Turkey Is Reaping the Benefits of Machine Picking

The global cotton industry has been experiencing a very dynamic transformation since the turn of the 21st Century. This transformation was the inevitable outcome of various global or country specific social, political, technological, commercial and environmental concerns, developments, advancements. Owing to the limited space availability, we do not intend to go through each of these factors; instead we’ll look at the establishment of “new frontiers,” focusing primarily on Turkey.

Some Significant Developments

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Starting with cotton cultivation, the doors to new frontiers had been opened in Turkey in mid-1980s, with the opening up of seed development to the private sector. Since then, many seed companies concentrated on the development of domestically produced conventional seeds with high yields and  good fiber quality (Turkey acts in parallel with the EU, where the growing of GM cotton is not allowed). The yields achieved with  certain brands have been comparable to those obtained with GM seeds in many countries. One such company, located in Aydin and actively engaged in cotton growing, ginning and baling operations has also been producing cotton planting seeds, for countries in which they had already established export markets, including Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Spain, Greece, Mexico, Colombia, Ethiopia, etc. It is also important to note that in Turkey the share of privately produced cotton seeds has exceeded 90%, leaving the public sector with a share of less than 10%.

The use of mechanized picking equipment has recently expanded, reaching to those countries, particularly China, where, until recently, manual picking largely benefited from relatively cheap local labour. The advantages of machine picking have recently been put into practice in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, where cotton harvesting machines, mostly U.S.-made, have been extensively employed. However, cotton fields lying further east between the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers are comparatively small, making the use of large cotton pickers unsuitable. Chinese authorities are presently working on a project to manufacture considerably smaller sized pickers that can be effectively and economically employed.

Adoption of machine picking has also been a significant development in countries with high cost and/or shortage of labor. The 1990s was the last decade in Turkey when manual picking was prevalent in many cotton growing areas. The transformation was so swift that many large farms chose to adopt machine picking with remarkably swift adaptation to suit to local conditions. It will not be too long before we see these pickers in many parts of Africa, such as Ethiopia, particularly on the newly developing large scale cotton fields.

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One such project is coming to reality in the Omo Valley, approximately 1,000 km southwest of Addis-Ababa, capitol of Ethiopia.  This is an integrated, highly mechanized Turkish project, not only for cotton cultivation but also cotton ginning/baling, and at a later stage, spinning operations. U.S.-made large capacity harvest machines are soon expected to appear in these Ethiopian cotton fields, where owing to suitable and steady climate, cotton can be planted almost at any time of the year.

Mention should also be made to a newly developed tripartite project: three Turkish investors in a joint venture with the Ethiopian government. One of the three investor companies had already established its presence some years ago in Adama, approximately 100 km southeast of Addis-Ababa, where very large scale ginning/baling, cotton spinning/weaving, dying and printing operations have been  taking place in their state of the art production plants.

The difficulty of ensuring a constant supply of acceptable quality constantly from locally grown and ginned cotton prompted this investor to establish a linkage with the Aydin-based Turkish seed development company mentioned earlier, which already had  good experience in seed development, cotton cultivation and ginning. With such an arrangement, locally grown good quality cotton would be used in the Ethiopian textile industry, while the surplus good quality cotton and (subsequently cotton yarn) could also be exported to many parts of the world, including Turkey.

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