Cotton Ginning in the United States (NAICS 115111)

1. Overview

A cotton gin is the first factory in the cotton supply chain. It takes the fluffy, seed-filled crop that comes off the field ("seed cotton"), mechanically separates the fiber (lint) from the seed, cleans the lint, and presses it into standardized bales ready for a textile mill or export. The name is short for "engine" — the machine famously mechanized by Eli Whitney in 1793 is why cotton became an industrial fiber at all. NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) code 115111 covers the businesses that do this work as a service to farmers.[4][13]

Ginning is a classic toll-processing business: the gin does not own the cotton it handles. It charges the farmer a per-bale fee and keeps or shares the byproducts, chiefly cottonseed. That makes it a small, capital-heavy, intensely seasonal, and highly consolidated link in a much larger agricultural commodity chain. Understanding gins is mostly about understanding U.S. cotton volume and price, because both flow straight through the gin. It is local, seasonal agriprocessing infrastructure — not a conventional manufacturing or textile business.

The ways in differ sharply by investor type. There is no pure-play, U.S.-listed cotton-gin company; the industry is almost entirely private, and a large share of it is farmer-owned cooperatives [26][35]. Public-market investors touch the theme only indirectly — through the diversified agribusinesses and merchants that own or feed gins, the machinery makers that build them, and the cotton commodity itself. Private investors — farmers, co-op members, and rural operators — are the ones who actually own gins, usually as shared-cost facilities rather than profit-maximizing standalones. For either door, the central underwriting question is the same: can the operation secure enough local cotton volume to keep expensive equipment productive during a short harvest season?

2. What it is and how the industry is structured

Harvested seed cotton is moved from the field in modules to a gin. The gin dries and cleans the cotton, separates lint from seed, presses the lint into ~480-pound bales, and removes waste (burrs, sticks, dirt). Cottonseed is sold for animal feed or crushed into cottonseed oil, meal, and hulls; a small amount of residual fiber called linters has industrial uses.[13] A gin's output is quality-sensitive: the USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) grades every bale on fiber length, strength, micronaire, color, and cleanliness, and that grade drives the bale's market value.[14]

Scope. NAICS 115111 is narrow — establishments whose primary activity is ginning cotton (separating lint from seed, cleaning, and baling). It sits inside the broader group 11511, Support Activities for Crop Production.[4]

What it excludes (adjacent codes, so you can see where the money moves next):

• 111920 – Cotton Farming: growing the crop. Gins process it; they don't grow it.
• 311224 – Soybean and Other Oilseed Processing: crushing cottonseed into oil and meal. Gins sell the seed; the oil mill crushes it.
• 493130 – Farm Product Warehousing and Storage: bonded warehouses that store baled lint.
• 424590 – Other Farm Product Raw Material Merchant Wholesalers: the cotton merchants and shippers who buy, market, and export the lint.
• Sibling support-activity codes 115112 (soil prep/planting), 115113 (mechanical harvesting), 115114 (postharvest crop activities, which explicitly excludes ginning), and 115116 (farm management).[4]
• Downstream spinning, weaving, and textile manufacturing are separate manufacturing sectors.

Ownership mix. Two models dominate. First, farmer-owned cooperative gins, where the growers who use the gin also own it, split the cost of ginning, warehousing, and marketing, and take margins back as members rather than as outside shareholders [6][26]. Second, independent, usually family-owned gins that operate for profit at market rates. Layered above the co-op gins are large federated cooperatives owned by the gins and growers themselves, which handle marketing, warehousing, and cottonseed crushing — best known are Plains Cotton Cooperative Association (PCCA) in Lubbock, Texas, and Staple Cotton Cooperative Association (Staplcotn) in Greenwood, Mississippi, the oldest U.S. cotton cooperative [35][36]. The U.S. International Trade Commission has long described domestic gins as commonly owned by farmers individually or through cooperatives; federal statistics do not publish a complete ownership-share breakdown.[26] This shared-infrastructure logic is why gins behave more like rural utilities than growth companies.

3. How big it is (federal figures + undercount caveat)

Cotton ginning is tiny by federal business-statistics measures, and those measures materially undercount it.

Our ground-truth federal figures come from the U.S. Census Bureau's County Business Patterns (CBP), 2023:

CBP is an employer-establishment series: it excludes self-employed and nonemployer businesses and firms without paid employees, and it does not publish revenue, bale volume, active-gin, capacity, utilization, margin, or capital-spending figures — so those are not stated here because our federal file does not contain them.[1][3] Two gaps make the headline numbers understate the industry:

1. Establishment count. Census counts 190 payroll establishments in this exact code [1], but the USDA's crop-statistics agency (NASS) counted 446 active gins in the 2024 season (down from 463 in 2023) [5], and the National Cotton Ginners Association (NCGA) says it represents roughly 1,100 ginning operations across 17 states [6]. The Census figure is lower because many gins are folded into farmer cooperatives, run seasonally under a single owner, or are classified under a parent entity. Treat 190 as a consistent employer-business baseline, not a facility census.

2. Employment (the bigger distortion). The 1,955-employee figure is badly understated because ginning is extremely seasonal: gins run flat-out from roughly September through January and sit idle much of the year. CBP measures paid employment in the pay period including March 12 — squarely in the ginning off-season — so it captures the year-round managers and maintenance crews, not the far larger seasonal workforce that runs the plants at harvest. Read 115111's federal payroll as an "off-season baseline," not the industry's true peak headcount.

The practical takeaway: nearly every U.S. gin falls under the SBA's $16 million receipts threshold, so this is a small-business industry [2], and its economic footprint is best gauged by bale volume rather than headcount or establishment counts. About 14.1 million running bales were ginned in 2024, up roughly 20% from the drought-hit 2023 crop.[5]

4. The investable universe

There is no clean public-company table here, because the direct industry is private. This is the honest picture. The genuine listed connections are diversified or indirect, spanning the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Nasdaq, the Singapore Exchange (SGX), and India's exchanges (BSE/NSE):

Private and cooperative platforms (where the industry actually lives):

• Lummus Corporation (Lummus Ag Solutions): the dominant U.S. maker of high-throughput ginning equipment; private, and Bajaj's main rival.[40]
• Olam Agri: global cotton operator with U.S. ginning/warehousing; now controlled by SALIC.[31][32]
• Cargill Cotton and Louis Dreyfus Company (LDC): private cotton merchants with global merchandising, U.S. originating, ginning, and warehouse networks.[33][34]
• PCCA and Staplcotn: farmer-owned marketing/warehousing cooperatives that also support cooperative gins and gin technology; PCCA markets on the order of 2.5–3 million bales a year.[35][36]
• Calcot: grower-owned cooperative that receives baled cotton and handles marketing, warehousing, and risk management.[37]
• Local independents and cooperative gins: e.g., McCleskey Cotton in the Southeast, and hundreds of grower-owned gins nationwide.[38]

Two things follow. First, the only ways to own a listed piece of this chain are a diversified agribusiness that happens to run gins (The Andersons), the gin-equipment maker (Bajaj), the cottonseed/merchant/exchange names (ADM, Bunge, ICE), or an SGX proxy now largely bought out (Olam) — there is no pure U.S. gin equity. Second, the co-op giants are owned by their farmer-members, so "investing" in them means being a grower in their territory, not buying a share.[35][36]

5. How the money works

A gin is a fee-for-service processor, and its economics turn on volume, byproducts, and fixed-cost coverage. The rough model is:

bales processed × per-bale ginning fee + cottonseed/byproduct value + ancillary services

Revenue has two main legs:

1. The ginning charge — a per-bale fee paid by the farmer, typically on the order of $45–$65 per bale depending on region, harvest method, and moisture [11]. The gin never takes title to the lint; it just charges to process it.
2. Cottonseed — the seed separated out is the gin's own byproduct to sell (to oil mills and dairy feeders). Cottonseed often runs 15–20% of gross revenue per bale and is frequently the swing factor between a good year and a bad one; cottonseed prices can move ~$100/ton in a season, so on a 30,000-bale gin a $100 move is roughly $100,000 of margin.[12]

Ancillary revenue — bale handling, storage, sampling, logistics, and (for co-op or merchant-linked gins) marketing and grower financing — layers on top and varies with ownership structure.

Unit economics. Each bale of lint weighs ~480 pounds; commercial gins run a lint turnout near 38% of seed-cotton weight (typically 35–40%), the rest being seed and trash.[13] The largest costs are labor, electricity and fuel, equipment maintenance and depreciation, module hauling, insurance, dust and fire controls, and interest — energy and logistics loom large because cotton moves through a big, air-driven system and must be handled fast at harvest.[10][24] The plant itself (presses, cleaners, dryers) is a multi-million-dollar fixed asset, and that fixed cost is the whole game: NCGA cost surveys show total ginning cost falling to roughly $15–$25 per bale near full capacity but ballooning to $40–$60 or more when spread over too few bales.[10][11]

That math is why throughput is everything — the classic capacity-utilization dynamic of any heavy processing plant. A full gin can clear a healthy per-bale spread; a half-empty gin in a drought year can lose money outright.[9][11] And scale is concentrating: in the 2024 season 58% of active gins processed more than 20,000 bales, up from 46% a year earlier.[5] Ownership structure shifts the risk profile — a pure toll gin earns mostly service fees, while a cooperative or merchant-linked gin may also own inventory, market lint, buy cottonseed, or finance growers, adding profit opportunities but also commodity, credit, and working-capital exposure.

The metrics to watch, in order: bales ginned (throughput/utilization), the per-bale ginning charge, cottonseed prices, and energy/labor costs. Cyclicality comes straight from the crop — a gin's revenue is hostage to how much cotton its local farmers plant and harvest.

6. What drives demand

Gin volume is downstream of two things — how many acres of cotton get planted and how well the crop yields — and both are volatile.

• Cotton acreage and price. Farmers plant cotton only when it pencils out against corn, soybeans, sorghum, and wheat. U.S. growers planted about 9.3 million acres for 2025 — down ~17% from 2024 and the lowest since 2015 — on weak prices and dry conditions [17]. USDA's June 2026 Acreage report then estimated ~9.85 million all-cotton acres for 2026, about 6% above 2025 — a modest rebound, still subject to weather, abandonment, and final yields [16]. Less acreage means fewer bales for gins.
• Weather and irrigation. Cotton is concentrated in drought-prone West Texas; drought, excessive rain, hurricanes, heat, and pests hit both the amount and the quality of cotton reaching gins [9].
• Cotton price. The 2025/26 U.S. farm price is estimated near $0.60/lb, versus ~$0.63 for 2024/25 [17]. With production cost above 75¢/lb while growers received roughly 64¢/lb in mid-2024, farmers are squeezed — which discourages planting and, in turn, ginning volume.[11]
• Export demand. USDA Economic Research Service (ERS) data show exports account for more than 85% of demand for U.S. cotton, with domestic mill use historically low (roughly 1.7 million bales against ~11–12 million bales exported) [17][18]. U.S. gin volume therefore rides on global textile production and trade far more than on domestic mills.
• Cottonseed demand. Feed, oil, meal, and hull prices set the value of the gin's secondary product stream [12].
• Global supply competition. Brazil, Australia, India, China, and others shape U.S. export volumes, basis, and grower planting decisions [17].

7. Regulation

Ginning sits where farm policy meets light-industrial rules.

• USDA cotton classing (quality certification). After ginning, a sample from every bale goes to a USDA AMS classing office, is tagged with a Permanent Bale Identification (PBI) number, and is measured on High Volume Instrument (HVI) machines for length, strength, uniformity, micronaire, color, and trash [13][14]. This government-graded data is what lets U.S. cotton trade by the bale worldwide, and gins/warehouses may act as licensed sampling agents. USDA NASS separately surveys active gins each season for bales ginned, bale weight, and cottonseed [15].
• Farm-bill support. "Seed cotton" is a covered commodity under Price Loss Coverage (PLC) and Agriculture Risk Coverage (ARC): PLC pays growers when the seed-cotton price falls below a statutory reference of $36.70 per hundredweight (cwt), and cotton lint is eligible for Marketing Assistance Loans (MAL) [19]. These props stabilize grower income and, indirectly, keep cotton in the ground for gins to process. (Seed cotton was restored to ARC/PLC in the 2018 Bipartisan Budget Act after upland cotton was pulled over a World Trade Organization dispute with Brazil.)
• Air and environmental permits. Gins are dusty. They must control particulate matter (PM10/PM2.5) from cleaning and drying; the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) identifies particulate matter as the primary pollutant from ginning and publishes emission-factor guidance [22]. Obligations run through federal air law, state implementation plans (SIPs), and local permits — Oklahoma, for instance, has a dedicated cotton-gin emissions rule [23]. Stripper-harvested cotton (common in West Texas) generates more dust than picker-harvested, so permit burdens vary by region.
• Worker safety. Cotton gins are treated as an agricultural operation; OSHA's (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) machine-guarding rule under 29 CFR §1928.57 applies [20]. Notably, OSHA's cotton-dust standard specifically excludes ginning (and harvesting) — a long-standing carve-out that keeps gins out of the textile-mill dust regime, so investors should not assume the mill rules apply to a gin.[21]
• Checkoff. Cotton is subject to the federal Cotton Research and Promotion program (the "checkoff"), funded by an assessment on the crop.[13]

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

The defining trend is relentless consolidation into fewer, bigger gins. Texas alone had roughly 4,300 gins in 1900 and about 185 today [8]; nationally the active-gin count has fallen by roughly 75% over the last 30 years, even as the survivors grew far larger [7]. Active U.S. gins slid from 510 in 2021 to 479 in 2022 to 463 in 2023 to 446 in 2024 [5][10]. A 2024 Journal of Cotton Science review ties the rising regional concentration of gin byproducts directly to smaller gins merging into larger facilities.[24]

The drivers are structural:

• Fixed-cost economics reward scale (Section 5), so larger, faster gins undercut small ones on per-bale cost.
• Farm consolidation — fewer, bigger cotton farms — concentrates the deliverable crop.
• Drought and thin margins push weak gins to close or merge; industry watchers describe a drift toward "about two gins per county," and mergers grew more common through the 2022–2024 drought stretch [9].

Competition is intensely local: cotton is bulky and expensive to haul before ginning, so a gin competes only with the handful of others within economic trucking distance. That local franchise is exactly why the cooperative model persists — members build a gin partly to guarantee capacity and keep pricing honest, not to earn an outside return. Scale cuts unit costs but has a downside: fewer plants can mean longer hauls and regional bottlenecks. The 2025 crop showed it — USDA's Risk Management Agency reported abnormal ginning delays in parts of Texas and Oklahoma after higher acreage and yields overwhelmed local capacity.[25]

9. Risks

• Volume/weather cyclicality. Revenue is hostage to local acreage and yield; a drought year can leave a gin far below the break-even throughput its fixed costs require [9].
• Commodity-price squeeze on customers. Persistently low cotton prices (near or below cost of production) discourage planting and shrink the crop that feeds gins [11][17].
• Trade exposure. With most U.S. cotton exported, tariffs, a strong dollar, and Brazilian/Indian/Australian competition can cut demand and price with no domestic offset [17][18].
• Cottonseed volatility. A big swing in cottonseed prices can flip a gin's profit, since seed is 15–20% of revenue [12].
• Utilization / capital intensity / stranded assets. Too little local volume fails to cover fixed costs; too much creates delays and equipment strain. Gins are expensive to build and hard to repurpose, so a plant in a declining cotton area can become a stranded asset [24].
• Input and labor cost. Energy, bagging, repairs, insurance, interest, and scarce seasonal skilled labor can rise faster than ginning fees [10].
• Quality and contamination. Poor moisture control, foreign material, or equipment problems reduce bale value and damage grower relationships.
• Safety, fire, and environmental. Cotton dust, combustible material, machinery, and air emissions create operational and insurance exposure [20][22].
• Policy dependence. The economics lean on farm-bill supports; changes to seed-cotton PLC/ARC, MAL, or the checkoff reshape grower incentives [19].
• Concentration and disclosure. A gin may depend on a few growers, cottonseed buyers, or co-op relationships — and the listed companies with gin exposure bury it inside broad ag segments, making pure gin economics hard to isolate.

10. How to invest, and the outlook

Public-market routes (indirect only).

• Closest listed owner of gins: The Andersons (Nasdaq: ANDE), via its 65% stake in Skyland Grain's three gins — but underwrite the whole diversified agribusiness, not a cotton-gin pure-play [27].
• Ginning technology: Bajaj Steel Industries (BSE 507944 / NSE BAJAJST) is the closest listed pure-play on gin equipment; its main U.S. rival, Lummus, is private [39][40].
• Broader value chain: ADM (cottonseed processing), Bunge (BG) (merchandising), and Olam Group (SGX: VC2) (gins, now SALIC-controlled) give diffuse exposure; Deere (DE) builds the harvesters that feed gins [28][29][31].
• The commodity itself: exposure to cotton volume and price — the real driver of gin fortunes — runs through Cotton No. 2 futures (on ICE) and cotton-linked exchange-traded products, which move on the same acreage, weather, and export forces above [17][18][30]. Treat this as commodity, not equity, exposure.

Private routes (where the industry actually is). Owning a gin means building or buying one, almost always as a farmer cooperative or a family independent tied to a specific growing region [26][35]. This is agricultural-infrastructure ownership — modest, cyclical toll-processing returns and shared-cost logic, not venture-style growth. Diligence should center on: annual bales available within the service radius; historical and expected capacity utilization; ginning fees and grower retention; equipment age, downtime, and required capital spending; cottonseed and byproduct outlets; warehouse/logistics/marketing integration; working-capital needs and counterparty credit; and permits, insurance, fire controls, and environmental liabilities. The federated co-ops (PCCA, Staplcotn, Calcot) are member-owned and closed to outside capital [35][36][37].

Near-term outlook. The direction of travel is fewer, larger, higher-throughput gins. With 2025 acreage at a multi-year low and prices soft, near-term gin volumes stay under pressure, though 2026 acreage is estimated modestly higher [16][17]. USDA's June 2026 outlook projected lower global production, higher mill use, and tighter 2026/27 ending stocks — conditions that could support cotton prices if they hold [17]. The medium-term picture is steady to constructive for well-located, efficient gins with durable grower relationships, modern equipment, strong cottonseed outlets, and enough volume to keep assets productive — but margins will stay volatile, and marginal small plants will keep closing or merging. For any investor, the honest framing is that cotton ginning is a narrow, private, cyclical, local toll-processing niche best played through the cotton commodity and the machinery makers rather than through the gins themselves.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns: 2023 (NAICS 115111) — establishments, employment, payroll. https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2023/econ/cbp/2023-cbp.html
2. U.S. Small Business Administration, Table of Size Standards Matched to NAICS Codes (NAICS 115111), 2023. https://www.sba.gov/document/support-table-size-standards
3. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns Methodology (coverage and exclusions). https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/technical-documentation/methodology.html
4. U.S. Census Bureau, North American Industry Classification System: Sector 11 (scope and adjacent-code definitions), 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/resources/archives/sect11.html
5. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Cotton Ginnings 2024 Summary, May 2025 — active gins, bales ginned, size distribution. https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/6108vb275/8s45s745q/n8711p389/ctgnan25.pdf
6. National Cotton Ginners Association, "About NCGA" — ~1,100 ginning operations across 17 states. https://www.cotton.org/ncga/
7. Cotton Grower, "The Changing State of America's Gins," 2023–2024 — consolidation and scale. https://www.cottongrower.com/cotton-production/ginning/the-changing-state-of-americas-gins/
8. Texas Cotton Ginners' Association via Texas Co-op Power, "Prized Fibers," 2023–2024 — Texas gin history. https://texascooppower.com/prized-fibers/
9. KCBD NewsChannel 11, "Cotton gin mergers more common as businesses struggle during drought," January 2024. https://www.kcbd.com/2024/01/22/cotton-gin-mergers-more-common-businesses-struggle-during-drought/
10. G. Holt et al., National Cotton Ginners Association, "The Cost of Ginning Cotton — 2021 and 2022 Survey Results," Beltwide Cotton Conferences, 2024. https://www.cotton.org/ncga/upload/Beltwide-GAH-THE-COST-OF-GINNING-COTTON-2021-and-2022-SURVEY-RESULTS-Final-Submitted.pdf
11. CottonGins.org, "Ultimate Guide to Cotton Gin Profitability," 2025 — per-bale fee and cost ranges (industry blog). https://cottongins.org/blog/cotton-gin-profitability-guide/
12. Farm Progress, "Cottonseed in gin's revenue stream," 2023. https://www.farmprogress.com/cotton/cottonseed-in-gin-s-revenue-stream
13. National Cotton Council, "How Cotton is Ginned and Marketed" (process, byproducts, linters, classing, checkoff). https://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/story/gin-and-market.cfm
14. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service, "Cotton Classing Services" (HVI, PBI). https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grading/cotton-classing
15. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, "Cotton Ginnings Survey Guide." https://www.nass.usda.gov/Surveys/Guide_to_NASS_Surveys/Cotton_Ginnings/index.php
16. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, Acreage report, June 30, 2026 — ~9.85 million all-cotton acres for 2026. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Newsroom/2026/06-30-2026.php
17. USDA Economic Research Service, Cotton and Wool Outlook / market outlook (2025–2026) — prices, 2026/27 forecast, competition. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/cotton-and-wool/market-outlook
18. USDA Economic Research Service, "Exports Dominate Demand for U.S. Cotton" — export share >85%. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/58352
19. Congressional Research Service, "Farm Bill Primer: Support for Cotton" (IF12195) — seed-cotton PLC/ARC ($36.70/cwt reference) and Marketing Assistance Loans. https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12195
20. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 29 CFR §1928.57, "Guarding of Farm Field Equipment, Farmstead Equipment, and Cotton Gins." https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1928/1928.57
21. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 29 CFR §1910.1043, "Cotton Dust" (ginning and harvesting excluded). https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/1910/1910.1043
22. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, AP-42 Section 9.7 / Emission Factor Documentation: Cotton Ginning — particulate matter. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-10/documents/c9s07.pdf
23. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Oklahoma SIP: Control of Emissions from Cotton Gins." https://www.epa.gov/air-quality-implementation-plans/oklahoma-sip-ok-252100-23-control-emissions-cotton-gins
24. Journal of Cotton Science, "Cotton Gin By-Products Utilization: Past, Present, and Future," 2024 — consolidation and cost categories. https://www.cotton.org/journal/2024-28/2/79.cfm
25. USDA Risk Management Agency, "2025 Crop Year Abnormal Cotton Ginning Delays" (Manager's Bulletin MGR-26-004). https://www.rma.usda.gov/policy-procedure/bulletins-memos/managers-bulletin/mgr-26-004-2025-crop-year-abnormal-cotton
26. U.S. International Trade Commission, Industry and Trade Summary: Cotton (Pub. 3391) — farmer/cooperative ownership. https://www.usitc.gov/publications/other/pub3391.pdf
27. The Andersons, Inc., Form 10-K and "Acquires Majority Ownership in Skyland Grain, LLC," Nov. 2024 — 65% stake; Skyland operates three cotton gins. https://investors.andersonsinc.com/2024-11-04-The-Andersons,-Inc-Acquires-Majority-Ownership-in-Skyland-Grain,-LLC
28. Archer-Daniels-Midland, "ADM and Planters Cotton Oil Mill Reach Agreement for Cottonseed Processing Joint Venture," Dec. 2025. https://www.adm.com/en-us/news/news-releases/2025/12/adm-and-planters-cotton-oil-mill-reach-agreement-for-cottonseed-processing-joint-venture/
29. Bunge Global SA, 2025 Annual Report (cotton merchandising). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1996862/000162828026024590/annualreport_bg-12312025x.htm
30. Intercontinental Exchange, "Cotton No. 2 Futures" contract rules. https://www.theice.com/publicdocs/rulebooks/futures_us/10_Cotton.pdf
31. SALIC, "SALIC Completes Acquisition of Stake in Olam Agri" (80.01%). https://www.salic.com/news/SALIC-Completes-Acquisition-of-Stake-in-Olam-Agri
32. Olam Agri, "United States of America" (U.S. ginning and warehousing). https://www.olamagri.com/locations/usa
33. Cargill, "Cotton" (merchandising, ginning, warehousing). https://www.cargill.com/agriculture/cotton
34. Louis Dreyfus Company, "Cotton" (U.S. originating and warehousing). https://www.ldc.com/us/en/who-we-are/business-lines/cotton/
35. Plains Cotton Cooperative Association, "About PCCA." https://pcca.com/who-we-are/about-pcca/
36. Staple Cotton Cooperative Association (Staplcotn), "About." https://www.staplcotn.com/about/
37. Calcot, "Calcot Today." https://calcot.com/calcot-today/
38. McCleskey Cotton, company site (independent operator example). https://mccleskeycotton.com/
39. Bajaj Steel Industries Ltd. (BSE: 507944 / NSE: BAJAJST), company profile and listing data. https://simplywall.st/stocks/in/capital-goods/bse-507944/bajaj-steel-industries-shares
40. Lummus Corporation (Lummus Ag Solutions), "Cotton Ginning." https://www.lummus.com/cottonginning