Cotton bales with very high moisture content have the potential to damage the reputation of U.S. cotton with foreign customers, a cotton merchant says.
The high moisture levels are "clearly and unequivocally bad for the spinning value" of those bales, Jerry Marshall, Cargill Cotton senior vice president at Cordova, Tenn., told members of the Southern Cotton Ginners Association at their annual meeting at Memphis.
While the first part "is no doubt correct," Marshall says, "I don't think the second part is accurate.
"While there is probably nothing wrong with cotton at 6 percent to 7 percent moisture," he says, too much moisture can cause quality problems and leave a bad impression with foreign buyers.
"I don't think the problems kick in until it gets higher than 7 percent," he says.
That has been corroborated in studies done by Stanley Anthony, supervisor of the USDA Agricultural Research Service's Cotton Ginning Laboratory at Stoneville, Miss.
In studies going back to 1957, in which varying amounts of water were added to cotton bales before packaging, it was found that above 8 percent moisture, problems occurred from reductions in color, increases in microbial activity, increases in short fiber content and neps, and decreases in HVI color. Reflectance and yellowness values also indicated that bales became darker and more yellow as moisture increased.
Marshall, in his remarks at Memphis, noted that much of the world likes to buy U.S. cotton because of the availability of bale-by-bale HVI data.
As an example, he cited a sale his company made last year to a very large textile mill in northern India.
"They'd purchased over 10,000 bales of high-grade, long-staple cotton from our company, from which they intended to make a high-quality yarn.
Marshall says he obtained a USDA-certified printout of the original government classing to prove to the buyer "we had shipped him exactly what we had sold." Even then, the buyer was still unhappy.
Samples from most of the bales, he says, looked as they were supposed to look. But one was like the spotted samples he'd seen earlier.
With gin bale numbers in hand, Marshall phoned his Memphis office to have them double-check the USDA classing.
"All had been classed as 21s by USDA in October 2001. But when we checked the landed weight, the spotted bales had lost considerably more weight than those that still looked like 21s.
U.S. cotton thus far has been successful in garnering a disproportionate share of the world market, he says. "The reason is not that we produce the highest-quality cotton in the world — rather, we do it with reliability.
"Our merchants and co-ops honor their contracts, even when the market goes 'way up after the sale. We do it with predictability. We export cotton on time, every time, 12 months a year. And we do it because of HVI data.
But, Marshall says, if the HVI data are unreliable, if the color of the cotton changes within the course of a single season, those data have no value to the spinner.