Over a number of years, the USDA, National Cotton Ginners Association and NCGA’s various member organizations such as Southeastern Cotton Ginners, surveyed our members to collect cost of ginning data. This information was collected and published every three years at the Beltwide Cotton Conference and was maintained by Tommy Valco with USDA.

The USDA and NCGA receive many calls each year for this aggregated data. All kinds of users request this data from bankers to researchers to ginners and farmers. People gaging their own operation and people trying to value a purchase. As important as this information can be, the participation by gins filling out the survey in the Southeast has been below average.

It is time to do the Cost of Ginning Survey once again but with some significant changes. Changes the developers expect will make the survey easier to do, more valuable to each participating gin and more reflective of the situation year over year instead of every three years. National Cotton Ginners and USDA ginning labs have made the decision to put the survey online. All data will be maintained at the National Cotton Ginners and each gin will be able to look at their own data as long as the survey continues.

All published data will be aggregated and individual gin information will be anonymized to maintain privacy. Gins will have access to some aggregated anonymous data but always have access to their own individual data. Since the data will be maintained and tracked each year, a gin will be able to compare themselves to the region or the country each year to see how they stack up. They can use the data to see how changes they made may have improved or hurt their costs. We can use the data to show the impact of weather year over year.

The collection of cost data each year, maintained and carried forward, and accessible will really improve the usefulness of this data for the future. We hope you’re as excited about this as we are. We really look forward to getting as many gins into this survey this year as we can.

To help with this process we’ve asked Greg Holt with the USDA in Lubbock and Harrison Ashley with the National Cotton GInners Association to hold a webinar explaining the survey, the uses, history and, more importantly, the process of signing up, and getting your data into the survey. We are hosting this webinar NEXT THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 2022 at 10AM Eastern Time. You can sign up for the webinar at: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0ufu2tqjwpG93cxg21J9OKla8LC-tsBHLd

If you want to poke around early the Survey can be found at https://cottonsurvey.org.

DSF