Cotton ginners have been working through the off-season to make sure they’re ready to get the cotton rolling.
Jerry Butman, the general manager for Lubbock Cotton Growers, said his workers begin making repairs immediately after they have finished ginning for the season. From checking bearings to changing elbows, the team at Lubbock Cotton Growers looks at every piece of equipment so there are no problems during the season.
“The machinery that gives you trouble is the machinery that you didn’t look at during the offseason. So we make sure we look at everything and try to try to get it back to brand new as or as close as it possibly can each repair season,” Butman said. Lummus Ag Solutions helped build the gin at Lubbock Cotton Growers in 2009. Approximately 115 local producers use that specific gin facility on the southeast side of Lubbock.
Ross Rutherford, the Vice President of Customer Service for Lummus, said some gins choose to begin repairs once the cotton seed has been planted. “And with a cotton gin being a seasonal business and the cotton gin under pressure to get that farmer’s cotton processed, the efficiency and the uptime, we always talk about downtime, it’s really about uptime. A gin is only profitable when bales are going out the door,” said Rutherford.
The efficiency of the gins has become more crucial because of decreased operations across the nation. In the past decade, the number of operational gins decreased from 601 to 463 in 2024, according to the USDA. Rutherford says the biggest challenge the industry is facing is the lack of new and young people to replace the retiring workers.