any cotton pickers out there?

[Anonymous-0]

Well, I've never picked cotton, but the other day I was picking up square bales out of the field. I think it was 186 degrees outside. I had to shut off the A/c in the pickup because it got too hot. I was all by myself, with sweat stinging my eyes, hay in my throat, hands on fire. So after the sixth hour of this I got to wondering, how does this compare in overall crappiness to picking cotton? With cotton you have the hundred pound sack on your back all day, right? I have picked okra one time though.

 

[Anonymous-0]

These days they use a big machine kinda like a combine. Creatively named a "cotton-picker." I've always wanted to know more about cotton farming myself. Northern Illinois is a long way from the nearest cotton field, though.

 

[hay]

hand cotton picking is kind of like picking okra only much more labor intensive and hot and very prickly. ya have to stoop over all day and drag a heavy sack behind. not only that but in the "cotton" south the heat, humidity, insects all play a factor. i done it one time on gramps farm and will NEVER EVER do it again in my lifetime. it's amazing how folks used to do things compared to now. nowadays is the "good ole days" as far as i'm concerned.

 

[Walt Davies]

Did you know that California is the largest producer of cotton. I guess that why we were called Cotton pickers out here.
Funny I never saw a cotton plant and i grew up in California.
My wife who is from Arkansas said that her mom picked cotton on she road on the back of the long sack all day when she was very young. Now that's one tough woman, she lived to 91.

Walt

 

[thurlow]

No experience with TX, AZ or CA cotton, but in the Mid-South, (hand)picking typically started the first week of Sept. It was indeed hot for a couple of weeks, then cooler and downright cold before finishing up, usually by pulling, i.e., gathering the whole boll, rather than by picking, i.e., just gathering the lint w/seed from out of the boll. A full-sized sack was 9 ft, "though other sizes could be had. It"s nothing like gathering okra; there"s nothing prickly about it, except for the occasional stab of the opened boll under your nail or cuticle. The sack had a strap thru which you placed your head and one arm. Most folks would "weigh up", when the sack got uncomfortably heavy to drag, 50-80 lbs. Others took pride in getting as many pounds as possible into it. There was an old popular song, "In them old cotton fields back home"; some singers would sing, "when them cotton BALLS get rotten", it was obvious they"d never been closer to cotton a cotton field than the shirt on their back.

 

[Bob85355]

Picked cotton when I was a kid back in the late 40s and early 50s in southeast Missouri. Hard work and not much money. Too hot or too cold. Learned pretty quick that it wasn"t something I wanted to do. Found other jobs.

Now I get my grandkids to help in mixing horse dung for composting. They all decide there"s others things more interesting that working with horse poop.

Bob
Central Arizona

 

[peaster]

Actually Texas is the largest producer of cotton. California leads in yield per acre. The Lubbock area is the largest cotton producing region in the world and produces the majority of the cotton the US exports.

 

[ken in texas]

Not only did you pull the heavy sack through the field as you filled it,then you drug it to the scales and lifted it high enough to clear the ground and tying it to the scales to weigh it .Then you pulled and drug it into the trailer and empted it and packed it down to make room for more cotton,then more of the same,daylight to dark. Not so good memories.......................

 

[keh]

Picking cotton by hand is hard, boring work. Hardware stores used to sell knee pads for people who wanted to go along the row on their knees and pick cotton. A good picker could pick 100 pounds of cotton in a day. Even when it was a family operation, the cotton would be weighed on scales called steelyards supported on a pole held between 2 people and a running total kept. When hands were being paid by the pound to pick a total was kept for each person. Picking started when the some of the cotton bolls had opened and were dry enough to pick. The field might be gone over 2 or three times before it was finished. There had better not be even a little white showing in the field. Every lock(1/4 segment of a boll) counted. Today, chemicals are used to kill the leaves and ripen the crop uniformily so the mechanical cotton pickers can pick the cotton. They leave about eleven percent of the cotton in the field. The mechanical pickers dump the cotton in a big hydraulic press called a module builder which makes a big pile like a hay stack on the ground which is covered with a sheet of canvas. This module is picked up by a truck with a tilting bed which has a conveyor chain in the floor. The truck takes it to a gin to be ginned, with the clean lint pressed into bales. A standard bale is 480 pounds, a great yield per acre is 2 bales.

I remember going to the gin with Daddy in the 2 horse wagon pulled by 2 mules named Kit and Kate. I regretted starting school because I could no longer go to the gin with Daddy.

Cotton was one of the few legal crops where a living, not a decent living usually, could be made from a 20 acre crop. This is no longer true.

As every school child knows, the cotton gin was invented by Eli Whitney in the 1790s. At first, cotton growing was VERY profitable and the business was accused of causing slavery to increase. Whitney was the classic clever Yankee mechanic, but he didn't make much off the cotton gin. It was so simple that many people copied it and Whitney had legal expenses trying to protect his patents. Later Whitney got a contract to make muskets for the US army. He developed the system of making each part of the gun precisely so that the parts were interchangeable so the guns could be made quicker and cheaper and turned a nice profit on this and other contracts. Of course, the principle of interchangeable parts is used in all manufacturing today. Later, Colt's revolvers were made at Whitney's old plant.

KEH

 

[Eric SEI]

Back in the 80's John Deere made them in their Ankeny, IA plant, and I think they still do.

 

[old_bc]

Here is a picture taken in October of 2006. You can see leaves a lot of cotton on the stalk.

old_bc

 

[old_bc]

This a module ready to loaded on a truck and taken to the gin.

old_bc

 

[kendak]

Been farming all my life & the field pictured looks pretty clean....a 9 ft.cotton sack is so rare nowdays that they sell for many many times orginal cost...A new IH picker will sell for about $500000. yea thats 6 figures & will drop a 8 bale module in the field without ever coming to the turnrow....Kent

 

[dave guest]

Picked cotton by hand in South Carolina in 1947. Three of us, my 2 cousins. We were like 4 and 5 years old so they lost money on the deal.