Stepping back into a field full of open cotton after so many years left Li Long feeling rather nostalgic.
In his previous life, when it was finally time to harvest cotton, people picked the patch at the edge of the field by hand, then harvested the rest by machine. To ensure the machine could harvest everything in one pass, they sprayed a boll-opening agent beforehand to make all the bolls open.
So when he entered a cotton field back then, there were almost no leaves left on the stalks, only open cotton.
But things were different now. Hand harvesting required a first picking, a second, and even a third, so when picking began, the plants might still be green. Although most of the bolls had opened, a few remained closed or only partly open.
Li Long had not come to pick cotton. He had no desire to put himself through that ordeal. He had come to take a look-once the cotton opened, families with little land picked their own, but a family like the Li family, with a hundred mu, could not manage it themselves, even with the people who had come from their hometown.
So before dawn that morning, Li Jianguo and Li Junfeng had driven the van to the Day Labor Market and brought back ten people in one load to pick cotton.
The going rate for picking cotton was forty cents a kilogram. The county Cotton and Hemp Company had set its purchase price at roughly 1.8 to 2.2 yuan.
The cotton mainly needed to be inspected for impurities. Different impurity levels and lint percentages meant different prices.
Lint percentage was actually the proportion of the picked cotton made up of fibers that could undergo further processing as lint cotton.
To test the lint percentage, they took