Cotton Picker

It was first invented in the 1920s, but was not made practical until the 1950s, and even then, it was not immediately implemented on most Farm s.

The first pickers 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. It uses rows of barbed Spindle s 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 a basket located on the picker. 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 in at approximately 21,000 lb (20 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 lb (218.2 kg).

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mechanical Cotton Picker Encyclopedia article by Donald Holley, University of Arkansas at Monticello

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Cotton Picker