Cotton Board CEO Hosts Farm Tour, Commodity Roundtable Meeting

By Jim.Robinson|November 4, 2013

Cotton Board CEO and current Chairman of the Commodity Roundtable, William A. Gillon, recently hosted a meeting and farm tour for a group known as the Commodity Roundtable. The Commodity Roundtable is a consortium of executives who represent our nation’s commodity boards. Anne L. Alonzo, Administrator, Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) for the United States Department of Agriculture attended, spoke and participated in the tour of a 12,000 acre cotton farm north of Memphis, Tennessee.

“Administrator Alonzo and her staff do an outstanding job at AMS and it was a great opportunity for us to show them and the entire Commodity Roundtable group a first-class cotton operation,” says Gillon.

“It was an eye-opening experience to see how cotton is harvested and automatically moduled by the new on-board module-building cotton pickers,” says Alonzo. “The U.S. cotton industry has an amazingly efficient and transparent system in place to track its cotton from dirt to shirt. Our nation’s cotton producers are an integral part of keeping that process effective and transparent. Samples from every bale ginned in the U.S. are delivered to one of the ten USDA/AMS Classing Offices across the country where the samples are then classed and graded.”

The Commodity Roundtable members meet throughout each year and share information that impacts their respective programs while seeking solutions to issues they may have in common. While most participants are leaders from national research and promotion boards in the seeds and livestock, dairy, poultry and vegetable programs of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Services (AMS), executives from regional fruit and vegetable marketing orders and propane also participate.