper-mods, and those extractors are screaming, compared to the stock strippers. They're almost impossible to plug now (unless you just try to), and he can travel really fast in high-yielding cotton. He got 12 modules of cotton on 73 acres this year. That's a LOT of cotton! Those modified strippers just took it in stride. It was a sight to see, because that field is pretty much in town, and there were 3 860s (with 4 row broadcast headers), an 880 (with a 4 row "row" head), and 2 module builders (Run by Allis 7000 series tractors). 

The 860/880 as first pictured, is a cotton stripper,  which is usually based on the same chassis a combine and harvests all the cotton after the plant has dried completely out, (much like combining beans) by using big wire brushes to collect the cotton. The 616's pictured are cotton pickers. They were based on a (reversed for 2 row) tractor chassis and had rotating spindles to gently pick the cotton out of the bolls. I've been away from cotton farming for 35 years, so the modern machines are likely different.