mechanical cotton pickers

[Larry E. Davis]

Doing research for our historical society. Would like to find out how long a 1950 mechanical cotton picker would take to pick one acre of cotton. Going to compare time to field hands picking cotton in early 1900's to mechanical picker used today. Thanks for any help.

Larry

 

[Absent Minded Farmer]

Larry,
here's an excerpt from the 1952 McCormick General Line Catalog, "A cotton picker, operated by one man, picks as fast as 40 to 50 hand pickers, picks six to eight acres in a 10 hour day. In fields averaging one bale of open cotton per acre, it picks about 2/3 to 4/5 bale per hour, gets the lint from about 95 percent of the open bolls... picks as clean as or cleaner than most hand pickers".

Nowadays, you can pick six rows at a time, wide or narrow & compress the clean cotton into a four to ten-thousand pound "module" or compressed bale of cotton, right in the basket on the machine.

Not too bad for 60+ years of progress & almost 100 for R&D.

Hope this is of some help.

Mike

 

[thurlow]

Bought our first picker in the mid-50s; it was a one-row A-C mounted on the rear of a WD. Based on my recollection from almost 60 years ago, it took about 1 1/2 or 2 hours to pick an acre. Back then, all cotton was picked twice; the first time when it was about 2/3 or 3/4 open and the second time to finish it up.....a month or so later. The basket held 600# of seed cotton and there was considerable "down" time..........dumping, adding water, cleaning out trash, etc. In my part of the world (West TN) a bale-per-acre was the "standard". We would usually pick 4-6 (1500 #) bales per day. A GOOD hand-picker might pick 300# per day, while the average was probably more like 200#. Bought a new 122 JD........mounted on a new 3010D....in 1963; it was faster and considerably more efficient and would pick 8-10 bales per day. I had just gotten out of HS (RHS '62); I ran the picker and my dad ran the AII Gleaner with a 2-row corn head and a 13 ft grain table. Best day I ever had, I picked 11 bales; later went to a 2-row 699JD in '68 and finally quit growing cotton in '93.