08 Nov Sherry: A week of milo and cotton

Here we are … in another week of harvest. The kids and I started our week still in south Texas harvesting milo. We cut milo for a couple more days. We were able to wrap up our milo harvest for 2022 early in the week. Thankfully we were able to finish up with zero issues. Yippee! We got the evening off, which worked out perfectly since we had to pack up, then head north back to the cotton pickers.

While we were away from the cotton pickers Brian had a few breakdowns, but nothing that him and Daryl couldn’t fix. However, the day we finished milo, he had a fan drive go out in a cotton picker. The parts he needed were not available in his area, but the local John Deere in south Texas did have the parts. And luckily for Brian we were still home. The next day, we picked up all the parts he needed, then headed north. When we arrived to the cotton pickers, he did not skip a beat. He got the parts and started working on it quickly. Fan drive is fixed.

We had one more day of picking cotton in East Texas. Wyatt was able to convince his little sister, Whitleigh, to go to work with him. She helped him clean row units on his picker. He also showed her how to wrap a bale manually with the tether. She helped load wrap, or really just swung on the contraption we use to load wrap. She said she is ready to run a cotton picker and will do a better job than her brothers. Ha! We finally finished picking cotton in east Texas.

Wesson used the tractor and bale spear to line up the bales so they are easily loaded on to the trailer that we haul the bales on. Once he finished his job, he and Wyatt decided to run-on top of the bales. They do this almost every day.

The next few days consisted of cleaning up the cotton pickers and getting them loaded to haul to the next stop. Cleaning a cotton picker is fun … said no one, ever. We blew all four of them off with our diesel air compressor. What doesn’t get blown off, we pick off by hand, this task seems to take forever but we all help and get it done. We will begin loading the pickers on to the lowboy tailer and start traveling south next week.

Sherry Zimmerman can be reached at sherry@allaboardharvest.com.

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