Once in Cameron, Carl’s cotton is fed into the gin. The machines remove seeds and trash and press the cotton into 500 pound bales. Each bale receives a PBI (permanent bale identification) bar code which pins it to Carl’s farm and to its sample, which is graded for quality. Seasonal workers from Texas perform much of the labor. The gin remains active well into the night.
Once in Cameron, Carl’s cotton is fed into the gin. The machines remove seeds and trash and press the cotton into 500 pound bales. Each bale receives a PBI (permanent bale identification) bar code which pins it to Carl’s farm and to its sample, which is graded for quality. Seasonal workers from Texas perform much of the labor. The gin remains active well into the night.
At a yarn factory in Chanzhou, workers oversee the largely mechanized spinning process that turns raw cotton into yarn. Spindles of yarn are stacked together for dying, dried, and then dusted and wrapped. Bags of yarn will be sent directly to weaving factories or sold to yarn dealers in the textile center of Changzhou.
Farming equipment can easily cost more than $350,000 per machine. To keep their business viable, Carl and Grover modify equipment in the farm's shop to undertake multiple tasks and prepare harvesting equipment for use in the months ahead.
Mrs. Jiang, the owner of Yuan Tian Clothing Company, sells left over fabric from clothing production to a recycler. Cotton and polyester scraps are recirculated in a different manufacturing economy, broken down into raw materials for new products.
A truck is loaded with cotton in Cameron, SC and then heads southeast, towards the Port of Savannah, GA. It passes through a nearby warehouse for temporary storage before it is staged and then loaded again onto a shipping container for its journey to an overseas buyer. At the warehouse in Savannah, shipping containers are unpacked, repacked, sealed, and eventually picked up by another truck that hauls the container to the port.
Two workers in the sewing room of Yuan Tian factory, Liu Shizheng and Hao Junmei, talk about living far away from family and friends, overtime work, and how much they are paid for their piece work in the factory.
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