Cotton picker

A cotton picker is a specialized tool used to harvest cotton. This term can describe a person who picks ripe fibers by hand or a machine known as a cotton harvester.

For much of history, harvesting was done by hand. In many societies, plantation owners used slave labor to pick the crop. This practice increased the profit margins for those owners. The transition from human labor to mechanical harvesting changed the agricultural industry forever.

Mechanical harvesting required significant engineering breakthroughs. Early inventors tried using barbed spindles to twist fibers onto a rotating part. These early designs were impractical because the spindles became clogged with cotton. In the late 1920s, John Daniel Rust began developing a new approach. He worked with his brother, Mack Rust, to solve the clogging problem. John Rust discovered that a smooth, moist spindle could strip fibers from the boll. This method allowed the machine to work without trapping the cotton in the mechanism.

The Rust brothers' journey was marked by both success and difficulty. John Rust received his first patent in 1933. Eventually, the brothers held forty-seven patents on cotton picking machinery. They founded the Rust Cotton Picker Company in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1935. In 1936, they demonstrated their machine at the Delta Experiment Station in Stoneville, Mississippi. Although the machine had deficiencies, it successfully picked cotton and gained national press coverage. However, the Great Depression made it hard to find financing for their inventions.

Following the Rust brothers' work, the industry saw rapid development. While the Rusts struggled with large-scale manufacturing, other companies began designing their own pickers. The manufacturing demands of World War II delayed the widespread use of these machines. In 1944, the International Harvester Company produced a commercially successful picker. After the war, the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company used an improved Rust design. These mechanical advancements were so significant that they were cited as a factor in the Second Great Migration.

To make these machines effective, farmers also had to change how they grew cotton. In the past, cotton bolls matured at different rates. This forced laborers to pick the same fields three or four times each season. If they waited for all bolls to open, the quality of the cotton would deteriorate. Modern plant breeders solved this by developing hybrid cotton varieties. These new plants have bolls that ripen uniformly and sit higher off the ground. Additionally, farmers use herbicides to defoliate the plants. This process drops the leaves before the machine arrives, ensuring a cleaner harvest.

Today, there are two primary types of mechanical pickers in use. The first is the "stripper" picker, which is common in Arkansas and Texas. This machine removes the lint along with various plant parts, such as unopened bolls. It separates the lint by dropping heavier matter before the fibers reach the rear basket. The second type is the "spindle" picker. This machine uses rows of barbed spindles that rotate at high speeds to grab the seed-cotton. A counter-rotating doffer then removes the cotton from the spindles and blows it into a basket.

Modern technology has made the harvesting process even more efficient. Early harvesters could only manage one row of cotton at a time. These machines could replace up to forty hand laborers. Current self-propelled machines can harvest up to six rows simultaneously. Once a basket is full, the machine dumps the seed-cotton into a module builder. This device creates a compact "brick" of cotton called a module. These modules weigh approximately 16 un-ginned bales.

In 2007, John Deere offered an on-board round module builder. By 2008, the Case IH Module Express 625 was designed to build these modules while harvesting.