780.805—Ginning of “cotton.”
Only the ginning of “cotton” is within the first part of the exemption. An employee engaged in ginning of moss, for example, would not be exempt. The reconditioning of cotton waste resulting from spinning or oil mill operations is not included, since such waste is not the agricultural commodity in its natural state for whose first processing the exemption was provided. (See 107 Cong. Rec. (daily ed.) p. 5887.) The “cotton,” “seed cotton,” and “lint cotton” ginned by ordinary gins do not include “linter” or “Grabbot” cotton, obtained by reginning cotton seed and hard locks of cotton mixed with hulls, bolls, and other substances which could not be removed by ordinary ginning (Mississippi Levee Com'rs v. Refuge Cotton Oil Co., 91 Miss. 480, 44 So. 828, 829). Mote ginning, the process whereby raw motes (leaves, trash, sticks, dirt, and immature cotton with some cottonseed) are run through a ginning process to extract the short-fiber cotton, is not included in the ginning of cotton unless it is done as a part of the whole ginning process in one gin establishment as a continuous and uninterrupted series of operations resulting in useful cotton products including the regular “gin” bales, the “mote” bales (short-fiber cotton), and the cottonseed.