BROOKS COUNTY — Thanks to one of the best crop years in more than a decade, farmers received nearly $1.2 million in rebates from B.C.T. Gin Company.

B.C.T. Gin (an acronym for Brooks, Colquitt and Thomas counties) began giving rebates to farmers in 1989. The amounts have varied from year to year, depending on the growing season and the harvest, but this year, the rebate amount was the highest ever in a single season.

“We give rebates on cotton and peanuts. It’s one cent per pound for cotton ginned, $3.70 per bale on cotton seed and $10 per ton on peanuts. The rebates we just gave out are on last year’s crop,” said General Manager Van Murphy.

The company was formed in 1983 and is owned by cotton and peanut producers. Murphy said they initially set their ginning rates according to what others in the area charged, and in 1989, once the company’s debt was down, instead of cutting prices, they decided to give back part of the profits to the farmers.

“We still were able to cut charges, as the value has grown and the profits have grown. We wanted to give the rest back to the people we made it off of,” he said.

B.C.T. Gin serves 275 farmers in the region, 75 percent of which are also stockholders in the company.

Murphy said, “Volume has a lot to do with it — there’s strength in numbers.”

The company purchased a gin in Morven in 2003, and also operates gins in Berlin and Quitman, along with peanut buying points in Quitman and Sandhill.

“2003 was the perfect year, from planting time to December. The weather was the best I’ve seen in 21 years,” said Murphy. “It was the perfect growing season.”

Even though the harvests were higher than normal, which usually drives prices down, Murphy said with 70 percent of it going overseas now, prices stayed high.

“China is the biggest producer of cotton, along with the rest of Asia and Australia. They did not have good crops and had bad weather, so we still had a market for ours,” he said.

Less than three years ago, the percentages were reversed, and only 30 percent of the crop went overseas. But with the closing of nearly all of the textile mills, especially in the Southeast, the crops are largely sent to overseas locations where many of the mills relocated.

B.C.T. Gin has grown steadily each year, and has the capacity to gin up to 150 thousand bales of cotton and handle over 20 thousand tons of peanuts.

Over the past 15 years, the company has handed out $5.7 million in rebates to farmers.



To contact Business Editor Kay Harris, please call 244-3400, ext. 280.