Science: Cotton Milestone

When the Rust brothers produced their first picking machine, in 1935, a revolution in cotton farming was forecast. But mechanical cotton culture ran into many snags, has proved much more evolutionary than revolutionary. Last week the movement passed a milestone. Near Clarksdale, Miss., where John Rust began a tryout of an improved picker, a pioneering plantation harvested the first commercial cotton crop ever produced, from planting to baling, entirely by machine.

Hopson’s Picking. The scene was a 28-acre field on the 4,000-acre plantation of the Hopson Planting Co. International Harvester Co. mechanical pickers, including an experimental model that picked two rows at a time, trundled up & down the white lanes, plucking the bolls clean. Mounted on tractors with big wheels that straddle the rows, these machines have rotating drums with small spindles that pull the cotton tufts from the plant.

Picking is only one of several tough problems in machine cultivation. Other devices used on the Hopson plantation:

¶ Cleaning cotton seed before machine planting. After ginning, the seed has a fuzzy nap that makes seeds stick together; planting these clusters by machine makes “chopping” (thinning), necessary when the plants come up. The Hopson farm eliminated chopping by de-fuzzing the seeds so they could be planted singly.

¶ A flamethrower to kill weeds. Running along the ground between rows, this torch-like apparatus, while burning off weeds, left the thicker cotton stems unharmed.

¶ Leaf-killing dust. A prime drawback in mechanical picking is that leaves get collected along with the cotton. To get cleaner cotton, the Hopson plantation, before harvesting, defoliated the plants with cyanamid dust dropped from a plane.

The Hopson experiment was not an unqualified success: the machine picking, less selective than hand methods, produced a poorer grade of cotton. But Business Week reported last week that the saving in labor costs more than made up for the loss in quality.

Rust’s Backing. Meanwhile John Rust, now working independently of his brother Mack, unveiled his new two-row picker. Long handicapped by lack of capital, John Rust has a substantial new backer, Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co., which built two of his new machines for the Mississippi field tests. Like the Rusts, machinery manufacturers are convinced that cotton mechanization is just over the horizon. Last week John Rust, more impressed than he was in 1935 with the social enormity of his invention, said he was still determined to establish a foundation out of his earnings to soften the blow for cotton hands.