Quality and Cost of Ginning American-Egyptian Cotton, Seasons 1952-53 and 1953-54

Excerpts from the report: This study compares the quality of services and the costs of some of the newer, more elaborately equipped plants with those of gins with only a moderate amount of cleaning equipment, and also some older gins with very simple equipment. Performance is compared both for hand-picked and machine-picked cotton, because the type of gin equipped to do the best job on machine-picked cotton may not be most suitable for hand-picked cotton, and vice versa. Thirteen gins were selected out of 21 in operation in the area studied at the time this project was begun. This area embraces the Trans-Pecos area of Texas, the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico, and central Arizona. Gins were divided into four groups of elaborately, moderately (two groups), and simply equipped cotton gins. Measurable differences between the quality of ginning services performed by gins with simple, moderate, or elaborate equipment were relatively small except in the case of formation of neps (tiny tangled masses of fiber). The more elaborately equipped gins in each area appeared to be slightly more effective in removing foreign matter from machine-picked seed cotton than the more simply equipped gins. With regard to moisture content removal and other measures of performance there was no consistent pattern by gin groups.