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2019 Gin Show featured SP690 cotton picker with rubber tracks.

Brad Robb, Staff Writer

April 3, 2019

2 Min Read
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Don Swisher, left, president and CEO, Preferred Equipment Company, and Jim Sayle, producer, Lake Cormorant, Miss., in front of the John Deere CP690 cotton picker that Swisher had on display at this year’s Southern Cotton Ginners Association Mid-South Farm and Gin Show.Brad Robb

History was made on February 27, in Louisiana this year.

For the first time since the Bonnet Carre’ Spillway, located in St. Charles Parish, became operational in 1931, high water levels across the Mississippi flood valley caused the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to open the spillway two years in a row. The spillway can divert 1.870 million gallons of water per-second from the Mississippi River into Lake Pontchartrain to regulate downriver water flow, maintain river stages and relieve pressure on mainland levees.

Across the Mid-South, incessant rains are impacting farming decisions, farmland and the business of agriculture in general. If you attended this year’s Mid-South Farm and Gin Show, it was hard to miss a unique piece of farming equipment on static display next to the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts — a cotton picker with rubber tracks instead of tires.

It was appropriately parked outside with the high waters of Old Man River rolling in the not-too-distant background. To say it captured the attention of every farmer who walked past it would be an understatement. Don Swisher, owner of Preferred Equipment Company, Inman, Kansas, who retrofitted the harvester, said foot traffic and farmer questions at his booth were non-stop.

The impetus for the machine began in 2012 after a late, wet fall in some regions of the Cotton Belt had growers calling Swisher requesting tracks for their harvesters. The more he investigated what it would take, the more people told him it could not be done, the more he dug his heels into the dirt to prove them, or himself, wrong.

The idea sat idle for two years until Swisher and Glyn Jordan, Con-Ag Services, in Goodwill, La., put their heads together, got serious, and made some prototypes. At one point, frames could not be built fast enough to keep up with demand. After seeing an all-open frame track assembly by international track manufacturer SoucyTrack, Swisher knew he could make it work.

After re-milling a few brackets, braces, and moving the final drive back almost 29 inches — which transferred 34 percent of the machine’s weight from the back axle on to the track, which now supports 80,000 pounds — the project was all but complete.

In addition to the John Deere SP690 on display at the Gin Show, Swisher and his team have also retrofitted tracks to a John Deere 7760.

While traveling back from Atlanta, Ga., where my wife and I visited our son who flew the nest last September to start his professional life as an accountant, I saw several fields on the outskirts of Tupelo, Miss., that looked like Sherman tanks conducted artillery exercises during last year’s harvest.

Could tracked cotton harvesters be the next big thing? I guess Mother Nature and the economics of farming will have something to say about that.

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