More cotton gins are closing or merging with others every year. As the drought took a toll on farmers’ operations, gins couldn’t harvest enough cash flow to stay afloat.
Lubbock Cotton Growers merged with Lone Star Ag in Brownfield, and bought Liberty Co-op a few years ago. The Gin Manager, Jerry Butman, said it is getting harder to keep a gin in business as the price of everything has doubled making it harder to make ends meet.
“Used to, the ginning business was easy to make money in, now it’s not,” Butman said. “You better be watching every penny you spend if you want to be profitable in this business.”
With very little rainfall the past few years, Butman said there wasn’t enough cotton harvested to keep every gin in business.
“Due to the drought, it don’t rain enough for cotton gins to gin enough volume to make ends meet,” Butman said.
So, many gins are going further to pick up cotton. Butman said 15 years ago Lubbock Cotton Growers would go 35 miles to pick up cotton. Now, the gin travels 100 miles because they can haul more at at time.
“Now we can haul 10 round bales at a time versus one module at a time,” Butman said.
Butman feels going that far is necessary because the bigger the footprint, the better off the business is.
“If you want to make money it is, and volume is the name of the game,” Butman said.
But, the smaller gins have struggled to make it work.
“Some of the gins are kind of getting left behind in some of those areas where they just don’t have the volume that they need to survive,” Butman said.
He wants farmers having to switch to keep an open mind about their new gins. In his experience, he said both times Lubbock Cotton Growers has taken in another gin, it has worked out just fine.
“I think most all those guys would tell you it’s worked out really good for ‘em,” Butman said.
Butman told KCBD he thinks eventually there will only be about two gins per county.
source: https://www.kcbd.com/