Every three years, the USDA and National Cotton Ginners Association publish the results of a “Cost of Ginning Survey”. The 2021 crop is the next crop year to get the official survey. We highly encourage all gins to participate in this survey.

The Survey is used extensively in the intervening years for a wide variety of purposes. Because it has been done (same questions and definitions) in the same way for many years, trends can be traced and changes in the industry followed.

In recent years, the Survey has been done online. There has been a significant push in the past couple of years to make the survey more user friendly and try to work some of the bugs out of the initial online version.

Because there have been some changes and because the Survey is continuing to evolve, we asked Dr. Greg Hold and Harrison Ashley to do a brief webinar over zoom to orient users on how the survey would be conducted. The webinar was held last week and recorded. The link to the recording is below.

Taking the Survey online has really answered a couple of questions we’ve gotten over the years. One was is my data private… Yes. In the past, the survey data was potentially accessible through the Freedom of information act. Once the paper was published, the data was dumped to help mitigate that. Now the National Cotton Ginners Association will be the repository and it is locked up. The other question we’ve gotten is “what’s in it for me?”. The Survey is now an ongoing venture. It will be available every year. You will be able, in the future, to look at your trends over time. Things such as cost per bale of gas or electricity or module hauling. Even in the years when the data will not be a Beltwide paper, you can use the survey to help track your own costs and compare them to other gins in the region or nationally.

Please go to Youtube: https://youtu.be/_F3_AxUSzTY and just ignore the moderator.

You can find the Survey at: https://cottonsurvey.org

Take Care.