. Those things gather probably twice as much trash from tall, high yielding Western cotton as they do cotton bolls. Brush harvesters and stripper are about as welcome at a cotton gin as a colony of red imported fire ants at a nudist summer camp.
Also, any moisture from rain or heavy fog shuts down the harvester instantly. Growers who have had success with stripper or brush harvesting have had to terminate the crop very early to make sure they dodge rain or fog and that reduces yield potential. Others who have tried to cheat the rain and fog have experienced disasters.
The UNR breakthrough has been promised in the West with Deere's unique 12-row picker that gathers cotton in rows spaced 15 inches apart by slicing off plants in one row and feeding them into an adjacent machine row where they are wrapped around other plants from an adjacent 15-inch row. Twisting together plants are then fed through a spindle picking mechanism.
First West showing
It has received a lot of press and rave review in other areas of the Cotton Belt where yields increases of 100 pounds per acre have reported. Deere ran it for the first time publicly in the West this year in 15-inch cotton at San Juan Ranch near Dos Palos, Calif. where ranch manager Daniel Burns planted about 180 acres of no-till cotton, herbicide-resistant cotton in 15-inch rows in one of the worst planting seasons in recent memory.
It was so late he left one field for dead — too late to replant. However, to Burns' surprise it came up.
Overall, Burns was not totally displeased with the stands in the three fields.
The 15-inch cotton trial at San Juan Ranch was part of a large scale, University of California trail comparing single row 30-inch cotton, double rows planted 7.5 inches apart on 30-inches beds and the 15-inch UNR.
Burns has been pioneer in the double row 30-inch cotton, which has out-yielded single row 30 consistently since he started growing it in 1998. It really outperforms conventional single-row-to-a-bed cotton in a poor year like 2005. During the seven years he has grown double-row 30-inch cotton, he has averaged a quarter-bale more cotton per acre than convention, single row 30-inch cotton. However in a year like '05 Burns expects to yield a half bale more per acre with twin-row 30 than single row 30.
“Twin-row really shines in a poor planting season year like this year,” he said.
600 acres twin-row
Burns grew about 600 acres of twin-row this season, which is the maximum he can efficiently plant with his Monosem stagger planting unit planter. The rest of San Juan's 2,300 acres of cotton is single row 30s This season was one of those lousy years. It started late with cold wet weather delaying planting. The crop hit an blistering July hot spell with daytime highs above 105 almost all month long and then when the weather cooled and the crop began to set cotton in August and September, fall arrived early, precluding that late summer/early fall boll set from maturing into harvestable bolls.
Untimely rain is particularly onerous in UNR because San Juan's 15-inch cotton was planted flat and water stood in the field. The rain was not good for the other cotton on 30-inch cotton, but it was on beds and the water shed off the plant rows into the furrows.
Early in the spring Burns ran an all-in-one Eliminator cultivation implement once and pulled borders to pre-irrigate. He sprayed emerged weeds with Roundup just ahead of planting with a new Deere offset planter designed to plant 16 15-inch rows.
A week after he planted, it rained about 2 inches and the field crusted over. Burns ran a rotary hoe over it, and it started to come up when another 1.5 inches of rain fell on it.
May 8 stand
By then he needed to replant, but Deere had already trucked the planter to another state. So, he just decided to take what he had, assuming it would emerge.
“It was planted April 27 and we did not get a stand until May 8th,” he said. However, it developed into a “pretty decent” stand, he admitted.
After the stand was established, it was treated for weeds twice with Roundup on May 10 and May 25.
Uni