Cotton ginning in the US is the most efficient and technologically advanced in the world. I had to sneak onto a cotton gin property and take some pictures of the equipment at work. The most significant advance was how the cotton is handled before ginning (This word is a derivative of "engine".) .

In the old days, farmers brought the cotton bolls to the gin in wire mesh trailers pulled by tractors or trucks. Then the gin sucked them out of the trailer and into the gin. Now they are picked and compressed with special trailers with hydraulic rams. These huge "bales" are called modules, an invention from Texas A&M.

These modules weigh up to 16, 000 pounds, are the size of a school bus, and can lead to the production of 13 bales of ginned cotton, weighing about 500 pounds each. This is about 35% of the mass of the crop, the seeds making the bulk of the weight.  Even the hulls are marketable for paper production; in the old days (and sometimes now in some areas), they were burned making cotton gins stinky neighbors.

The truck below is bringing a module in for a farmer. The gin owner, usually a coop, buys the module based on its weight, quality, and condition. Eventually, the farmer gets a check after the coop markets the cotton to a textile producer and the seeds to whomever.

These covered modules are stored all over the gin grounds waiting for processing as you can see in the background of several of the pictures..