Hey everyone, I'm Mitchell Hora, a farmer in Iowa, and you're listening to Fieldwork.

Big thanks to the Walton Family Foundation for their support this season.

And I am Zach Johnson, a farmer from Minnesota.

This is a podcast by Farmers for Farmers, where we talk about what's working, what's not,

which we're trying to figure that out just right here at the podcast.

What are we going to talk about today, Mitchell?

Well, let's talk about cotton since I know zero about cotton.

It's a big crap as well.

I mean, it's worth a lot of money.

A lot of people have mixed feelings when you think about cotton,

especially around, you know, the slave era where, you know, the colonists were planting seeds

and had the massive plantations.

They were really focused around cotton.

And, you know, unfortunately, of course, utilizing slaves.

Then it went to having sharecroppers and kind of a different era of cotton growth.

And now it's majorly mechanized and like they got crazy crazy equipment

for picking cotton now. I think some of those machines are cost like a million dollars for some

these cotton pickers. It's really insane. It is. It's crazy. And there's no denying that,

you know, cotton is a massive crop here

in the U.S. It's a major export for us. So it's a big deal. But today, we are going to talk

with somebody that's going to fill us in a little bit more about what's going on in the modern

cotton industry now. Yeah. So Dr. Andy Jordan is our guest today. He grew up picking cotton on his father's

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