I own and operate a gin in Coldwater, MS which is 30 miles south of Memphis, TN. Being a public gin, we gin several different,varieties of cotton from several different types of land. We normally gin 16-18 hours per day with one crew.

My gin is equipped with 3 - 141 gin stands, split 721 overhead, two stage tower drying, two stage lint-cleaning and U.D. press. We usually gin from 5,000 to 7,000 bales per year.

Let's go back to the 1984 crop. In September we had the best crop we have had in several years. A little late but good. We got started ginning about Sept. 23rd. By Oct. 1 we had only ginned 75 bales. Then it started to rain followed by a light frost. We had two inches of rain the last week of September. These rains continued all through October, November and December, up until Christmas, for a total of 22.5 inches. They came no farther apart than 3 days except Oct. 27 when we had 5 straight days without rain.

We tried to defoliate between rains and all we did was crack bolls for the next rain to hold water and lower grades. We also had cotton in the 2 and 3 leaf stage in open bolls. By October 27 we had ginned only 161 bales of cotton. This is when we started ginning.

While all this was going on, I had a Mexican crew from South Texas or Mexico and I had to keep them busy 40 hours per week. During all this down time, they cleaned and painted trailers, repaired trailer sheds and anything else I could find for them to do.

I know all of you have ginned some wet cotton. You will usually have two or three hundred wet bales in a fall. This is not the kind of wet cotton I am talking about today. I had a new ginner who had not ginned much cotton and had ginned very little wet cotton. The first two or three days he stayed choked up about as much as he ran. Then one night I told him I would try to set the gin if he would run it like I set it. By this time he would agree to anything.

I thought back to a crop we ginned in 1972. It was about as wet as 1984's. Back then I was ginning on 5 90's, had one tower dryer, but I had a counter flow dryer that could really dry cotton if you had the nerve to turn it up.