16 Sep Sherry: Here’s to fall harvest 2024

Bishop, Texas — Hi y’all! Have y’all been waiting for our fall 2024 harvest? I have! I prefer the fall over the summer because summer temperatures in the 110+degree range are not much fun to be in.

My name is Sherry Zimmerman, and I’m from Bishop, Texas, I am the co-owner of Zimmerman Farms. I have been farming and custom harvesting with my husband, Brian, for 25 years. (He is a fourth-generation farmer and harvester.) We have four kids: Wailynn and Wyatt (16, identical twins), Wesson (14) and Whitleigh (12). We are our harvest crew, with the help of a few family members, too!

We run combines and cotton pickers. We begin our combine harvest with wheat around mid-May (Texas and Oklahoma) and normally have that wrapped up in mid-July. We then head back to Texas to harvest our milo, corn and cotton crop. We always hope to have a few days off after combine harvest to get our cotton pickers ready to roll, literally! However, this never seems to happen. The kids and I run combines, while Brian gets the cotton pickers ready. 

This year our cotton harvest began mid-July, here at home. We run two JD 7760s and two CP690s. Getting these pickers ready is not an easy task, so once the kids and I are finished combining, we join him in working on the pickers. We change about 7,200 spindles, 2,160 moisture pads and 960 doffer pads, and these are the easier jobs. Our cotton harvest here at home was pretty decent. We ran across 1.5 bales to the acre of cotton to 3 bales to the acre of cotton, all dry land. Our next cotton harvest stop is southeast Houston, Texas.  That will begin in the next couple of weeks.

Let’s talk a little bit about cotton.  Cotton in our area is planted in early March and can be harvested as early as July or as late as October. Cotton is a flowering plant. Its growing season is approximately 150-200 days. It is a beautiful plant to watch grow. Cotton is a fiber, and it is used for many things, from money to baseballs, medical supplies to animal feed, rope to cooking oil and thousands of other items.  

We use baler cotton pickers to harvest cotton.  They roll an 8-foot-by-8-foot round bale of cotton, which is then covered with plastic wrap. The bale weighs about 5,000lbs, which consists of cotton, seed and gin trash (minimal stalks, burrs and leaves). The bale will contain about 2,000 pounds of cotton and 3,000 pounds of gin trash. These bales are stacked in a row of four to eight, left at the edge of the field to be loaded in a module truck or on a semi-trailer and hauled to the cotton gin. 

I’m hoping we can get a Facebook Live in a cotton gin pretty soon. The cotton goes through the machine that separates the fibers from the seed and the gin trash.  After this process, you are left with a ginned cotton bale. Cotton is measured by lint pounds. Five hundred lint pounds make up the ginned bale of cotton.  Hopefully, the next time we visit, we will be rolling up some cotton. We are excited to share this year’s cotton harvest with each of you and look forward to answering any questions y’all may have about cotton harvest.