Stalk pullers??? Pull the other one...

Forgive us for this rant, but we find ourselves shaking our heads a lot at the moment and this is particularly confusing to see – especially given our global view of the cotton industry.

So, almost 20 years after being parked under trees, the cotton stalk puller has made a return to Australia?!

Who would believe that a machine that performed so poorly previously would have such a late life renaissance?

Especially as many in Australia have travelled to the US over the last 10 years and witnessed, firsthand, how hit and miss these machines really are…

In fact, our customers in the US first contacted us almost 10 years ago to get help to replace their stalk pullers

Sure, we would say that wouldn’t we? After all, we make the best version of the machine that consigned them to the scrap yard – so we must be biased, right?

Possibly… but with good reasons:

• A stalk puller needs perfect soil conditions to work properly
• Too hard and the stalk won’t come out, too soft and the whole process will make a giant mess
• It also needs the stalks to be roughly uniform in size to make sure it can grab them
• A thin stalk next to a big fat stalk will get missed as the discs or tyres fail to close on it properly
• They rely on the speed being just right 
• Too fast and stalks will be missed, too slow and there won’t be enough force to pull them
• The standard rule of thumb in the US is that they will take out around 90% of the stalks in a perfect environment and as low as 70% in poor conditions!
• Run properly, a rootcutter will take out more than 99% of stalks
• If the stalk is successfully pulled, you then have a trash problem…
• You can end up with a stalk that is over 30cm long – lying on top of the paddock!
• The top of the stalk will be woody and more brittle but the bottom will be more wet and spongy so it can take a long time to break down
• Raking and burning is not a good idea even where it is allowed 
• So, you need to mechanically intervene to try and bury it or break it into smaller pieces!
• This adds passes to the program that weren’t previously needed or you were trying to minimise – defeating any gains
• All that work has then deprived next year’s plant of the perfect potential growth channel, full of organic matter, through possibly compacted dirt
• Over a number of years this issue will get worse as only the top soil gets worked properly – see our deep ripper page for solutions… 
• And after all that you will run a huge risk of having to deal with regrowth – because burying the stalk has always been the most effective way of killing the stalk
• Once again, in the US, it is common to have to spray the paddock multiple times after pulling stalks

Sounds great…

Australian cotton farming is the envy of the world – it is generally highly efficient and very innovative. It is amazing to see some taking a step back in time because they’ve forgotten how things used to be or have been seduced by a shiny new machine (and are fed up with the old ones too most likely…)

Why not just give the customer what they want?

Because being distracted by a short-lived fad will not help our business grow long term – we are better served directing our energy into working on the next generation of the rootcutter instead. 

We hope you’ll see that in 2026, just as these latest stalk pullers start getting parked under trees again…