Cotton picker at work

The mechanical cotton picker is a machine that automates cotton harvesting. Image File history File links Cottonpicker. ... Image File history File links Cottonpicker. ... Wind turbines A machine is any mechanical or organic device that transmits or modifies energy to perform or assist in the performance of tasks. ... Cotton ready for harvest. ... Hay bales after harvest in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany In agriculture, harvesting is the process of gathering mature crops from the fields. ...

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 farms. Bales of hay on a farm near Ames, Iowa A farm is the basic unit in agriculture. ...

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. There are two types of pickers in use today. One is the "stripper" picker, primarily found in use in Texas. It removes not only the lint from the plant, but a fair deal of the plant matter as well(such as unopened bolls). Later, the plant matter is separated from the lint through a process dropping heavier matter before the lint makes it to the basket to the rear of the picker. The other type of picker is the "spindle" picker. It uses rows of barbed spindles 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 the basket. 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). Manual labor is a term used for physical work done with the hands, especially in an unskilled manual job such as fruit and vegetable picking, road building, or any other field where the work may be considered hard or arduous, which has as its objective the production of goods. ... Timo Boll Timo Boll (born March 8, 1981 in Erbach) is a German table tennis player. ... The word spindle might (or might not) have several meanings: A spindle (shrub), a poisonous shrub or small tree of the genus Euonymus. ...

This is also a derogatory term referring to slaves in the fields as "cotton pickers".

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