Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
of the cotton plants at 90% accuracy when N status was divided into two categories:
deficient and nondeficient.
6.3 COTTON HARVESTING
6.3.1 C
OTTON
H
ARVESTERS
Traditionally, cotton was harvested by hand, a very labor-intensive operation. A good
human picker could harvest about 100 kg of seed cotton in a day. In some countries,
cotton is still hand harvested, but in the United States, virtually all cotton has been
mechanically harvested since the late 1960s (Wessels, 2011).
The first patent for a mechanical cotton harvester was issued in 1850, but the first
commercial cotton harvester was not produced until nearly a century later. John D. Rust
found that a smooth, moist spindle could be used to pick cotton, and he developed a
mechanical cotton picker that was first demonstrated at the Delta Experiment Station
in Stoneville, Mississippi, in 1936. After many years of research and development,
International Harvester and John Deere began producing spindle-type cotton harvesters
in quantity in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Mechanical Cotton Picker, 2010). Over
time, the size of spindle-type cotton harvesters has increased from one-row machines to
six-row machines.
There are two basic types of mechanical cotton harvester today: spindle picker
(also known as picker) and stripper type (also known as stripper). Most U.S. cotton
is harvested with the picker. Pickers use moistened spindles to remove seed cotton
from open bolls. As seed cotton in an open boll encounters the revolving, barbed,
wet spindles attached to a rotating drum, the cotton is wrapped around the spindles
and pulled from the boll. The spindles then pass through a device called a doffer,
where the seed cotton is removed from the spindle. The seed cotton is then pulled
away by moving air and blown up into a collection basket (Figure 6.1) (Story of
Cotton, 2011).
FIGURE 6.1
John Deere 9965 cotton picker.
