Cotton picker
A cotton picker is either a machine that harvests cotton, or a person who picks ripe cotton fibre from the plants.[1][2] The machine is also referred to as a cotton harvester.[3]
History
In many societies, slave labor was utilized to pick the cotton, increasing the plantation owner's profit margins (See

In 1935 the Rust brothers founded the Rust Cotton Picker Company in
The introduction of the cotton picker has been cited as a factor in the Second Great Migration.[5]
Cotton plant improvements
To make mechanical cotton pickers more practical, improvements in the cotton plant and in cotton culture were also necessary. In earlier times, cotton fields had to be picked by hand three and four times each harvest season because the bolls matured at different rates. It was not practical to delay picking until all the bolls were ready for picking because the quality of the cotton deteriorated as soon as bolls opened. But about the time mechanical pickers were introduced, plant breeders developed hybrid cotton varieties with bolls higher off the ground and that ripened uniformly. With those innovations, the harvester could make just one pass through the field. Also, herbicides were developed to defoliate the plants and drop their leaves before the picker came through, producing a cleaner harvest.[6]
Conventional harvester
The first harvesters were only capable of harvesting one row of cotton at a time, but were still able to replace up to forty hand laborers. The current cotton picker is a self-propelled machine that removes cotton lint and seed (seed-cotton) from the plant at up to six rows at a time.
There are two types of pickers in use today. One is the "stripper" picker, primarily found in use in Texas. They are also found in Arkansas. It removes not only the lint from the plant, but a fair deal of the plant matter as well (such as unopened bolls). Later, the plant matter is separated from the lint through a process dropping heavier matter before the lint makes it to the basket at the rear of the picker. The other type of picker is the "spindle" picker. It uses rows of barbed spindles that rotate at high speed and remove the seed-cotton from the plant. The seed-cotton is then removed from the spindles by a counter-rotating doffer and is then blown up into the basket. Once the basket is full the picker dumps the seed-cotton into a "module builder". The module builder creates a compact "brick" of seed-cotton, weighing approximately 21,000 pounds or 9.5 tonnes (16 un-ginned bales), which can be stored in the field or in the "gin yard" until it is ginned. Each ginned bale weighs roughly 480 pounds (220 kg).
An industry-exclusive on-board round module builder was offered by John Deere in 2007.[7] In c.2008 the Case IH Module Express 625 was designed in collaboration with ginners and growers to provide a cotton picker with the ability to build modules while harvesting the crop.[8]
References
- ^ "Cotton picker Definition und Bedeutung | Collins Wörterbuch". www.collinsdictionary.com (in German). Retrieved 13 October 2021.
- ^ "picker". dictionary.cambridge.org. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
- ^ "Cotton harvester | machine". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
- ^ a b Holley, Daniel. John Daniel Rust (1892–1954). The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture (EOA). 29 December 2010.
- ISBN 1-55728-606-X.
- ^ Wessels Living History Farm. Cotton Harvesting. Farming in the 1950s-1960s. (2007). Downloaded September 8, 2002.
- ^ "John Deere Launches the 7760 Self-Propelled Cotton Picker". Archived from the original on 3 July 2009. Retrieved 18 October 2009.
- ^ Wi, Racine (8 January 2008). "Case IH Module Express 625 Streamlines Cotton Harvest". Reuters. Archived from the original on 11 June 2015. Retrieved 15 January 2024.
- Holley, Donald. Mechanical Cotton Picker Encyclopedia article, University of Arkansas at Monticello
- The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XXI: 13748–13760. Retrieved 10 July 2009.
- International Harvester article from Engineering & Technology for a Sustainable World
- "Recent Progress in the Mechanization of Cotton Production in the United States," by Gilbert C. Fite © 1950 Agricultural History Society
- The Cotton Foundation. Cotton Physiology. The Cotton Foundation Reference Book Series, Number One. Jack R. Mauney and James McD. Stewart, eds. The Cotton Foundation, Memphis, 1986.
External links
Media related to Cotton harvesters at Wikimedia Commons