- [David] "A Fork in the Road" was brought to you by... - I'm Tyler Harper.

As your Agriculture Commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia Grown.

♪ Picture perfect ♪ ♪ Hang the picture on the wall ♪ ♪ I see you change from afar ♪ ♪ Yet to me you are the star ♪ ♪ All right, baby ♪ ♪ This good, this fine ♪ ♪ Take the feeling, pass it on ♪ ♪ Just pass it on ♪ ♪ Na na na na na ♪ - I'm Tyler Harper.

As your Agriculture Commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce and we'll pick Georgia Grown.

- The fascinating and ever-changing world of agriculture.

Let's hit the road here in Georgia and meet the farmers, producers, makers and bakers who keep us all fed and keep us coming back for more, straight ahead at the "Fork in the Road."

(dramatic music) ♪ I came from the mud ♪ ♪ There's dirt on my hands ♪ ♪ Strong like a tree ♪ ♪ There's roots where I stand ♪ - [David] Georgia farmers, artisans, merchants and producers, we depend on these men and women every day of our lives through the choices we make and the food we consume.

Their strategy and approach is always shifting, but the end game remains the same: results.

(acoustic upbeat country music) These fluffy fields have been a familiar site in Georgia for nearly 300 years.

In fact, Georgia was the first colony to produce cotton commercially, first planting it near Savannah in 1734, and it's a crop that remains an important part of Georgia and the nation's economy.

Cotton-related jobs employ over 53,000 Georgians and have an economic impact of over $3 billion.

This week, we explore the world of cotton, from the seeds to the seams.

- I'm Carson Cross and I'm from Midville, Georgia, and my family grows cotton, corn, peanuts, and wheat, and we're also in the ginning business.

The cotton plant on our farm is mostly just, you know, upland cotton, just your basic cotton that you make T-shirts out of.

The basic parts of the cotton plant is first, you have your plant itself.

It comes out with two leaves and then it keeps growing in what they call nodes and cotton will have anywhere from 18 to like 20 something nodes on it in a good growing season.

Our main goal is to keep a bloom on for 45 days until it becomes a mature boll, and then your mature boll opens and then you get a cotton boll and you start seeing the white stuff in the field that you see.

So when cotton harvested, the next stage is, you know, getting it to the gin or transport it to the gin.

Usually you have a farmer will stack it in stacks or stuff it in the gin or the farmer will transport the cotton to the gin and then after that process, it's moved onto the ginning process.

The gin takes it in there and they separate the seed from the lint.

The raw cotton, which is a lint cotton, it goes into the warehouse for storage, processing, and then whoever buys it, it goes onto the ports and most of it's exported overseas.

(dramatic music) - [David] Let's begin our journey through the cotton fields southeast of Macon in Twiggs County to join up with a farmer in the planting stages.

(upbeat country music) - We're planting cotton, 12 row, 38" row population, 30,000 seed per acre is what we're shooting for.

- [David] How do you pick your times?

- [Mark] A lot of it's got to do with soil temperature.

We've planted about 300 acres already, which wasn't ideal, but we have to go ahead and start so we can get over it.

All the times when it's right to plant, you gotta go, you gotta run, you know, 13, 14 hour days and you know you want it in the 80 or 90 degrees so the soil temperature stays at a certain temp.

- [David] Once you do plant, what are the conditions you're looking for for the rest of the year until you start getting the blooms?

- Ideally you'd want, you know, an inch, inch and a half of rain every week.

It'd be optimal if you could split it up, get a half inch at the very beginning of the week and half inch at the end or rain every Friday so you got the weekend off, but you know that doesn't happen.

You know, it's a good yielding crop in this area.

It's pretty forgiven.

You get 60 good days at the end of the year with good rainfall, it gives you a chance at the end, it can make a good crop.

(gentle acoustic guitar music) - [David] Executive Director of the Georgia Cotton Commission, Taylor Sills, joined me on my journey through the planting, growing and picking of cotton.

- So the Georgia Cotton Commission is a state checkoff program for cotton producers.

We're mandated by law to invest grower funds in programs of research, promotion and education, and we help to represent 3,500 cotton producers across the state like Mark and his brother, Hudson.

We grow cotton on a given year between 95 and 100 counties.

This year we're gonna plant 1.2 million or a little less acres.

- [David] It's really impressive, the number of cotton farmers.

Has that stayed the same over the years or is that something that has transitioned?

- [Taylor] Yeah, we peaked out on cotton acres in the early 1900s at about five million acres across the state, but those acres were centered around North Georgia.

Atlanta was a major cotton growing area in the state, Cartersville, even on up into Dalton and places like that.

The boll weevil came and at one point cotton acres got down to about 120,000 acres in the state of Georgia, so we've really made a comeback.

- [David] Tell me why the Georgia's a great state to grow cotton.

- It's funny you mentioned that.

Georgia was the first state in the country to grow cotton commercially.

The second year of the colony of Georgia, they planted cotton in the trustees garden there in Savannah, which was designed to help farmers learn about new crops that they could grow on their farm, and we've grown cotton in this state ever since.

- [David] Tell me where the cotton from Georgia goes.

- 85% of raw cotton is exported, mostly to the East Asian market.

And then part of what stays domestically is spun into yarn and then exported to be turned into a finished good.

About 80% of the cotton goes into textual clothing, shirts, pants.

Another big part of it is home goods, towels, bedsheets, you know, there's a conception out there of the farmer and his overalls with his pitchfork and that couldn't be further from the case.

Farmers today, just like Mark Herrington that we met with earlier, they're running very advanced, complicated businesses and they have to have the skillset to go with that.

This field was planted Saturday.

I assume, in a few days, hopefully those seeds will crack and that plant will come up.

It'll start off as a little tiny cotton plant, but at some point it goes into fruit production stage, so you'll see little white or yellow flowers in the cotton white to yellow-ish.

They'll be pollinated.

Those flowers will turn red and then they'll fall off and what comes after that will be a nice, big round boll of cotton, like he said, mid to late September, early October.

They will look at starting to harvest.

It'll be ginned over the winter and then hopefully make it into yours or mine closet sometime relatively soon.

(side swooshing) (instrumental country music) - This has all been stripped and we'll come back over here and plant right over these strips parts.

You see this probably 18 inches and we'll put the seed right in the middle of that.

- [David] And tell me about the machine behind you here.

- This is a 1230 hydraulic drive case planter.

She's been over some acres, but she still does a good job.

The seeds in this hopper here, our seed are treated.

We don't put anything in the furrow, which we don't have a lot of trouble with nematodes around here yet.

- [David] And I see some peanuts in there.

- That was last year's crop.

Peanut puts out nitrogen.

When you come back and plant cotton over it, one of the main aspects of growing cotton, you got to add the nitrogen to it, you know, you gotta feed it nitrogen and what it's getting out of this ground that had peanuts last year is one of the main things that the old peanuts are putting off is nitrogen.

That's really good for cotton growers.

I can remember me and my brother playing tractors in the front yard and that was one thing, I never even thought about another job, you know, I just loved farming.

It's rewarding to plant something to carry it out through harvest.

(dramatic music) - [David] We now let a few months pass, watch the weather and head up to Shepherd Farms in Rutledge to begin the cotton harvest.

(gentle upbeat music) - [Taylor] The Shepherd family is harvesting their cotton crop for 2023.

- [David] And we're here in Rutledge.

We're not in Deep South.

- That's right.

- [David] How far up in Georgia can you grow the cotton?

- So in this side of the state, this is, you know, here in Morgan, Walton, Oconee is kind of the heart of the Northeast Georgia cotton production area, but we have producers this year in Franklin-Hart and Elbert County too.

If you look over into South Carolina, on the Northwest side of the state, we have a little more concentrated amount of acres there.

It's centered around Cartersville and Rome.

There's a gentleman who farms a little bit of cotton and his base of operations is 15 miles from the Chattanooga city limit.

Cotton's the most widely planted crop in Georgia.

I believe in 2023 planted cotton in 96 of Georgia's 159 counties.

(gentle upbeat music) You've got three different distinct machines go going right here.

This right here is your standard cotton picker.

Yeah, that thing, it has little spindles in it and they come through and pluck the cotton off the plant.

It blows that into that basket.

Then you see his boll buggy right here.

That's just a transportation device so it can get that cotton to the module builder, and a module is one of these, I call 'em loafs rectangular volume of cotton.

It's about the size of a shipping container, but when producers talk about bales, those are gonna have about 14 to 16 bales of cotton.

After they came out with a new harvest equipment that rolls and picks together, those are called round modules, so this is a conventional module.

This also has all the seed, sticks, burr, leaf, anything that came off the plant and the harvesting process is in there with it and that'll all be cleaned out at the gin.

- [David] So how's the crop looking this year?

- It's doing pretty well so far.

We've gotten into some, it's probably been three plus acre cotton and we've had other places that haven't did so well, but overall it's been a good crop this year.

- [Taylor] As you see here, this is a beautiful boll of cotton.

There's actually, this is a five lock boll.

You have five locks of cotton here in this boll.

Most of your cotton is four, most bolls, but you know, you get lucky sometimes and have a lot of five lock cotton that you see it there.

- [David] So it's like the four leaf clover of cotton.

- [Taylor] Kind of, that's exactly right.

Anytime we can get a bonus, we'll take it.

(dramatic music) - [David] Let's now head down to a cotton gin in Omega, Georgia, and meet a few cotton farming families who are transforming cotton from field to fabric.

If you've never seen a cotton gin in action, it's an amazing sight indeed.

(upbeat music) - The cotton gin is very similar to the mechanical pickers that you see today.

They all the same as they did 50 years ago, they're just a lot faster.

Eli Whitney was probably producing a bale a week, where this one's producing 50 bales an hour, that's the difference.

We try to grow the finest cotton that we can right in this area.

Our coastal plains, the sandy loam that we have here is ideal for our cotton so we can grow some really good quality cotton here and it pairs so well with our peanut crop that comes from here.

55% of the peanuts used in the United States come from an 80 mile radius of where we're standing right now and the cotton production matches so well with the rotation for our peanut so it just makes it a great fit for this area.

Southern Drawl Cotton was formed about three years ago and a group of nine family farms went together to try to add some value to the cotton that we were growing.

We thought we had to do something better than making bales of cotton and putting 'em on a ship in the port of Savannah and sending them to India and Pakistan and China and then having 'em send them back as high price shirts and sheets and whatnot, so we got in the sheet business.

All of our cotton comes through the Omega gin.

This is the modern-day version of Eli Whitney's invention so many years ago, today a gin that's spitting out about 50 bales of cotton an hour.

(acoustic guitar music) - [David] Like Brian, Michael Brooks also has a love for cotton and farming.

His family has been farming in South Georgia since the 1800s.

It's in his blood and his roots.

- So basically we're combing and this is how you tell the fiber length.

This is a good cotton.

Everybody that's involved is either friends or family and we just try to keep it that way and we're trying to bring part of our farms into your home.

We looked at having retail stores and it just, we couldn't see where that was feasible at the time and once online sales started going to a lot of stores and it opened up that avenue for us.

We've been fortunate and really excited about the future of Southern Drawl.

So you get a grade on color, you get a grade on how long those fibers are within there, then you get a grade on how strong those fibers are.

- [Brian] He's weaving it for you.

- [Michael] So now we're just making yarn.

That's all it is, just twisting it out.

That's how they used to do it years ago.

- [Brian] We made about 53 or 54 sets of sheets out of a bale of cotton.

Normal sheets are about 70 to 72.

That's how much difference it is and the reason our sheets cost more, it takes a lot more cotton to make.

- So we figured if we were gonna have to be expensive being all made here in the US, we better make the best product that we could with the cotton that we're growing.

We're proud of our box and the way it happens.

This tells you a little bit about the sheets and kind of our warranty and how to handle it.

You'll get a card in it and they'll tell you what farmer, what farm that cotton represents that it comes off of.

This particular set has got the rope draw as a fitted sheet where you can get it both ways.

We have an elastic sheet for fitted and we have the rope draw.

I was a marketing major and you always try to tie some kind of niche so the first time you use it, you'll actually come through and pull these to even it up.

There's a space that'll be on the side that allow you to adjust and then after you use that you just pull it in and once you get it tight, you lock it in and that locks it down.

And so we're really proud of that, really proud of that.

- [David] The drawstring keeps it from slipping off it.

- If it comes off your bed, I'm telling you, you've worked really hard at night to make it happen.

That's right.

This is just a two-piece set of our towels.

You can get a six-piece set or just two large towels, but they make really good gifts.

- [David] It's the quality, softness, purity of Georgia cotton that these farming families believe in.

It's why they continue to grow.

It's how they sell with honesty.

And they say nothing is more rewarding than the feedback.

- I personally call everybody at buy a set of sheets.

A lot of people wouldn't believe that, but I make an effort to call 'em to just say thank you 'cause I want people to know how much we appreciate them.

They can buy sheets anywhere, but they chose to buy 'em from us and they're shocked that someone would call 'em and say thank you and check on 'em and make sure that everything's okay.

But I tell 'em, we as Southern Drawl, we want to treat them the way we wanna be treated so we're gonna treat our customers the same way and if something's not right, oh we'll fix it.

- Our hardest sale is the first order that they buy from us.

90% of our people, after they buy the first order, they come back in time and it's a repeat.

(upbeat music) - I'm not kidding when I say I made a lot of friends around the country.

Had a girl outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

We text back and forth nearly every day.

I can't talk to her and she can't talk to me 'cause she can't understand me and I can't understand her, but she's a dental hygienist and when she's cleaning teeth, she's selling sheets from me.

We've become very good friends.

I took some of these bolls and picked 'em off and sent 'em to her.

I said, some of 'em will be open when they get there and the ones that are not, just put 'em in your window sill and they opened up and that was fascinating to her.

She said that was a big thing every morning to go look at the bolls and see which ones that open and which ones are cracking and 'cause they'll still open.

You take one and put it in your dash of your car, in a day or two it'll be open to it.

The warmer it is, the more it'll, faster it'll open.

- [David] So these Georgia farmers seem to sleep well at night.

You could say it's because they work so hard every day, but odds are it's because they're sleeping in some of the softest sheets in the USA, made with a genuine Southern Drawl.

(dramatic music) We now explore another cotton-related operation in 1888 Mills in Griffin, one of the last major towel manufacturing plants in the United States.

(upbeat music) - We're at 1888 mills here in Griffin, Georgia.

We started this company in 1996, so we've been here almost 26 years now.

We had lost a lot of textile jobs in this area and we felt it was very important for folks to work.

As one of the founders, we knew it would become a global industry as we had a lot of examples in global industry such as electronics, automobiles.

We knew textiles would become a global industry, but we wanted it to be local and the people here are very important to us and so that's why we started the company.

In this plant, we make towels, using some of the finest cotton grown, a lot of it grown here in Georgia.

1888 is largest towel manufacturer in the United States.

We are very, very pleased to make the best towels in the world at this facility and we find that to be part of our textile heritage, which you find in our name, 1888.

Towels have been continuously made in Griffin since the year 1888.

In the 1888 Mills Griffin facility, product-wise we probably produce close to 6 1/2 million pounds of actual finished towels.

1888 Mills has three sales groups: retail, hospitality, and healthcare.

In retail, our largest customer is Walmart, but we also make for Target, we make for Dollar General, we make for a lot of the major retailers, we also do a lot of e-commerce.

We're very pleased with relationships we have with hotels like Choice Hotel chain.

All the Hyatt bath towels that you see are made right here in Griffin, Georgia.

(upbeat music) Cotton is the best natural fiber to work with because of a lot of different things.

Absorbency of course, but also it's very comfortable on the skin.

It is a natural fiber, so it's very breathable.

It weaves extremely well and will give you a very high loft on the fabric itself and so cotton is our number one main staple.

How you make a yarn, which is ultimately gonna be made into the towel, is you actually take the yarn, you elongate it, take any of the trash out of the yarn and you put twist in it.

When you put twist in it, that's what gives it strength to make it into a yarn.

Cotton staple length is extremely important because to do that twisting you've gotta have something to catch with, so you putting the twist in, the longer the staple the better, but the Georgia upland cotton is certainly satisfactory for anything that we're trying to do.

So our original raw material into the plant is actually cotton that's already been spun into yarn.

Now, in our supply chain, we have other vendors that actually take the raw cotton, go through the generating process and spin into the yarn, but our original raw material is the yarn itself.

The yarn comes on metered cones, so we know specifically for quality purposes how many yards are on that cone.

So as it goes through the first step is what we call warping and that's getting the yarn into the length direction through the towel.

The second process we call is sizing.

We do two things in sizing.

We get it from a warp beam to a loom beam, so it'll run on the loom equipment.

But the second thing, we give it a little more strength because the pressure on the looms are pretty severe and so we use a biodegradable starch, or reclaimed starch, that actually coats the yarn, it's kinda like spaghetti so you coat the yarn with that and then from that process we go right to the weaving.

From that process, we call that being in the gray.

Those will be on huge rolls.

They'll be stored on those rolls until they go to the finishing and dyeing.

Then it would go out to the fabrication or the cut and sew and from there whisk away to the warehouse for distribution.

(upbeat music) Interestingly, about 1888, even though we're a manufacturing company, we happen to manufacture towels, we have pretty much every discipline job that you could want to find in here.

Obviously there are manufacturing, so technology jobs, industrial engineering jobs, mechanical engineering jobs, all those kind of jobs are very important.

You know, we certainly have computer folks, we have accounting folks, we have product development marketing folks, we have sales folks, we have human resources, administrative folks, so here you've got every discipline that you could find under our roof because it's a company that encompasses so many things in getting product out to the ultimate consumer.

You know, we have every job there is except for, I guess, food and healthcare.

(chuckling) - My name is William Harris.

I work over the local room.

It's just like where we put all the spoons on a wheel and make a big beam out of it.

We make 13 to 14 beams per eight hour shift.

And then we take 'em to the slasher, they put 'em all on the slasher and run 'em all together to make a bigger roll and it go from the slasher to the weave site.

That's where it turn into a towel.

- My name is Sandra Hall.

My job title is draw in and change.

That means I draw all the patterns for these machines.

Once I get through with the process, they are put on the machines and put in production.

I will give you a short description.

You have a large spool of thread on the top, a large spool of thread on the bottom.

Those go through three different items, drop-wise, head-lies and reeds.

When it goes through that final process, the yarn goes across and tightens the towel up to make the loops, or terry, in the towel.

My reward concerning my job is I start with thousands of strings, go through processes, and then when I see that coming off the machine, I made that.

That is very rewarding to me, knowing that I started from scratch and look what I did.

- We really feel strongly about our employment base here and we really feel strongly about our community and sense of community.

Regardless of your education level, we have a place for you here, we can train you here.

It's a great industry.

You know, it goes back to 1888 here in Griffin.

You know, everybody uses a towel every day, hopefully, and you know, it's a very sustainable industry.

We've been here for a very, very long time and I think regardless of your education level, regardless of what your desires are, if you have the passion for doing what we're doing, we want you here.

- I guess my favorite part would be coming in and saying good morning to everybody.

To me, it's just a great place to work and I'm thankful to be here.

(upbeat music) - [David] So from the seeds to the harvest to the gin and off to the textile manufacturing, both big and small, the cotton industry continues to innovate and thrive here in Georgia, delivering soft, fluffy fabric to families all over the world.

I'm David Zelski, see you at the next Fork in the Road.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) "A Fork in the Road" was brought to you by... - I'm Tyler Harper.

As your Agriculture Commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia Grown.

♪ Picture perfect ♪ ♪ Hang your picture on the wall ♪ ♪ I see you change from afar ♪ ♪ Yet to me you are the star ♪ ♪ All right, baby ♪ ♪ Feels good, feels fine ♪ ♪ Take the feeling pass it on ♪ ♪ Just pass it on ♪ ♪ Na na na na ♪ - I'm Tyler Harper.

As your Agriculture Commissioner, I have the honor of representing one of the hardest working groups of people in our state, our farmers.

That's why we invite you to take the Georgia Grown Challenge.

Try any Georgia specialty crop against any other state's produce, and you'll pick Georgia Grown.