Someone once said that failure to plan is planning to fail. I’m not sure who said it, but it’s one of those things that can really ring true sometimes. In these columns, my colleagues and I often talk about...
In sports, it is inevitable that a player (or a team) will go into a slump. In every case, the recipe for getting out of that slump and back into high performance is to break down the training routine...
At the National Cotton Ginners’ Association 79th membership and board meeting in Dallas in early February, the board covered reports from committees on a wide range of topics, including technology, safety and labor, and legislative.
NCGA members are keenly aware...
It has been almost a year and a half since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued two violations for noise in South Texas. Two cotton gins were cited for noise levels, and OSHA is saying it wants these...
Over the past few months with the increased presence of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in many industries, the question is continuing to come up: What is your safety program? As we’ve been working with our members, their...
In the January 2015 issue of Cotton Farming, Dusty Findley discussed the new Occupational Health and Safety Administration reporting rule. This rule has greatly increased the number of ginners who have to call OSHA to report an accident.
If...
On Sept. 10, 2015, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new rules that could directly affect cotton gins across the country by next year.
Most people don’t think of cotton gins as producers of food, but since 2003,...
We have seen quite a few OSHA inspections occurring in the cotton ginning industry lately. If you have never been through one, there are a few things you can do now to make it go much more smoothly.
First, we...
There are several Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspections in progress at cotton gins right now. We have spent some time discussing OSHA inspections at our local meetings and at the gin schools. There will be additional discussions in January at the Beltwide Cotton Conferences in San Antonio, so be sure and attend the Ginning Conferences this year. In some ways, the inspections are very similar. We are seeing inspectors that have never been to a cotton gin before, and they make suggestions that are simply not possible to achieve. We are also seeing the normal emphasis in employee training, hazard communication programs and guarding. One significant difference we are seeing during inspections recently is a tendency to have a safety inspection, followed by a separate health inspection. We don’t know if this is the result of an emphasis in one particular region or something that is being emphasized across the United States.
Nearly every gin in the country has some type of air quality or environmental permit. Some are simple, and some are complex. It is important to know what your permit says because, just like every other government document, you're...
We're fortunate to live in what some people call the Sunbelt, but we call it the Cotton Belt. The winters are normally (last year excepted) mild, and spring and fall are usually beautiful. The summers… well they're SUMMER. Hot...
OSHA has paid visits to two gins in Texas over the last 12 months. We have learned several lessons from these two visits. One of the main lessons we have learned is that the ginning industry has very...
National Cotton Ginners Association (NCGA) President Dwayne Alford says building and maintaining a well-trained ginning sector workforce is vitally important for the U.S. cotton industry to continue being globally competitive. That's the key message Alford conveyed in his remarks...
Why the big focus on safety? It's no secret that your associations are the smallest of small businesses, but the role of your associations has become a big part of what you know about ginning cotton. Cotton ginners associations started like most other associations – a way to organize and learn from each other.
Electricity is one of the top three variable costs for a cotton gin, right next to bagging and ties, and labor. There are two main aspects to the electricity costs paid by a given cotton gin. The first is...
