Cotton picker facts for kids

A cotton picker machine working in a field.

The cotton picker is a special machine that helps farmers harvest cotton much faster and easier. Before these machines existed, picking cotton was very hard work that took a lot of time and many people. Cotton pickers make the job quicker and more efficient, helping farmers get their cotton ready for use.

The Story of Cotton Picking Machines

For a very long time, cotton was picked by hand. This was incredibly tough work that required many people working for long hours in the fields. Imagine picking tiny cotton fibers from hundreds of plants, day after day!

Early Ideas for Cotton Pickers

A man named John Daniel Rust started working on a machine to pick cotton in the late 1920s. His brother, Mack Rust, later joined him. Other inventors had tried to make machines with pointy spindles to grab the cotton. But these machines often got stuck because the cotton would clog them up.

John Rust had a clever idea: he realized that a smooth, wet spindle could pull the cotton fibers off the plant without getting tangled. In 1933, John Rust received his first patent for his invention. Eventually, he and his brother held 47 patents for cotton-picking machines!

Challenges and Successes

It was hard for the Rust brothers to get money to build their machines because of the Great Depression, a time when many people had little money. But in 1935, they started the Rust Cotton Picker Company. On August 31, 1936, they showed off their new picker in Mississippi. Even though it wasn't perfect, it could pick cotton, and many newspapers wrote about it!

The Rust company couldn't build many machines quickly. Other companies then worked hard to create their own cotton pickers. The start of World War II also slowed things down because factories were busy making things for the war.

After the war, in 1944, a company called International Harvester made a very successful cotton picker that farmers could buy. Later, the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company also made pickers using an improved design from the Rust brothers. Over the years, these machines got better and better, and more farmers started using them.

How Modern Cotton Pickers Work

A Case IH Module Express 625 picking cotton and making large cotton modules.

The first cotton pickers could only harvest one row of cotton at a time. But even then, one machine could do the work of up to 40 people! Today, modern cotton pickers are large, self-driving machines that can pick cotton from up to six rows at once.

There are two main types of cotton pickers used today:

Stripper Pickers

Stripper pickers are mostly used in places like Texas and Arkansas. These machines don't just pull the soft cotton fibers (called lint) from the plant. They also remove some parts of the plant itself, like unopened cotton bolls. Later, the plant bits are separated from the clean cotton. Heavier plant material drops away before the cotton goes into a big basket at the back of the machine.

Spindle Pickers

Spindle pickers use rows of special barbed spindles. These spindles spin very fast and grab the cotton (which is called "seed-cotton" because it still has seeds inside) right off the plant. After the cotton is picked, another part of the machine, called a doffer, spins in the opposite direction to pull the cotton off the spindles. Then, the cotton is blown up into a large basket on the picker.

Making Cotton Modules

Once the basket is full, the cotton picker empties the seed-cotton into a "module builder." This machine presses the cotton into a giant, compact "brick" called a module. Each module can weigh about 21,000 pounds! These big cotton bricks can be stored in the field or at the "gin yard" until they are ready to be processed. After processing, each module makes about 16 large bales of cotton, with each bale weighing around 480 pounds.

Around 2008, the Case IH Module Express 625 was created. This machine was special because it could build these cotton modules while it was still picking the cotton! John Deere also offered a similar machine in 2007 that made round modules right on the go.

Images for kids

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  Hand picking cotton in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

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  Weighing raw cotton in Uzbekistan.